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 CHAPTER IV.

marriage with Anne Boleyn was now a fixed idea in Henry's mind. He had become passionately attached to her, though not perhaps she to him. The evidence of his feeling remains in a series of letters to her—how preserved for public inspection no one knows. Some of them were said to have been stolen by Campeggio. Perhaps they were sold to him; at any rate, they survive. A critic in the "Edinburgh Review" described them as such as "might have been written by a pot-boy to his girl." The pot-boy must have been a singular specimen of his kind. One, at any rate, remains to show that, though Henry was in love, he did not allow his love to blind him to his duty as a prince. The lady, though obliged to wait for the full gratification of her ambition, had been using her influence to advance her friends, while Wolsey brought upon himself the rebuke of his master by insufficient care in the distribution of Church patronage. The correspondence throws an unexpected light upon the King's character.

The Abbess of Wilton had died. The situation