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1532.]
MARRIAGE WITH ANNE BOLEYN
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when the Bishop of Paris, who remained ambassador at the English Court, wrote to Montmorency to suggest that Anne Boleyn should be invited to accompany the King of England on this occasion, and that she should be received in state. The letter was dated from Ampthill, to which Henry had escaped for a while from his Greenwich friars and other troubles, and where the King was staying a few weeks before the house was given up to Queen Catherine. Anne Boleyn was with him; she now, as a matter of course, attended him everywhere. Intending her, as he did, to be the mother of the future heir to his crown, he preserved what is technically called her honour unimpeached and unimpaired. In all other respects she occupied the position and received the homage due to the actual wife of the English sovereign; and in this capacity it was the desire of Henry that she should be acknowledged by a foreign prince.

The Bishop's letter on this occasion is singularly interesting and descriptive. The Court were out hunting, he said, every day; and while the King was pursuing the heat of the chase, he and Mademoiselle Anne were posted together, each with a crossbow, at the point to which the deer was to be driven. The young lady, in order that the appearance of her reverend cavalier might correspond with his occupation, had made him a present of a hunting cap and frock, a horn and a greyhound. Her invitation to Calais he pressed with great earnestness, and suggested that Marguerite de Valois, the Queen of Navarre, should be brought down to enter-