What was needed, Philip thought, was a change of policy in the Papacy. The bigotry of Paul the Fourth had driven England from the obedience of the Roman see. The gentler policy of Pius the Fourth might yet restore her to it. Pius was as averse from any break with Elizabeth as Philip was. He censured bitterly the harshness of his predecessor. The loss of Scotland and the threatened loss of France he laid to the charge of the wars which Paul had stirred up against Philip and which had opened a way for the spread of Calvinism in both kingdoms. England, he held, could have been easily preserved for Catholicism but for Paul's rejection of the conciliatory efforts of Pole. When he ascended the Papal throne at the end of 1559 indeed the accession of England to the Reformation seemed complete. The royal supremacy was re-established: the Mass abolished: the English Liturgy restored. A new episcopate, drawn from the Calvinistic refugees, was being gathered round Matthew Parker. But Pius would not despair. He saw no reason why England should not again be Catholic. He knew that the bulk of its people clung to the older religion, if they clung also to independence of the Papal jurisdiction and to the secularization of the Abbey-lands. The Queen, as he believed, had been ready for a compromise at her accession, and he was ready to make terms with her now. In the spring of 1560 therefore he dispatched Parpaglia, a follower of Pole, to open negotiations with Elizabeth. The moment which the Pope had chosen was a critical one for the Queen. She was in the midst of the Scotch war, and her forces had just been repulsed in an attempt to storm the walls of Leith. Such a repulse woke fears of conspiracy among the Catholic nobles of the northern border, and a refusal to receive the legate would have driven them to an open rising. On the other hand the reception of Parpaglia would have alienated the Protestants, shaken the trusts of the Lords of the Congregation in the Queen's support, and driven them to make terms with Francis and Mary. In either case Scotland fell again under the rule of France, and the throne of Elizabeth was placed in greater peril than ever. So great was the Queen's embarrassment that she availed herself of Cecil's absence in the north to hold out hopes of the legate's admission to the realm and her own reconciliation with the Papacy. But she was freed from these difficulties by the resolute intervention of Philip. If he disapproved of her policy in Scotland he had no mind that Scotland should become wholly French or Elizabeth be really shaken on her throne. He ordered the legate therefore to be detained in Flanders till his threats had obtained from the Pope an order for his recall.

But Pius was far from abandoning his bishops. After ten years' suspension he had again summoned the Council of Trent. The cry for Church reform, the threat of national synods in Spain and in France, forced this message on the Pope; and Pius availed himself of the assembly of the Council to make a fresh attempt to turn the tide of the Reformation and to win back the Protestant Churches to Catholicism. He called therefore on the Lutheran princes of Germany to send doctors to the Council, and in May 1561, eight months after Parpaglia's failure, dispatched a fresh nuncio, Martinengo, to invite Elizabeth to send ambassadors to Trent. Philip pressed for the nuncio's admission to the realm. His hopes of the Queen's return to the faith were now being fed by a new marriage-negotiation; for on the withdrawal of the Archduke of Austria in sheer weariness of Elizabeth's treachery, she had encouraged her old playfellow, Lord Robert Dudley, to hope for her hand and to amuse Philip by pledges of bringing back "the religion," should the help of the Spanish king enable him to win it. Philip gave his help, but Dudley remained a suitor, and the hopes of a Catholic revolution became fainter than ever. The Queen would suffer no landing of a legate in her realm. The invitation to the Council fared no better. The Lutheran states of North Germany had already refused to attend. The Council, they held, was no longer a council of reunion. In its earlier session it had formally condemned the very doctrine on which Protestantism was based; and to join it now would simply be to undo all that Luther had done. Elizabeth showed as little hesitation. The hour of her triumph, when a Calvinistic Scotland and a Calvinistic France proved the mainstays of her policy, was no hour of submission to the Papacy. In spite of Philip's entreaties she refused to send envoys to what was not "a free Christian Council." The refusal was decisive in marking Elizabeth's position. The long period of hesitation, of drift, was over. All chance of submission to the Papacy was at an end. In joining the Lutheran states in their rejection of this Council, England had definitely ranged itself on the side of the Reformation.