Page:The Queens of England.djvu/308

268 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. riage. But now, when Knight and Cassali imagined that they had succeeded in carrying the points they had sought, Clement, by an act of cunning for which they were wholly unprepared, had duped them. He had dated the two acts from his prison, although they were signed some time after he had left it ; hence Henry could not make use of them, knowing that it would be thought that the pope only granted them under con- straint, and in the hope of recovering his liberty through the aid of England. Henry also knew that all acts signed by a prisoner were considered null, of which Francis the First had given a proof by his breach of the treaty he had not long before signed at Madrid. Thus Henry ♦found himself defeated, not- withstanding all the efforts he made to obtain his liberty to wed Anne Boleyn. Under no other pope could Henry have experienced the same difficulty in what he sought, and found the same disingenuous- ness as in Clement the Seventh — and from two causes : the first was, that the pope being illegitimate, he always dreaded lest the exposure of this fact should hurl him from the papal throne, to the possession of which illegitimacy was a bar ; and the second was, that the object nearest his heart was to re-establish the house of Medici, of which he was an illegitimate branch, in the government of Florence, for the fulfillment of which project he counted on the assistance of the emperor. Thus, while he avoided openly declaring for Charles the Fifth, while a powerful army was on the point of invading Naples, he wished to preserve terms with him, as well as with the kings of England and France, until the result of the wars should enable him to judge which side it would be the most profitable for him to declare for. The war declared by Henry and Francis against the emperor had not turned the thoughts of the former from the divorce. It still occupied him, and even were he disposed to forget it, the position in which Anne Boleyn found herself ever since the subject had been made public, was too painful to a woman am- bitious to ascend a throne, and desirous to vindicate her honor by a marriage with him by whom it had been compromised, to permit her to relax her efforts to urge Henry to procure the divorce. He pressed the pope, through Gregory Cassali, the English agent at Rome, to grant other bulls instead of those objectionable ones formerly accorded, but Cassali pressed Clement the Seventh in vain. All he could obtain from the wily