III

called

"The un

thrifty Forl"]

CHAP tion to use thyself more wisely hereafter; for that I assure thee, if thou dost not amend thy prodigality, thou wilt be the last Earl of our house; for of thy natural inclination thou art [He was disposed to be wasteful and prodigal, and to consume all that thy progenitors have with great travail gathered and kept together with honour. But having the King's Majesty my singular good and gracious Lord, I trust, I assure thee, so to order my succession that you shall consume thereof but a little. For I do not intend, I tell the truth, to make thee mine heir; for thanks be to God, I have more boys, that I trust will prove much better, and use themselves more like unto wise and honest men, of whom I will chuse the most likely to succeed me. Now good masters and gentlemen' (quoth he unto us), 'it may be your chances hereafter, when I am dead, to see these things that I have spoken to my son prove as true as I spake them. Yet in the mean season I desire you all to be his friends, and to tell him his fault, when he doeth amiss, wherein you shall show yourselves friendly unto him. And here,' quoth he, 'I take my leave of you. And, son, go your ways into my Lord, your master, and attend vpon him according to thy duty.' And so he departed, and went his way down the hall into his barge.

"Then after long consultation and debating in this the Lord Percy's late assurance, it was devised that the same should be infringed and dissolved, and that the Lord Percy should marry one of the Earl of Shrewsbury's daughters. And so he did after all this; by means whereof the former contract was dissolved; wherewith Mistress Anne Bullen was greatly offended, promising if it ever lay in her power she would work much displeasure to the Cardinal; as after she did indeed. And yet was he not in blame altogether; for he did nothing but by the King's devised commandment. And even as my Lord Percy was commanded to avoid her company, so she was discharged of the Court, and sent home to her father for a season, whereat she smoked; for all this time she knew nothing of the King's intended purpose."

At a later period Lord Percy, then Earl of
5 Wordsworth's Eccl. Biog., i.
Among the Vatican MSS.

363.

there exists a contemporary version of the story in verse.

6

Northumberland, denied that there had been any CHAP pre-contract between him and Anne Boleyn, and it is possible that the matter had not gone so far as a formal betrothal. Yet there exists a letter from some person whose name was not attached to it, which seems to show clearly enough that she was formally betrothed, and not merely "engaged" to the writer; and remembering that Cavendish was an eye and ear witness of the interview between Lord Percy and his father, and that he has always been regarded as a most honest and truthful historian, it is very difficult to suppose that the letter could be written by any one except Lord Percy. It is as follows:

"Mr. Malton, this shall be to advertise you that Mistress Anne is changed from that she was at when we three were last together. Wherefore, I pray you, that ye be no devil's sack, but according to the truth ever justify, as ye shall make answer before God, and do not suffer her in my absence to be married to any other man. I must go to my master, wheresoever he be, for the Lord Privy Seal desireth much to speak with me, whom if I should speak with in my master's absence it would cause ne lose my head; and yet, I know myself as true a man to my prince as liveth; whom (as my friends informeth me), the Lord Privy Seal saith, I have offended

This denial is repeated in the following letter to Cromwell, printed by Bishop Burnet from the Cottonian Lib. Otho. C. 10:-" Mr. Secretary, This shall be to signify unto you, that I perceive by Sir Raynold Carnaby, that there is supposed a Precontract between the Queen and me; whereupon I was not only heretofore examined upon my Oath before the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, but also received the Blessed Sacrament upon the same before the Duke of Norfolk, and other the King's

Highness' Council Learned in the
Spiritual Law; assuring you, Mr.
Secretary, by the said Oath, and
Blessed Body which afore I re-
ceived, and hereafter intend to re-
ceive, that the same may be to my
Damnation, if ever there were any
contract or promise of marriage
between Her and Me. At New-
ington-Green, the xiiith Day of
May, in the 28th Year of the Reign
of our Sovereign Lord King Henry
the VIIIth. Your assured, Nor-
thumberland." The Earl died sig
weeks later, on June 30, 1537.

