mer, post haste, and said to LORD ROCHFORT, Anne Boleyn's father,
'Take this learned Doctor down to your country-house, and there let him
have a good room for a study, and no end of books out of which to prove
that I may marry your daughter.' Lord Rochfort, not at all reluctant,
made the learned Doctor as comfortable as he could; and the learned
Doctor went to work to prove his case. All this time, the King and Anne
Boleyn were writing letters to one another almost daily, full of
impatience to have the case settled; and Anne Boleyn was showing herself
(as I think) very worthy of the fate which afterwards befel her.

It was bad for Cardinal Wolsey that he had left Cranmer to render this
help. It was worse for him that he had tried to dissuade the King from
marrying Anne Boleyn. Such a servant as he, to such a master as Henry,
would probably have fallen in any case; but, between the hatred of the
party of the Queen that was, and the hatred of the party of the Queen
that was to be, he fell suddenly and heavily. Going down one day to the
Court of Chancery, where he now presided, he was waited upon by the Dukes
of Norfolk and Suffolk, who told him that they brought an order to him to
resign that office, and to withdraw quietly to a house he had at Esher,
in Surrey. The Cardinal refusing, they rode off to the King; and next
day came back with a letter from him, on reading which, the Cardinal
submitted. An inventory was made out of all the riches in his palace at
York Place (now Whitehall), and he went sorrowfully up the river, in his
barge, to Putney. An abject man he was, in spite of his pride; for being
overtaken, riding out of that place towards Esher, by one of the King's
chamberlains who brought him a kind message and a ring, he alighted from
his mule, took off his cap, and kneeled down in the dirt. His poor Fool,
whom in his prosperous days he had always kept in his palace to entertain
him, cut a far better figure than he; for, when the Cardinal said to the
chamberlain that he had nothing to send to his lord the King as a
present, but that jester who was a most excellent one, it took six strong
yeomen to remove the faithful fool from his master.

The once proud Cardinal was soon further disgraced, and wrote the most
abject letters to his vile sovereign; who humbled him one day and
encouraged him the next, according to his humour, until he was at last
ordered to go and reside in his diocese of York. He said he w