s, goldsmith, whom Bourbon's letter mentioned in connection with him
in 1536.

All these months the negotiations for the hand of the Duchess of Milan
had fluctuated with the varying fortunes of the King's relations with
her uncle, Charles V. But at last they had altogether collapsed with
what seemed to Henry VIII. the threatening attitude assumed by the
Emperor and the Pope. Hereupon followed that historical chapter, so full
of fatal consequences to Cromwell, and no less big with shame for the
King's own story: the pitiful chapter of Anne of Cleves.

Her brother, the Duke of Cleves, was at this time a troublesome foe to
the Emperor; while the fact that she was a Protestant was a "Roland"
for the Imperial and Papal "Oliver." So Holbein was again posted off to
bring back a counterfeit of Anne, and to carry to her a miniature of the
King. And by the 1st September he had acquitted himself of the new
mission.

There is not an iota of historical or other evidence for that "Flanders
mare" anecdote, which seems to have had a gratuitous as well as
spontaneous origin in Bishop Burnet's seventeenth-century brain, to the
effect that the King was the victim of a flattering portrait by Holbein,
and cruelly undeceived by the actual looks of his bride. In the first
place his agents wrote to him frankly that the Princess was of no great
beauty, though not uncomely, and "never from the ellebowe of the Ladye
Duchesse her Mother," who was said to be most unwilling to part with her
(as a mother might well be, for the husband in question). The King was
also told that she was quite unskilled in languages or music, and
held, with her mother, that it was "for a rebuke and an occasion of
lightenesse that great Ladyes shuld be lernyd or have enye knowledge of
musike." And in the next place even a superficial knowledge of Holbein
would disprove any tradition of "flattery" from his unflinching, almost
brutally truthful brush. It was hardly likely that the painter who would
not stoop to flatter Bishop Stokesley, or Henry VIII. himself, would be
swerved from his good faith by Anne of Cleves.

Illustration: PLATE 35
ANNE OF CLEVES
_Oils. The Louvre_

On the contrary, the painting, in oils on vellum and mounted on a panel,
now in the Louvre (Plate 35), is the very embodiment of contemporary
accounts of this Princess. Her fair-skinned, commonplace, yet "not
uncomely" face looks out placidly at you from the quaint Flemish
head-dress of fine g