Book the Nineteenth. A ROYAL SUIT. CHAPTER I. MISTRESS ANNE. 1526. 1. WOLSEY was preparing for a meeting of the two Kings, when an incident occurred of which he took no note; the meeting of a gentleman and a lady in a garden; though this incident was to fire the passion of his life. The scene was Hever, in the Weald of Kent; a quaint and formal garden, with a moat, a drawbridge, an embattled gateway, and a brace of flanking towers. Viscount Rochford and his daughter were at home; the lady, plain of face and in her twenty-sixth year, but with the freshness of her youth and spirit lighting up a pair of fitful, fawn-like eyes. The King was visiting his Treasurer of the Household, as he visited all his officers and comrades in their turn; and in the quaint VOL. IV. B old garden by the moat he met the young lady who for several years had caused him so much trouble by her love affairs. 2. Henry was taken by a word and smile. A face so innocently arch, a wit so rapid and so bright, a mien so modest yet so gay, were new to him. The King was tiring of such beauties as Elizabeth Blount; mere lumps of rosy flesh, without the sparkle of a living soul. Less than an hour he moved among the flowers by that quaint garden round the moat, but as the minutes slipt away, his heart was lost. He fell so swiftly and completely that the outside world imagined he was won by magic arts. 3. On his return to Whitehall, Henry spoke of Anne Boleyn, not as of a lovely woman, but as one who had the 'soul of an angel.' 'I have talked,' cried Henry, in the fervour of a lover,' with a young lady who has the soul of an angel, and a spirit worthy of a crown.' Wolsey, full of his schemes for saving Christendom by an alliance with the House of Valois, was impatient of such raptures. 'Methinks it were enough,' he sneered, if she is worthy of your love.' Henry rejoined that she was not to be induced that way. I fear this angelic soul will never stoop to ordinary clay.' 'Great princes,' laughed the Cardinal, 'have means of softening hearts of steel.' Henry was not without some means of judging whether she would yield. He had been trying for six years past to force her on the son of Piers the Red; but he had lost that purity of heart which at an earlier season would have shrunk from Wolsey's hints. One day he tried his fortune in a coarse and easy way, by offering Anne a costly jewel and a worthless compliment. 'I think, most noble King,' said Anne, 'your Majesty speaks these words in mirth to prove me, but without intent of degrading your princely self. To ease you of the labour of asking me any such question hereafter, I beseech your Highness most earnestly to desist, and to take this my answer-which I speak from the depth of my soul-in good part. Most noble King, I would rather lose my life than my honesty, which will be the greatest and best part of the dowry I shall have to bring my husband.' 4. Well, Madame,' said the King, in something of a lover's pique, 'I shall live in hope.' Anne flushed with sudden ire. 'I understand you not, nor how you can retain such hope. Your wife I cannot be, both in respect of my unworthiness, and also because you have a Queen. Your mistress I will never be!' A soul so brave and A soul so brave and pure appeared to Henry worthy of a throne. Why should a King not choose his wife for love? His mother-good and lovely Queen Elizabeth—was the daughter of a private gentlewoman. Her blood was in his veins, yet the Plantagenet current ran as high as ever. Not inferior in descent and talent to a Woodville was the maid at Hever Castle. Wolsey might oppose him, for the Cardinal wanted him to marry a political consort. Henry hardly knew his mind; how true the woman was; or how far he might go to gain her heart. His fancy had been touched by a mysterious spirit, and after his repulse he never dreamt, in all the years through which he was to wait her answer, of renewing his unhallowed suit. Expecting every day to hear that his affairs were ended, he supposed he might be free in form, as Wolsey told him he was free in law, to enter on another tie. That freedom was his own to use. If he could marry Renée, he could marry Anne. And why, in such a matter, should he not consult the fancy of his eye, the feeling of his heart? 5. Henry at thirty-five was still a young man in the flower of life; tall, fair, and supple, with a roundness in his face and figure that relieved his height. All foreigners, Italians most of all, were struck by his personal beauty. 'Henry,' said Conaro the Venetian, ‘has a very handsome face, a nobly moulded figure. He is learned, grave, and wise, and is endowed with every fine accomplishment.' These words were not for Henry's eye. A little later, Surian described him as 'looking very grand and very handsome.' No man in his court had such a presence. Moriano, six years later, goes still further in his praise. As the ambassadors were speaking, I had nothing else to do than sit and feast my eyes on the King's physical beauty. Never in my days have I seen so fine a face; I will not say in princes, who are any class and kind of men. few in number, but in Never have I seen a man so handsome, elegant, and well proportioned, as this English King. Tall, agile, strong, with flesh all pink and white, graceful in his mien and in his walk, it seems to me that Nature, in creating such a prince, has done her utmost to present a model of manly beauty to these modern days.' 6. To charms of person, which are never wholly lost on female eyes, were added many gifts of mind. Foremost amongst these gifts were his taste as a poet and his talent as a musicianthings in which Anne Boleyn had herself attained a high degree of excellence. Henry composed as well as played, and many of his happiest hours were spent with clavicorde and lute. His skill in music drew all lovers of the art to him, and every one who rose to fame desired to play before so fine a judge. Not many weeks had passed since Zuan da Leze, an accomplished organist, had come from Venice with a wonderful instrument, hoping to achieve his fortune. Henry heard him play, and tossed him twenty nobles, on which Da Leze, who had been expecting an appointment in the household, hung himself in a fit of wounded pride. As poetess and musician, Anne lay open to these intellectual spells. 7. She kept her royal suitor at a distance, not so much because she thought him another woman's husband, as because her heart was not yet freed from the remembrance of her lover. Not her father only, but the oldest and the wisest men about her -Warham and Wyat-held that Catharine was, in |