credulous. The country was impatient to see him provided with a wife who might be the mother of a Duke of York. Day after day the council remonstrated with him on the loss of precious time;[1] and however desirable in itself the Imperial alliance appeared, his subjects were more anxious that he should be rapidly married somewhere, than that even for such an object there should be longer delay.
Charles, meanwhile, on his side continued to give fair words; and the King, although warned, as he avowed, on all sides, to put no faith in them, refused to believe that the Emperor would cloud his reputation with so sustained duplicity; and in August, while still dallying with the French offers, he sent Sir Thomas Wriothesley to Flanders, to obtain, if possible, some concluding answer.
The Regent, in receiving Wriothesley, assured him that his master's confidence was well placed—that 'the Emperor was a prince of honour,' and never meant 'to proceed with any practice of dissimulation.' Whatever
- ↑ 'We be daily instructed by our nobles and council to use short expedition in the determination of our marriage, for to get more increase of issue, to the assurance of our succession; and upon their oft admonition of age coming fast on, and (seeing) that the time flyeth and slippeth marvellously away, we be minded no longer to lose time as we have done, which is of all losses the most irrecuperable.'—Henry VIII. to Sir T. Wriothesley: State Papers, vol. viii. p. 116.'Unless his Highness bore a notable affection to the Emperor, and had a special remembrance of their antient amity, his Majesty could never have endured to have been kept thus long in balance, his years, and the daily suits of his nobles and council well pondered.'—Wriothesley to Cromwell: ibid. p. 160.
