These were the circumstances under which the second great interview was to take place between Francis the First and Henry of England.[385] Twelve years had passed since their last meeting, and the experience which those years had brought to both of them, had probably subdued their inclination for splendid pageantry.  Nevertheless, in honour of the occasion, some faint revival was attempted of the magnificence of the Field of the Cloth of Gold.  Anne Boleyn was invited duly; and the Queen of Navarre, as the Bishop of Paris recommended, came down to Boulogne to receive her.  The French princes came also to thank Henry in person for their deliverance out of their Spanish prison; and he too, on his side, brought with him his young Marcellus, the Duke of Richmond, his only son—­illegitimate unfortunately—­but whose beauty and noble promise were at once his father’s misery and pride; giving point to his bitterness at the loss of his sons by Catherine; quickening his hopes of what might be, and deepening his discontent with that which was.  If this boy had lived, he would have been named to follow Edward the Sixth in the succession, and would have been King of England;[386] but he too passed away in the flower of his loveliness, one more evidence of the blight which rested upon the stem of the Tudors.

The English court was entertained by Francis at Boulogne.  The French court was received in return at Calais by the English.  The outward description of the scene, the magnificent train of the princes, the tournaments, the feasts, the dances, will be found minutely given in the pages of Hall, and need not be repeated here.  To Hall indeed, the outward life of men, their exploits in war, and their pageantries in peace, alone had meaning or interest; and the backstairs secrets of Vatican diplomacy, the questionings of opinion, and all the brood of mental sicknesses then beginning to distract the world, were but impertinent interferences with the true business of existence.  But the healthy objectiveness of an old English chronicler is no longer possible for us; we may envy where we cannot imitate; and our business is with such features of the story as are of moment to ourselves.

The political questions which were to be debated at the conference, were three; the Turkish Invasion, the General Council, and King Henry’s divorce.

On the first, it was decided that there was no immediate occasion for France and England to move.  Solyman’s retreat from Vienna had relieved Europe from present peril; and the enormous losses which he had suffered, might prevent him from repeating the experiment.  If the danger became again imminent, however, the two kings agreed to take the field in person the following year at the head of eighty thousand men.

On the second point they came to no conclusion, but resolved only to act in common.

On the third and most important, they parted with a belief that they understood each other; but their memories, or the memory of one of them, proved subsequently treacherous; and we can only extract what passed between them out of their mutual recriminations.