handwriting (Pocock, Records, pp. 291–3). He next went with the same object to Paris; and Reginald Pole, writing to Henry (7 July) and giving some account of the circumstances under which the conclusion of the university there was arrived at, states that the adverse party had used every effort to prevent its being carried, but that Fox (who appears to have been the bearer of his letter) had ‘used great prudence and diligence in withstanding them.’ In May 1531 he again proceeded to France on the same business. Chapuys, in a letter to the emperor, describes him as an ‘habile galant, and one of the boutefeus in this matter of the divorce.’ On 26 Sept. the same writer states that Fox has again been sent to Paris, and adds that, in order ‘to enable him to do it better, the lady’ (Anne Boleyn) ‘has given him benefices and the office of almoner.’ In December Fox returned to England; and on New Year's day we find the queen presenting him with a piece of arras.
The tact and ability which he showed in these difficult and delicate negotiations led to his frequent employment in other political business. In 1532 he appears as one of the signatories to the treaty with France; and when, at the celebration of high mass, the treaty received the signature of Henry and the French ambassador, Fox, according to Chapuys, made a speech in praise of the alliance, describing it as ‘inviolable and eternal’ and ‘the best means of resisting the Turk.’ In April 1533 he was appointed on the commission to conclude a yet stricter ‘league and amity’ with Francis I, and in 1534 discharged a like function in arranging terms of peace with Scotland. The whole conduct of the divorce transactions appears to have now been mainly in his hands, and Sir George Casale refers to him as the best informed among English statesmen with respect to the negotiations on the subject which had been going on in Italy. In April 1533, when the lawfulness of Henry's first marriage was under discussion by convocation, he presided in the place of the prolocutor. In the following May, on the occasion of an official conference with Chapuys at Westminster, he was appointed to reply to Chapuys, to whom he represented that ‘the king, by his great learning, moved by the Divine Spirit, had found that he could not keep the queen as his wife, and, like a catholic prince, he had separated from her, and that there was no occasion to discuss the matter further’ (Rolls Series, 25 Hen. VIII, No. 465). He took a leading part in the attempts made to induce Catherine to give her assent to the statute respecting the succession, and in 1534 he published his treatise ‘De vera Differentia Regiæ Potestatis et Ecclesiæ.’ It was printed by Berthelet, and a second edition was published in 1538. Fox, by this time, had definitely taken his stand as a reformer, and Chapuys describes him as, along with Cranmer and Cromwell, ‘among the most perfect Lutherans in the world.’
In the meantime honours and preferments had been showered liberally upon him. On 3 Jan. 1528 he was presented to the rectory of Combemartin in the diocese of Exeter. In 1531 he was appointed archdeacon of Leicester, and continued to hold that office until his election as bishop of Hereford. In January 1532 he received a grant, in augmentation of the royal alms, of all goods and chattels of deodands and suicides in England. In 1533 he was promoted to the deanery of Salisbury and the archdeaconry of Dorset. In May 1535 he was presented to a canonry and prebend in the collegiate church of SS. Mary and George in Windsor Castle. In the following August he was elected to the bishopric of Hereford, the royal assent being given on 2 Sept. During the former month he appears to have been much with Cranmer at Lambeth, occupied probably in discussing with the primate the various points on which he would have to confer with the Lutheran divines in Germany, to whom it was proposed he should go as a delegate for the purpose of winning them over to Henry's side. On the 31st he received his credentials from the king at Bromham in Wiltshire, and in October he set out with Dr. Nicolas Heath, archdeacon of Stafford, for Germany. They were instructed to proceed first to the elector of Saxony, and afterwards to the other German princes. On their arrival at Wittenberg they had an interview with Luther, who, although he could not conceal his amazement at their apparent confidence in the justice of their cause, expressed himself willing to listen to their arguments. He, however, became wearied by their pertinacity and prolonged stay, which was protracted to April, Fox, in that month, even going so far as to follow the doctors of the university to the diet at Frankfort. At length he and his colleagues were dismissed, taking back to England as the reply of the protestant divines of Germany, that, although the king had doubtless been moved by very weighty reasons, and it was impossible to deny that his marriage was against natural and moral law, they could not persuade themselves that he had acted rightly in the matter of the divorce.
In 1536 Fox was sent on a similar errand to France. In the same year his growing sympathy with Lutheran doctrine was shown
