allowed himself to be persuaded. Henry sent Butts down to Eltham with his own horses. The Royal physician found his patient better than he expected, and, instead of talking over her disorders, he talked of the condition of the realm with his brother practitioner. "The Doctor is a very clever man," wrote Chapuys, reporting the account of the conversation which he received from the Queen's physician, "and is intimate with the nobles and the Council. He says that there are but two ways of assisting the Queen and Princess and of setting right the affairs of the realm: one would be if it pleased God to visit the King with some little malady."[1] "The second method was force, of which, he said, the King and his Ministers were in marvellous fear. If it came to a war, he thought the King would be specially careful of the Queen and Princess, meaning to use them, should things turn to the worst, as mediators for peace. But if neither of these means were made use of, he really believed they were in danger of their lives. He considered it was lucky for the King that the Emperor did not know how easy the enterprise of England would be; and the present, he said, was the right time for it."
His private physician, it is to be remembered, was necessarily, of all Henry's servants, the most trusted by him; and the doctor was not contented with indirect suggestions, for he himself sent a secret message to Chapuys that twenty great peers and a hundred knights were ready, they and their vassals, to venture
- ↑ "Le premier estoit si Dieu vouloit visiter le Roy de quelque petite maladie." The word petite implied perhaps in Chapuys's mind that Dr. Butts contemplated a disorder of which he could control the dimensions, and the word, if he used it, is at least as suspicious as Cromwell's language about Mary.
