to be some technical difficulty. "Unless she retracted and abjured in the presence of the persons before whom she took the oath, it was said that the Pope's absolution would be of no use to her." There was, perhaps, another objection. Cifuentes imperfectly trusted Paul. He feared that if he pressed the request the secret would be betrayed and that Mary's life would be in danger.[1]
Time, perhaps, and reflection alleviated Mary's remorse and enabled her to dispense with the Papal anodyne, while Cromwell further comforted the Ambassador in August by telling him that the King felt he was growing old, that he was hopeless of further offspring, and was thinking seriously of making Mary his heir after all.[2]
Age the King could not contend with, but for the rest he had carried his policy through. The first act of the Reformation was closing, and he was left in command of the situation. The curtain was to rise again with the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire rebellion, to be followed by the treason of the Poles. But there is no occasion to tell a story over again which I can tell no better than I have done already, nor does it belong to the subject of the present volume. The Pilgrimage of Grace was the outbreak of the conspiracy encouraged by Chapuys to punish Henry, and to stop the progress of the Reformation; Chapuys's successors in the time of Elizabeth followed his example; and with them all the result was the same—the ruin of the cause which with such weapons they were trying to maintain, and the deaths on the scaffold of the victims of visionary hopes and promises which were never to be made good.
