her chasteness, her meekness, her wisdom."1 "This," says Tur "is the king's own portrait of her, after six years acquaintance, amid all the enmity that attacked her." Even Cavendish, gentleman-usher of Cardinal Wolsey, who knew her well, and was the reverse of prepossessed in her favour, speaks of her at time of her return to England, and when she first became the ob of Henry's affections, as a lady of unblemished reputation. In Metrical Versions he introduces her as saying to Henry,

"At home with my father a maiden he found me."3

The residence of Anne in the royal family of France was calculated to enlarge and liberalize her mind in matters of religi The social circle in which she there moved, if it did not go length of throwing off the Papal yoke, and branding his holiness the Antichrist and the Man of Sin foretold in Scripture, was yet fu alive to the corruptions of the Popish Church, in so far as rela to the lives of the clergy. It freely canvassed and sharply censu the character of the Papal hierarchy, from the Pope downwar their ambition, avarice, idleness, libertinism. Louis XII. had be engaged in war with that restless and domineering pontiff Julius 1 and setting at defiance the anathemas of the Vatican, had conte plated the deposition of his holiness, and the introduction of gre ecclesiastical changes in France; and this had the effect of weake ing the power of superstition over the minds of the French courtie and of impregnating them, so far, with liberal views.* Francis threatened to wrench the Church of France from its connection wi the Papal throne, should an ecclesiastic whom he disliked be chos to the primacy. His mother Louise lets us see, by some passages her journal, how her mind had been emancipated from a blind abje devotion to the Papacy. In December, 1522, she makes this entr

1 Burnet's Reformation, vol. vi., p. 84.

2 Reign of Henry VIII., p. 202.

3 Life of Wolsey, vol. ii., p. 41.

Turner's Reign of Henry VIII., vol. i., p. 98.

*My son and I, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, begin to know the hypocrites, white, black, gray, smoky, of all colours-from whom may Heaven, of its clemency and infinite goodness, defend us; for if Jesus Christ did not speak falsely, there is not a more dangerous vain all human nature." Margaret of Valois, the most intellecpersonage of the court, and a woman whose winning manners, bed with her talents, gave her great influence over others, had y little veneration for the Roman pontiff and the shavelings of Papal hierarchy. Cardinal Wolsey, when ambassador in France 121, says in one of his despatches, "I devised with the king's ter, and she showed me many things of the Pope's act, which, if it as she saith, his deeds be as little to his honour as may be."? And when the light of the Reformation broke in upon France, bring

to view the pure doctrines of the gospel, which had been for sbscured and overlaid by the impieties, superstitions, and Rites of Popery, this illustrious lady was attracted by the

ty and beauty of divine truth. She became devoted to the and study of the sacred Scriptures, and earnestly inculcated araling and study of them upon others. She was the friend and

ess of such men as Briçonnet, Lefevre of Etaples, Farel, VatArld and Gerard Roussel, and other ardent apostles of reform.

ted in conversing with them on the great doctrines of the and listened with the deepest attention and interest to their Derpretations of God's Word, as well as encouraged them in boldly

ng the truth in Paris. Such was the society in which Byn was daily and hourly mingling, and such were the excit

which occupied no inconsiderable share of its attention -versation. We have, indeed, no definite information as to

e in the formation of her religious sentiments; but from ve know of them afterwards, it may fairly be concluded that sures of the Popish Church she heard in the French court,

a

ter, dated 2d August, quoted in Turner's Reign of Henry VIII, vol. i.

had the effect of impairing, if not of destroying, her veneration fo the Popedom, and that listening to the exposition of the pur doctrines of the gospel, pouring like honey from the honeycom from the persuasive lips of Margaret of Valois, or of her protégés she perceived their reasonableness and their truth. English and French historians of the best authority, agree in admitting that it was from her residence and intercourse with Margaret of Valois that she received the first grounds of the Protestant religion, and that to this source is to be traced the value which, as was afterwards shown, she attached to the Sacred Volume, and the protection she extended to such as were active in its circulation.

Whether Burnet's supposition as to Anne's return to France be correct or not, it is certain that she did not again appear at the English court till after an absence of four years, namely, in 1527, when Henry's contemplated divorce from his queen, Katharine of Aragon, had become generally known,' and formed the all-engrossing conversational topic of the day.

