Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/266

252 City Watchmen of the time of Henry VIII.

None being found, orders were given for the lady to proceed from Dartford, and at Greenwich she was received outwardly with all the pomp and rejoicings the most welcome beauty could have elicited. But still the mind of the mortified king revolted at the completion of the wedding, and once more he summoned his council, and declared himself unsatisfied about the contract, and required that Anne should make a solemn protestation that she was free from all pre-contracts. Probably Henry hoped that, seeing that she was far from pleasing him, she might be willing to give him up, but deeply wounded as her just pride as a woman must have been by his treatment, and her fears excited by the recollection of the fates of Catherine and Anne Boleyn, the princess could be no free agent in the matter. The ambassadors would urge the impossibility of her going back, thus insulting all Protestant Germany, and her own pride would second their arguments on that side too. The ignominy of being sent back, rejected as unattractive and unwelcome, was not to be thought of. She made a most clear and positive declaration of her freedom from all pre-contracts. On hearing this, the surly monarch fell into such a humour that Cromwell got away from his presence as quickly as he could. Seeing no way out of it, the marriage was celebrated on the 6th of January, 1510, but nothing could reconcile Henry to his German queen. He loathed her person, he could not even talk with her without an interpreter; and he soon fell in love with Catherine Howard, niece to the Duke of Norfolk, a young lady who was much handsomer than Anne, as little educated, and more unprincipled. From the moment that Henry cast his eyes on this new favourite, the little remains of outward courtesy towards the queen vanished. He ceased to appear with her in public. He began to express scruples about having a Lutheran wife. He did not hesitate to propagate the most shameful calumnies against her, delaringdeclaring [sic] that she had not been virtuous before her marriage. He openly avowed that he had never meant to keep her, and he dismissed, as a preparatory step, her German attendants, and placed about her English ladies of his own selection. Wriothesley, whom the fair historian of our queens justly styles "the most unprincipled of the low-born parasites who rose to greatness by truckling to the lawless passions of the sovereign," talked freely of the hardness of the king's case, bound to a woman that he could not love, and recommended a divorce.

The Block and Axe in the Tower of London.

The situation of Anne must now have been intolerable to a woman of any feeling and spirit: in a foreign court and country, deprived of the solace of the society of her own countrywomen—in the hands of a tyrant steeped in the blood of his wives and subjects, and surrounded by his creatures, who well knew how to make her life bitter to her. These circumstances seem to have stung her, at length, to speak with spirit. She told him that, if she had not been compelled to marry him, she could have had a younger and more amiable prince, whom she should have much preferred. That was enough—he resolved to be rid of her without delay; and he avenged himself on her freedom of speech by encouraging the ladies of the bed-chamber to ridicule her, and to mimic her for their amusement. Anne is said to have resented this so much, that she ceased to behave with the submissive complaisance which she had hitherto maintained, and returned these unmanly outrages with so much independence, that Henry complained to Cromwell, "that she waxed wilful and stubborn to him."

Anne, in need of counsel, could find none in those who ought to have stood by her. Cranmer, as the Reformer, and Cromwell, the advocate of Protestantism, and who