wife, and to him lawfully married; and in that point I will abide till the court of Rome, which was privy to the beginning, hath made thereof a determination and a final ending."[334] The learned councillors retired with their answer.  A more passive resistance would have been more dignified; but Catherine was a queen, and a queen she chose to be; and in defence of her own high honour, and of her daughter’s, by no act of hers would she abate one tittle of her dignity, or cease to assert her claim to it.  Her reply, however, appears to have been anticipated, and the request was only preparatory to ulterior measures.  For the sake of public decency, and certainly in no unkind spirit towards herself, a retirement from the court was now to be forced upon her.  At Midsummer she accompanied the king to Windsor; in the middle of July he left her there, and never saw her again.  She was removed to the More, a house in Hertfordshire, which had been originally built by George Neville, Archbishop of York, and had belonged to Wolsey, who had maintained it with his usual splendour.[335] Once more an attempt was made to persuade her to submit; but with no better result, and a formal establishment was then provided for her at Ampthill, a large place belonging to Henry not far from Dunstable.  There at least she was her own mistress, surrounded by her own friends, who were true to her as queen, and she attracted to her side from all parts of England those whom sympathy or policy attached to her cause.  The court, though keeping a partial surveillance over her, did not dare to restrict her liberty; and as the measures against the church became more stringent, and a separation from the papacy more nearly imminent, she became the nucleus of a powerful political party.  Her injuries had deprived the king and the nation of a right to complain of her conduct.  She owed nothing to England.  Her allegiance, politically, was to Spain; spiritually she was the subject of the pope; and this dubious position gave her an advantage which she was not slow to perceive.  Rapidly every one rallied to her who adhered to the old faith, and to whom the measures of the government appeared a sacrilege.  Through herself, or through her secretaries and confessors, a correspondence was conducted which brought the courts of the continent into connection with the various disaffected parties in England, with the Nun of Kent and her friars, with the Poles, the Nevilles, the Courtenays, and all the remaining faction of the White Rose.  And so first the great party of sedition began to shape itself, which for sixty years, except in the shortlived interlude of its triumph under Catherine’s daughter, held the nation on the edge of civil war.  We shall see this faction slowly and steadily organising itself, starting from scattered and small beginnings, till at length it overspread all England and Ireland and Scotland, exploding from time to time in abortive insurrections, yet ever held in check by the tact