II.

CH. 11. disagreed with her, and at her own desire she was A.D. 1536. removed to Kimbolton. But there were no

Jan. 7.

symptoms of immediate danger. She revived under the change, and was in better spirits than she had shown for many previous months, especially after she heard of the new pope's resolution to maintain her cause. 'Much resort of people came daily to her.'* The vexatious dispute upon her title had been dropped, from an inability to press it; and it seemed as if life had become at least endurable to her, if it never could be more. But the repose was but the stillness of evening as night is hastening down. The royal officers of the household were not admitted into her presence; the queen lived wholly among her own friends and her own people; she sank unperceived; and so effectually had she withdrawn from the observation of those whom she desired to exclude, that the king was left to learn from the Spanish ambassador that she was at the point of death, before her chamberlain was aware that she was more than indisposed.† In the last week of December Henry learnt that she was in danger. On the 2nd of January the ambassador went down from London to Kimbolton, and spent the day with her. On the 5th Sir Edmund Bedingfield wrote that she was very ill, and that the issue was doubtful. On the morning of the 7th she received the last sacrament, and at two o'clock

* STRYPE'S Memorials, vol. i. p. 370.

+ Sir Edmund Bedingfield to Cromwell: State Papers, vol. i. P. 451.

STRYPE'S Memorials, vol. i., and see Appendix, p. 241, et seq.

A.D. 1536.

letter to

on that day she died.* On her deathbed she dic- CH.11. tated the following letter of farewell to him whom she still called, her most dear lord and husband. January. "The hour of my death now approaching, I Her last cannot choose but, out of the love I bear you, Henry. advise you of your soul's health, which you ought to prefer before all considerations of the world or flesh whatsoever; for which yet you have cast me into many calamities, and yourself into many troubles. But I forgive you all, and pray God to do so likewise. For the rest I commend unto you Mary our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father to her, as I have heretofore desired. I must entreat you also to respect my maids, and give them in marriage, which is not much, they being but three; and to all my other servants a year's pay besides their due, lest otherwise they should be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.

Farewell.'+

This letter reached Henry with the intimation that she was gone. He was much affected, and is said to have shed tears.‡

* State Papers, vol. i. p. | request was refused. Pole was not 452.

+ LORD HERBERT, p. 188.

in England at the time. He drew
his information from catholic
rumour, as vindictive as it was
credulous; and in the many
letters from members of the
privy council to him which we
possess, his narrative is treated
as throughout a mere wild col-

LORD HERBERT, p. 188. It will have been observed, that neither in this letter, nor in the other authentic papers connected with her death, is there any allusion to Cardinal Pole's famous story, that being on her death-lection of fables. I require some bed, Queen Catherine prayed the king to allow her to see her daughter for the last time, and that the

better evidence to persuade me
that this story is any truer than
the rest, when we know that

CH. II.

A.D. 1536.

She is

Peter

of Peter

The court was ordered into mourning-a command which Anne Boleyn distinguished herself January. by imperfectly obeying.* Catherine was buried buried at at Peterborough, with the estate of Princess borough, Royal; and shortly after, on the foundation of and the See the new bishoprics, the See of Peterborough was borough is established in her memory. We may welcome, a memorial however late, these acts of tardy respect. Henry, in the few last years, had grown wiser in the ways of women; and had learnt to prize more deeply the austerity of virtue, even in its unloveliest aspect.

founded as

of her.

The death of Catherine was followed, four

Catherine allowed the king to
hear that she was dying, not
from herself, but from a foreign
ambassador; and that such a
request could have been made
in the few days which intervened
between this intimation and her
death, without some traces of it
appearing in the close account
which we possess of her language
and actions during those days, is
in a high degree unlikely.

* See LINGARD, vol. v. p. 30.
HALL says Queen Anne wore
yellow for mourning.'

+ The directions for the funeral are printed in LINGARD, vol. v. Appendix, p. 267.

It ought not to be necessary to say that her will was respected-LORD HERBERT, p. 188; but the king's conduct to Catherine of Arragon has provoked suspicion even where suspicion is unjust; and much mistaken declamation has been wasted in connexion with this matter upon an offence wholly imaginary.

In making her bequests, Catherine continued to regard herself as the king's wife, in which capacity she professed to have no power to dispose of her property. She left her legacies in the form of a petition to her husband. She had named no executors; and being in the eyes of the law

a sole woman,' the administration lapsed in consequence to the nearest of kin, the emperor. Some embarrassment was thus created, and the attorney-general was obliged to evade the difficulty by a legal artifice, before the king could take possession, and give effect to the bequests. -See STRYPE'S Memor. vol. i. Appendix, pp. 252-5. Miss Strickland's valuable volumes are so generally read, that I venture to ask her to reconsider the passage which she has written on this subject. The king's offences against Catherine require no unnecessary exaggera

tion.

Anne

months later, by the tragedy which I have now CH. 11. to relate. The ground on which I am about to A.D. 1536. tread is so critical, and the issues at stake affect Fall of so deeply the honour of many of our most emi- Boleyn. nent English statesmen, that I must be pardoned if I cannot here step boldly out with a flowing narrative, but must pick my way slowly as I can: and I, on my part, must ask my readers to move slowly also, and be content to allow their judgment, for a few pages, to remain in sus

pense.

And first, I have to say that, as with all the great events of Henry's reign, so especially with this, we must trust to no evidence which is not strictly contemporary. During periods of revolution, years do the work of centuries in colouring actions and disturbing forms; and events are transferred swiftly from the deliberation of the judgment to the precipitate arrogance of party spirit. When the great powers of Europe were united against Elizabeth, and when Elizabeth's own character was vilely and wantonly assailed, the catholic writers dipped their pens in the stains which blotted her mother's name; and, more careless of truth than even theological passion can excuse, they poured out over both alike a stream of indiscriminate calumny. On the other hand, as Elizabeth's lordly nature was the pride of all truehearted Englishmen, so the reformers laboured to reflect her virtues backwards. Like the catholics, they linked the daughter with the parent; and became no less extravagant in their panegyrics than their antagonists in their gratuitous

CH. II. invective. But the Anne Boleyn, as she

A.D. 1536.

Rules to be observed in judging this question.

appears in contemporary letters, is not the Anne Boleyn of Foxe, or Wyatt, or the other champions of protestantism, who saw in her the counterpart of her child. These writers, though living so near to the events which they described, yet were divided from the preceding generation by an impassable gulf. They were surrounded with the heat and flame of a controversy, in which public and private questions were wrapped inseparably together; and the more closely we scrutinize their narratives, the graver occasion there appears for doing so.

While, therefore, in following out this miserable subject, I decline so much as to entertain the stories of Sanders, who has represented Queen Anne as steeped in profligacy from her childhood; so I may not any more accept those late memorials of her saintliness, which are alike unsupported by the evidence of those who knew her. If protestant legends are admitted as of authority, the catholic legends must enter with them, and we shall only deepen the confusion. I cannot follow Burnet, in reporting out of Meteren a version of Anne Boleyn's trial, unknown in England. The subject is one on which rhetoric and rumour are alike unprofitable. We must confine ourselves to accounts written at the time by persons to whom not the outline of the facts only was known, but the circumstances which surrounded them; by persons who had seen the evidence upon the alleged offences, which, though now lost irrecoverably, can be proved to have once existed.