On the return of Anne from France, Henry was as deeply enamoured with her as ever, and she was reappointed one of Queen Katharine's maids of honour. Hitherto, delicacy and respect for Katharine, her mistress, together with the shock given, by the loss of Lord Percy, to her affections, which she could not easily transfer to Henry, made her discourage his tender aspirations. "She stood still upon her guard," says an old memorialist, "and was not easily carried away with all this appearance of happiness; first, on account of the love she bare ever to the queen, whom she served, a personage of great virtue; and secondly, she imagined that there would be less freedom in her union with her lord and king, than with one still more suitable to her estate." This was true of her feelings and conduct

2

1 The news "by secret ways and means " had reached Margaret, governess of Flanders, in August, 1527.-Letter of Wolsey to Henry VIII., dated Amyas, 11th August [1527], in State Papers, vol. i., p. 254. And about the same time they had reached Charles V.-Letter of Wolsey to Henry VIII., dated Campeigne, 5th September [1527], in ibid., vol. i., p. 257.

The Life of the Virtuous, Christian, and Renowned Queen Anne Boleyn, by George

for some years after her dismissal from the court; and after her return to it in 1527, she was deaf to his passionate addresses for more than a year. To gain her heart he loaded her with presents, and among other tokens of affection, he is said to have presented her with a horologe. At last, the united importunities of Henry,

Wat, etten at the close of the 16th century, in Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, vol. ii. The actor was grandson of the poet, George Wyatt, Esq., and sixth son and heir of Sir The Wyatt the younger, who was beheaded for rebellion in the first year of the teen Mary. He derived his information, as he tells us, from Miss Anne

, who attended on Anne both before and after she was queen, and from ady of noble birth, a relative of his own.

The appears from the love-letters Henry wrote to her after her return from Face If a letter in Miss Wood's Letters of Royal, &c., vol. ii., p. 14, translated Let's Itaan Life of Queen Elizabeth, said to be from Anne Boleyn to Henry, paze, the fact would be quite the reverse. From internal evidence it must refer

without date-to the time of her appointment to be maid of honour to Queen Karen 1527, and it expresses the most idolatrous affection for Henry, and a en to do or become whatever he should please. But this is so contrary to the harter of Henry's unquestionably authentic love-letters to her at this period, a show that she acted with great reserve, that we cannot believe in its authentiay Let, indeed, too often draws upon his imagination to be an authority of much ght. Most of these love-letters of Henry to her are in French. The originals are in Vatican at Rome, forming part of the Codices Vaticani, No. 3731. They were , it has been supposed, "by some secret management, probably by Wolsey's and sent to Rome by Cardinal Campeggio. . They have been pubzorrectly in some parts, in the third volume of the Harleian Miscellany, 22-62, and elsewhere. Mr. Gun has given the most complete edition of them, being in the Pamphleteer, Nos. 42 and 43, correctly copied from autographs in

her father, and others of her friends, who assured her that the king's marriage with Katharine was contrary to the divine law and that the divorce was what must take place, prevailed, and she not only encouraged his advances, but became dazzled by the gilded splendours of royalty. The expectation of being one day the queen of the greatest monarch in Europe, became the pivot upon which her thoughts began and continued to turn. Still, perhaps, every now and then she wavered, partly from compunctions of conscience at the thought of inflicting wrong upon Katharine, and partly from the apprehension of finding the situation of queen-consort in the circumstances far from enviable; and it was not till Campeggio came to the English court, in October, 1529, with the professed design of granting the divorce, but with the real intention of doing nothing, that, seeing the highest authorities in the church, and her greatest enemies to all appearance favouring her advancement, she ceased to hesitate.'

Wolsey, though not ignorant of Henry's vehement affection for Anne, probably never dreamed of its going farther than making her his mistress; or he imagined that if the monarch, in the fever of passion, had resolved upon making her his wife and queen, he would gradually cool and alter his intention.2 It may be doubted whether Henry himself, till the last half of the year 1527, had decidedly and irrevocably formed such a resolution. Between July and October that year Wolsey was in France, negotiating a matrimonial alliance between his master and Renée, daughter of Louis XII., afterwards Duchess of Ferrara. This looks as if Henry's mind had not been altogether made up as to whom he should marry upon the divorce of his present queen. But his passion for Anne mightily increased

the Vatican palace, with a valuable introduction, and some fac-similies of the writing and notes."-Tarner's History of the Reign of Henry VIII., vol. ii., p. 227. Turner has given the most of them in that work. Their respectful language," he justly observes, "is an irresistible attestation of Anne Boleyn's virtue, and of the impression it had made upon her royal admirer." Our limits prevent us from giving an abstract of these effusions of royal affection.

1 This is proved from Henry's love-letters to her.-See D'Aubigné's Reformation in England, book xx., chap. iii.

2 Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, vol. i., p. 67.