over to her his important prisoner, the Duke of Longueville, whom he had taken at the battle of Spurs, and wished Catherine to keep in her household, a responsibility which she respectfully declined. After the victory she wrote to Henry, sending him 'a piece of the king of Scots' coat,' and regretting she was unable to send the king of Scots himself alive to him as a prisoner. 'Our Englishmen's hearts,' she said,' would not suffer it.'
When the king returned from France in the end of September, he rode in post to his queen at Richmond, 'where,' says the contemporary chronicler, Hall, 'there was such a loving meeting that every creature rejoiced.' But even in the following year a rumour got abroad that Henry, disappointed at her having no children, had begun to think of a divorce, and there is reason to believe that it arose from some very real evidences of a diminution of Henry's love, even at this early period. The main cause appears to have been his continued experience of her father's treachery. Ferdinand had concluded a separate truce with France to the prejudice of his ally at the very moment when Henry's success seemed most completely assured. Henry vented his anger in reproaches of which his own wife had to bear the full bitterness, and it was owing to this, as Peter Martyr was told, that she had her second premature confinement.
The supposition of the late Mr. Rawdon Brown (Cat. State Papers, Venetian, i. pref. pp. xc, cviii) that a vague expression in Sanuto's diary, 'Fanno nuovi pensieri,' points to whispers of a divorce being circulated even in 1510, before Henry and Catherine had been quite a twelvemonth married, seems altogether unwarrantable. The words clearly have quite a different application. A vivid description is given by Hall of the way in which she and the king went a-maying to Shooter's Hill in 1515, and met in the woods Robin Hood and his merry men dressed in green. These were archers of the king's own guard, and the performance was witnessed by a vast multitude of people. Some additional particulars of it are given in letters from the Venetian embassy. The senior ambassador, Pasqualigo, then about to leave for France, had an audience afterwards with the queen, and to her great delight spoke to her in her native Spanish. The secretary of the embassy describes her as 'rather ugly than otherwise' (Rawdon Brown, Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII, i. 79-81, 90). Two years later occurred the 'Evil May day,' when the Londoners sacked the houses of foreigners. The offenders were tried by summary process, and many of them hanged within three days at their own or their masters' doors. Others remained still in prison, till Catherine threw herself on her knees before the king to intercede for them, and induced his sisters Mary and Margaret, queens dowager of France and Scotland, to do the same.
The visit of her nephew Charles V to England in 1520 gave Catherine the most lively satisfaction. She knew, however, that great preparations were then making for another meeting with which she had no great sympathy—that of Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Henry was playing off the two rivals, Charles and Francis, one against the other, and it was unknown whether a French or an imperial alliance would prove the main feature of his policy. It was, in fact, to interrupt the French interview, or, at least, to prevent an Anglo-French alliance, that Charles had been induced to think seriously of visiting England. The friendship of Henry was to him of the utmost importance, and to secure it he had become a suitor for the hand of the Princess Mary, although she had already been affianced to the Dauphin. There is no doubt that the nobles and the people generally were with the queen in preferring greatly an alliance with him to the friendship of France. One day, in anticipation of the French interview, she called to her some of the lords to discuss matters, and set before them such strong arguments against its being held at all, that those present were struck with amazement. During the conference the king made his appearance and asked what it was all about, on which Catherine frankly told him, and declared the line she had taken in the matter. What answer the king made at the moment we are not informed, but the result was that both he and his council held her in higher esteem than they had ever done before (Cat. State Papers, Henry VIII, iii. 256).
The emperor landed at Dover late in the evening of Saturday, 26 May 1520, and next morning Henry conducted him to Canterbury to the queen's presence. There he remained during the few days he spent in England, and on Thursday the 31st he embarked at Sandwich for Flanders. That same day Henry and Catherine also took ship and crossed from Dover to Calais for the long projected interview with Francis. On Sunday, 10 June, each king went to dine with the other's queen, the one from Guisnes to Ardes, and the other by a different route from Ardes to Guisnes, the departure of each being announced to the other by salvoes of artillery. Three weeks were spent in these splendid courtesies, and shortly after they
