These gifts were presented to the bride and bridegroom on 10th December, in the thirty-third year of Henry’s reign. The youthful bride could not have been more than fifteen years of age, and Sir Anthony was not much under sixty.
[92] Hentzner also saw the bedchamber in which Henry VIII died, but this was late in Elizabeth’s reign, when it was shown as one of the “lions” of the palace, a fact which tends to prove that the apartment was never again used by any other sovereign, but kept as a sort of show-place.
[93] In his youth Henry’s eyes had been considered fine. In the picture by Paris Bordone, belonging to the Merchant Taylors’ Company, they are a light grey and decidedly good in colour and shape.
[94] Edward VI was never officially proclaimed Prince of Wales—the document doing so was prepared, but was delayed by the death of his father. None the less, he is frequently so styled in the last years of Henry’s reign.
[95] Dr. Wendy became physician to Elizabeth. He died in 1560 at Haslingford Court, a manor given to him by Henry VIII.
[96] Dr. Gale was living as late as 1586. He wrote a curious work entitled The Office of a Chirurgeon, which gives a dreadful picture of warfare in the sixteenth century. See for an account of this rare work, once possessed by the author, The Medical Biography, p. 65.
[97] Father Thiveter, a Franciscan, who obtained some curious facts concerning the death of Henry VIII, presumably from Princess Mary, wrote an account of that event which has been occasionally reprinted.
[98] The Queen had sent him a picture of the King, his father, and of herself, in one frame. Edward was so delighted with the present that he said he preferred it to gold-embroidered robes and other things most priceless: “Quamobrem majores tibi gratias ego ob hanc strenam, quam si misisses ad me preciosas vestes, aut aurum celatum, aut quidvis aliud eximium.”
[99] “Thursday,” writes Aubrey, “was a fatal day to Henry VIII, and so also to his posterity. He died on Thursday, January 28; King Edward VI on Thursday, July 6; Queen Mary on Thursday, November 17; and Queen Elizabeth on Thursday, March 24.”
[100] During the last year of Henry’s reign Edward had resided at Hatfield with his sister Elizabeth. Very early in December it was deemed advisable, owing to the precarious state of the King’s health, to remove the young Prince from Hatfield, first to Tittenhanger House, in Hertfordshire, and then to Hertford itself. His various removals can be traced from the dates of his letters to his father, to the Queen, and to the Princesses his sisters. On 5th December, for instance, he wrote a letter to Elizabeth from Tittenhanger lamenting his enforced absence from her. And later, on the 18th, he wrote another in the same strain; but on 10th January he addressed his sister Mary a Latin letter from Hertford, and on the same day the epistle already mentioned to Queen Katherine. Elizabeth, in the meantime, was relegated to Enfield Chase, where she remained until she joined Queen Katherine at Chelsea, after Henry’s death.