“MR. MELTON.—­This shall be to advertise you that Mistress Anne is changed from that she was at when we three were last together.  Wherefore I pray you that ye be no devil’s sakke, but according to the truth ever justify, as ye shall make answer before God; and do not suffer her in my absence to be married to any other man.  I must go to my master, wheresoever he be, for the Lord Privy Seal desireth much to speak with me, whom if I should speak with in my master’s absence, it would cause me to lose my head; and yet I know myself as true a man to my prince as liveth, whom (as my friend informeth me) I have offended grievously in my words.  No more to you, but to have me commended unto Mistress Anne, and bid her remember her promise, which none can loose, but God only, to whom I shall daily during my life commend her."[185]

The letter must furnish its own interpretation; for it receives little from any other quarter.  Being in the possession of Cromwell, however, it had perhaps been forwarded to him at the time of Queen Anne’s trial, and may have thus occasioned the investigation which led to the annulling of her marriage.

From the account which was written of her by the grandson of Sir Thomas Wyatt the poet, we still gather the impression (in spite of the admiring sympathy with which Wyatt writes) of a person with whom young men took liberties,[186] however she might seem to forbid them.  In her diet she was an epicure, fond of dainty and delicate eating, and not always contented if she did not obtain what she desired.  When the king’s attentions towards her became first marked, Thomas Heneage, afterwards lord chamberlain, wrote to Wolsey, that he had one night been “commanded down with a dish for Mistress Anne for supper”; adding that she caused him “to sup with her, and she wished she had some of Wolsey’s good meat, as carps, shrimps, and others."[187] And this was not said in jest, since Heneage related it as a hint to Wolsey, that he might know what to do, if he wished to please her.  In the same letter he suggested to the cardinal that she was a little displeased at not having received a token or present from him; she was afraid she was forgotten, he said, and “the lady, her mother, desired him to send unto his Grace, and desire his Grace to bestow a morsel of tunny upon her.”  Wolsey made her presents also at times of a more valuable character, as we find her acknowledging in language of exaggerated gratitude;[188] and, perhaps the most painful feature in all her earlier history lies in the contrast between the servility with which she addressed the cardinal so long as he was in power, and the bitterness with which the Bishop of Bayonne (and, in fact, all contemporary witnesses) tells us, that she pressed upon his decline.  Wolsey himself spoke of her under the title of “the night-crow,"[189] as the person to whom he owed all which was most cruel in his treatment; as “the enemy that never slept, but studied and continually imagined, both sleeping and waking, his utter destruction."[190]