III

CHAP grievously in my words. No more to you, but to have me commended unto Mistress Anne; and bid her remember her promise, which none can loose but God only, to whom I shall daily, during my life, with my prayer commend."

The King's inclinations known to Anne

A.D. 1527

"7

Whenever this affair occurred, it was almost certain to have led to some disclosure of the King's feelings, though it is said by Cavendish that she Boleyn always had a "grudge against my Lord Cardinal for breaking of the contract made between my Lord Percy and her, supposing that it had been his devised will and none other." But he states that she was soon recalled to court, and that she was not long in knowing the King's inclination towards her, if she did not know it before. It was probably, in fact, during her absence from court on this occasion that she received from Henry the earlier letters of a series, the date of which has been assigned with tolerable certainty to the years 1527 and 1528, beginning with the carlier half of the former year.

Ellis' Orig. Lett., III. ii. 131. There is, however, a letter from Wolsey to the King in the State Papers, in which he writes respecting a son of Sir Piers Butler (Lord Ormond, whose title of Ormond was taken away and given to Sir Thomas Boleyn). "And I shall, at my return to your presence, devise with your Grace, how the marriage betwixt him and Sir Thomas Bolain his daughter may be brought to pass.". This letter is supposed, by the editor of the State Papers, to have been written in November 1521. He also supposes that Mary Boleyn must be the daughter meant because Anne was then in France, and only fourteen years of age; but this is no evidence whatever; and it is certain that Mary Boleyn had

8

been married to William Carey the year before.

8 These letters are too remarkable to be passed over without some further notice than the text admits of. The originals are seventeen in number, some in French, and others in English, and are preserved in the Vatican Library, where they are numbered among the MSS. as 3731. They are all printed at length in the Harleian Miscellany, iii. 47-60, and in vols. 21 and 22 of the Pamphleteer, in which latter publication there are facsimile specimens of the writing and signatures. Bishop Burnet saw them, and says, "I, that knew his hand well, saw clearly that they were no forgeries." [Travels, Letter iv. p. 37.]

Lord Herbert states [Henry

III

Her accep

In these he always lavishes the most tender terms CHAP of affection upon her; and sometimes writes in such free language of their longed-for union as shows A.D. 1527 that he had then, at least, learned that such lan-tance of his guage, however gross, would not be offensive to her, advances They also supply evidence that neither warmth of feeling nor warmth of expression were all on one side. Even in the earlier letters, and when he is addressing her as "mistress and friend," he hopes that absence will not diminish her affection for him, and speaks of the demonstration of it which she has already made towards him. About October 1528, he is assuring her that the divorce business is going on as quickly as it can. "There shall be no time Her impalost," he says in one letter, and in another, "there about decan be no more done, nor more diligence used;" lay as to while in a third, he rejoices that she has been brought round to a reasonable patience, "the suppressing of your inutile and vain thoughts and fantasies with the bridle of reason."

The replies of Anne Boleyn to these letters of the King are not known to exist, but several letters which she wrote to Cardinal Wolsey are extant, and these show how eager this young lady of nineteen or twenty years old was for the settlement of that divorce which would enable her to supplant her elder

VIII., p. 288] that the recovery of these letters was one object of the search made among the luggage of Cardinal Campeggio when he was embarking for Rome in 1529, but that they had previously been sent to Rome. He also says that they had been stolen from the King's cabinet, but the editor of the Harleian Miscellany thinks they must have come from Anne Boleyn's cabinet, as the letters

were all written to her by the
King, and were not likely to have
been preserved by him if they had
been returned into his hands.

Some parts of the King's lan-
guage in these letters are too indeli-
cate to be put into a volume in-
tended for general reading; it can
only be said that they contain dis-
tinct allusions to licentious inter-
course between himself and his
correspondent.

tience

the divorce

CHAP rival of twenty years' honourable and virtuous standing as wife and Queen.9

III

Hitherto we have been looking at this question, from what may be said to be the domestic point of