The whole enginery of thumbscrew, rack, and stake was set to work. Tender human flesh shrinks from burning, lacerating, and torture, so the griefs, longings, and aspirations of thousands of hearts flowed in streams deep down below the surface, coming to light here and there for brief moments among the followers of Huss, the Albigenses, the Waldenses, only to be driven back again into silence and despair.
In the early part of the sixteenth century the fate of Europe was in the hands of three men--Charles V., Emperor of Germany; Francis I., King of France, and Henry VIII., King of England.
Charles was half Fleming and half Spaniard, with the grasping acquisitiveness of the one nation, and the proud, fanatical cruelty of the other. Small of stature, plain in feature, sedate, quiet, crafty, he was playing a desperate game with Francis I. for supremacy in Europe.
Francis, handsome as an Apollo, accomplished, fascinating, profligate, was fully his match in ambition. Covering his worst qualities with a gorgeous mantle of generosity and chivalrous sense of honor, he was the insidious corrupter of morals in France; creating a sentiment which laughed at virtue and innocence as qualities belonging to a lower class of society.
Each of these men was striving to enlist Henry VIII. upon his side, by appealing to the cruel caprices of that vain, ostentatious, arrogant king, who in turn tried to use them for the furthering of his own desires and purposes.
It was a sort of triangular game between the three monarchs--a game full of finesse and far-reaching designs. If Charles attacked Francis, Henry attacked Charles. While the astute Charles, knowing well the desire of the English king to repudiate Katharine and make Anne Boleyn his queen, whispered seductive promises of the papal chair to Wolsey, who was in turn to establish his own influence over his royal master by bringing about the marriage with Anne, upon which the king's heart was set, and then be rewarded by securing Henry's promise of neutrality for Charles, in his designs of over-reaching Francis--and after that, the road to Rome for the aspiring cardinal would be a straight one!
It was an intricate diplomatic net-work, in which the thread of Henry's desire for the fair Anne was mingled with Wolsey's desire for preferment, and both interlaced with the ambitious, far-reaching purposes of the other two monarchs.