been made formally public, and she begged that the whole matter might be kept as private as possible.[1]
That the Pope would be willing, if he dared, to gratify Henry at Charles's expense was only too likely. The German Lutherans and the German Emperor were at the moment his most dangerous enemies. France and England were the only Powers who seemed willing to assist him, and a week before the meeting of Wolsey's court he had experienced in the most terrible form what the imperial hostility might bring upon him. On the 7th of that same month of May the army of the Duke of Bourbon had taken Rome by storm. The city was given up to pillage. Reverend cardinals were dragged through the streets on mules' backs, dishonoured and mutilated. Convents of nuns were abandoned to the licentious soldiery. The horrors of the capture may have been exaggerated, but it is quite certain that to holy things or holy persons no respect was paid, and that the atrocities which in those days were usually perpetrated in stormed towns were on this occasion eminently conspicuous. The unfortunate Pope, shut up in the Castle of St. Angelo, looked down from its battlements upon scenes so dreadful that it must have appeared as if the Papacy and the Church itself had been overtaken by the final judgment. We regard the Spaniards as a nation of bigots, we consider it impossible that the countrymen of Charles and Philip could have been animated by any such bitterness against the centre of Catholic Christendom. Charles himself is not likely to have intended the humiliation of the Holy See. But Clement had reason for his misgivings, and Wolsey's policy was not without
- ↑ Inigo de Mendoza to Charles V., May 18, 1527.—Spanish Calendar, vol, iii. part 2, p. 193.
