Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/90

70 Court during the last years, the Emperor was repeatedly said to be 'in retreat.' For a day or for a week he would relinquish public business, and retire into a monastery for meditation; and although as a politician he was impelled into toleration of the Protestants, and urged into alliances which the Church could neither encourage nor excuse, yet heresy, as such, was every day becoming more hateful to him; and he had flattered himself, perhaps really, that, in connecting himself with England, he might recover the King to the faith. The Diet of Spires must have taught him both the strength and the obstinacy of the Lutheran States. His experience of Henry, in the closer intimacy which had followed the treaty, could not have been more reassuring; it is easy to understand, therefore, that his position must have been more than painful; and that his inward thoughts, and the language which he was obliged to affect, may have been unavoidably at considerable variance. If this be a true account of the state of his mind, we may imagine how he was likely to have been affected by a letter which, on the 25th of August, immediately before those movements which there is so much difficulty in explaining, he received from the Pope.