IT was on August 9, 1529, just seventeen days after Campeggio's ad-
journment of his court, that the writs were ordered for summoning a
parliament -- " Henry's reply to Clement VII's revocation of the divorce,"
says one authority, ¹ certainly a sign that Wolsey's days were numbered
and that the king was about to seek other counsels and another kind of
support for whatever it was that he intended.

At what that was, the French ambassador made a shrewd guess -- if he
was not, indeed, passing on information received from the source of it all. He
wrote on August 23: "It is intended to hold a parliament here this winter,
and then bring about the divorce by their own absolute power in default
of justice being administered by the pope"; ² Campeggio, much less
shrewdly, was completely taken in by Henry's duplicity. Four weeks after
the letter just quoted he travelled, with Wolsey, to Grafton, in Northampton-
shire, for his farewell audience, September 19. A letter, written on
October 7, gives us the reassuring picture of Henry's mind, on the eve of
the Reformation Parliament, which Campeggio took back with him to
Rome: "He told me, and as it seemed to me with heartfelt sincerity,
that he would not ever fail to be a most christian king, a good defender of
the faith, and that, though the whole world failed, he would never fail in
his duty of being a good christian king. And in this conversation I went
into the matter of the Lutherans and this parliament which is about to be
held, and certainly the king seemed to me very well disposed to do good,
in so far as his powers extend." ³

Two months later, Henry was revealing something of his real intentions
to Eustace Chapuys, the new ambassador from Charles V, who was regaling
the king with an account of Clement VII's splendid reception of the emperor
at Bologna. Henry's comment was that the pope and cardinals were more
interested in ceremonial than in the Gospel, that when Luther exposed the
bad life of clerics he did well, and had he gone no further than this Henry
would have supported him. Even so, he said, Luther's heresy was not a

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