ne 1534). As for
the Queen, he said, she was being treated "in everything to the best that
can be devised, whom we do order and entertain as we think most expedient,
and as to us seemeth prudent. And the like also of our daughter the Lady
Mary: for we think it not meet that any person should prescribe unto us
how we should order our own daughter, we being her natural father." He
expressed himself greatly hurt that the Emperor should think him capable
of acting unkindly, notwithstanding that the Lady Katharine "hath very
disobediently behaved herself towards us, as well in contemning and
setting at naught our laws and statutes, as in many other ways." Just
lately, he continues, he had sent three bishops to exhort her, "in most
loving fashion," to obey the law; and "she hath in most ungodly,
obstinate, and inobedient wise, wilfully resisted, set at naught and
contemned our laws and ordinances: so if we would administer to her any
rigour or extremity she were undoubtedly within the extreme danger of our
laws."

The blast of persecution swept over the land. The oaths demanded by the
new statutes were stubbornly resisted by many. Fisher and More, as learned
and noble as any men in the land, were sent to the Tower (April 1534) to
be entrapped and done to death a year later. Throughout the country the
Commissioners with plenary powers were sent to administer the new oaths,
and those citizens who cavilled at taking them were treated as traitors to
the King. But all this did not satisfy Anne whilst Katharine and Mary
remained recalcitrant and unpunished for the same offence. Henry was in
dire fear, however, of some action of the Emperor in enforcement of the
Papal excommunication against him and his kingdom, which according to the
Catholic law he had forfeited by the Pope's ban. Francis, willing as he
was to oppose the Emperor, dared not expose his own kingdom to
excommunication by siding with Henry, and the latter was statesman enough
to see, as indeed was Cromwell, that extreme measures against Mary would
turn all Christendom against him, and probably prove the last unbearable
infliction that would drive his own people to aid a foreign invasion. So,
although Anne sneered at the King's weakness, as she called it, and
eagerly anticipated his projected visit to Francis, during which she would
remain Regent in England, and be able to wreak her wicked will on the
young Princess, the King, held by political fear, and probably, too, b