[304] Sir William Fitzwilliam to Cromwell: MS. State Paper Office.
[305] Sir William Godolphin to Cromwell: MS. State Paper Office, second series, Vol. XIII.
[306] MS. State Paper Office, Letters to the King and Council, Vol I.
[307] MS. ibid.
[308] Cromwell’s Memoranda: MS. Cotton. Titus, B 1. Many of the plans are in the Cotton Library, executed, some of them, with great rudeness; some finished with the delicacy of monastic illuminations; some, but very few, are good working drawings. It is a mortifying proof of the backwardness of the English in engineering skill, that the king for his works at Dover sent for engineers to Spain.
[309] 32 Henry VIII. cap. 50.
[310] Details of the equipments of many of these fortresses lie scattered among the State Papers. The expenses were enormous, but were minutely recorded.
[311] On whatever side we turn in this reign, we find the old and the new in collision. While the harbours, piers, and the fortresses were rising at Dover, an ancient hermit tottered night after night from his cell to a chapel on the cliff, and the tapers on the altar, before which he knelt in his lonely orisons, made a familiar beacon far over the rolling waters. The men of the rising world cared little for the sentiment of the past. The anchorite was told sternly by the workmen that his light was a signal to the king’s enemies, and must burn no more; and when it was next seen, three of them waylaid the old man on his road home, threw him down, and beat him cruelly.—MS. State Paper Office, second series, Vol. XXXIII.
[312] Lord Montague, on the 24th of March, 1537, said, “I dreamed that the king was dead. He is not dead, but he will die one day suddenly, his leg will kill him, and then we shall have jolly stirring.”—Trial of Lord Montague: Baga de Secretis. The king himself, in explaining to the Duke of Norfolk his reason for postponing his journey to Yorkshire in the past summer, said: “To be frank with you, which we desire you in any wise to keep to yourself, being an humour fallen into our legs, and our physicians therefore advising us in no wise to take so far a journey in the heat of the year, whereby the same might put us to further trouble and displeasure, it hath been thought more expedient that we should, upon that respect only, though the grounds before specified had not concurred with it, now change our determination.”—State Papers, Vol. I. p. 555.
[313] “I assure your lordship his Grace is very sorry that ye might not be here to make good cheer as we do. He useth himself more like a good fellow among us that be here, than like a king, and, thanked be God, I never saw him merrier in his life than he is now.”—Sir John Russell to Cromwell: MS. State Paper Office, second series, Vol. XXXVI.