ary 1536) has
thrown out the first bait to the Princess, telling her by her aunt (Lady
Shelton) that if she will discontinue her obstinacy, and obey her father
like a good girl, she (Anne) will be the best friend in the world to her,
and like another mother will try to obtain for her all she wants. If she
will come to Court she shall be exempt from carrying her (Anne's) train
and shall always walk by her side." But obedience meant that Mary should
recognise Cranmer's sentence against her mother, the repudiation of the
Papal authority and her own illegitimacy, and she refused the olive branch
held out to her. Then Anne changed her tone, and wrote to her aunt a
letter to be put into Mary's way, threatening the Princess. In her former
approaches, she said, she had only desired to save Mary out of charity. It
was no affair of hers: she did not care; but when she had the son she
expected the King would show no mercy to his rebellious daughter. But Mary
remained unmoved. She knew that all Catholic Europe looked upon her now as
the sole heiress of England, and that the Emperor was busy planning her
escape, in order that she might, from the safe refuge of his dominions, be
used as the main instrument for the submission of England to the Papacy
and the destruction of Henry's rule. For things had turned out somewhat
differently in this respect from what the King had expected. The death of
Katharine, very far from making the armed intervention of Charles in
England more improbable, had brought it sensibly nearer, for the great
war-storm that had long been looming between the French and Spaniards in
Italy was now about to burst. Francis could no longer afford to alienate
the Papacy by even pretending to a friendship with the excommunicated
Henry, whilst England might be paralysed, and all chance of a diversion
against imperial arms in favour of France averted, by the slight aid and
subsidy by the Emperor of a Catholic rising in England against Henry and
Anne.

On the 29th January 1536 Anne's last hope was crushed. In the fourth month
of her pregnancy she had a miscarriage, which she attributed passionately
to her love for the King and her pain at seeing him flirting with another
woman. Henry showed his rage and disappointment brutally, as was now his
wont. He had hardly spoken to Anne for weeks before; and when he visited
her at her bedside he said that it was quite evident that God meant to
deny him heirs male by her. "When you get