Hilles, an English merchant, who favoured the new doctrines, writing to Henry Bullinger, at Zürich, says distinctly it was the object of the catholic party at first to set up Catherine as a rival to the queen in a less honourable position. The king, however, had views of his own, and a rumour gradually got abroad that the queen was to be divorced and the young lady to take her place. The position certainly took herself as well as the world by surprise. Old associates, beginning to perceive how matters stood, pressed their claims upon her. It was rumoured, indeed, that the king had not only begun to love her, but had actually made her pregnant before Anne of Cleves was divorced (Cal., Venice, v. 87). The report was wrong, certainly, as a matter of fact. Anne of Cleves was divorced by a decree of convocation on 9 July, and parliament besought the king, 'for the good of his people,' to enter the matrimonial state yet a fifth time in the hope of more numerous issue. He accordingly married Catherine, quite privately, at Oatlands, on 28 July (Third Report of Dep.-Keeper of Public Records, App. ii. 264), and on 8 Aug. publicly acknowledged her as his queen at Hampton Court. On the 15th she was prayed for in all the churches by that title.
The couple spent a fortnight at Windsor, and thence made a brief progress by Reading, Ewelme, and other places to Grafton and Ampthill, returning to Windsor on 22 Oct. Just after they had departed on this tour a priest at Windsor was arrested along with another person for speaking unfitting words of the queen, but the matter seems to have been trivial, for the priest was dismissed with a mere admonition, and nothing more appears to have come of it. Some very ill-founded rumours were also set afloat that the king might possibly repudiate Catherine and take back Anne of Cleves as his queen. But those rumours soon died away, as the fact was apparent that the king was, for the time at least, thoroughly enamoured of his new spouse. Opinions, indeed, were divided as to her beauty, which the French ambassador Marillac thought only mediocre, but even he admitted that she had a very winning countenance.
Partly to quiet his northern subjects and partly to meet James V of Scotland at York, the king, in July, set out on a progress along with Catherine. They passed by Dunstable, Ampthill, Grafton and Northampton, through Lincolnshire, into Yorkshire, reaching Pontefract in the latter part of August, where they remained till the beginning of September. During this period took place some of those stolen interviews with former lovers which, even if they were not actually criminal, helped to bring Catherine to confusion. At Lincoln, and again at Pontefract, Lady Rochford procured meetings between her and her cousin Culpepper, one of which lasted from eleven at night till three in the morning. How interviews at such hours were kept from the king's knowledge is not explained to us, but Lady Rochford set a watch on back entrances, and the affair was effectually concealed. At Pontefract, on 27 Aug., Catherine appointed Francis Dereham as her secretary, perhaps as the best way of keeping matters quiet, though it was obviously a dangerous expedient. The royal party went on to York, where they arrived in the middle of September, but James did not make his appearance, and in the end of the month they began to move homewards again. On 1 Oct. they reached Hull, where they stayed five days, and then passed on, by Kettleby, Colly Weston, and Ampthill, to Windsor and Hampton Court, where they arrived on the 30th to keep the feast of All Saints' on 1 Nov.
The solemnities of All Saints' day were duly performed, and the king ordered the Bishop of Lincoln, his confessor, to give thanks to God with him for the good life he led and hoped to lead, 'after sundry troubles of mind which had happened to him by marriages' with her who was now his queen. But next day at mass Archbishop Cranmer put a paper into the king's hand which he requested him to read in the strictest privacy. It contained information given him by John Lassells, the brother of that Mary Lassells who had been a servant of the old Duchess of Norfolk, and who was now married in Sussex. Knowing her old familiarity with Catherine, Lassells had advised his sister to apply for service with the queen. She replied that she would not, but was very sorry for the queen. 'Why so?' asked Lassells, and his sister told him in reply of her former intercourse with Dereham and Mannock, and that a maid in the house had refused to share her bedroom in consequence. Perplexed with this dreadful news, the archbishop at first consulted the lord chancellor and the Earl of Hertford, who agreed that it ought to be communicated to the king, and that no one was so fit to do it as the archbishop himself.
Henry was unable at first to believe the news, and he ordered a strict investigation. The lord privy seal (Fitzwilliam, earl of Southampton) was despatched secretly first to London to examine Lassells, the informant, and then into Sussex to examine his sister, making a pretence of hunting. Sir
