ossibly because they
conflicted with the relations developing between Anne and the King
himself. As Wyatt complained in a sonnet,[539]

There is written her fair neck round about
_Noli me tangere_; for Caesar's I am
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

But, for any definite documentary evidence to the contrary, it might
be urged that Henry's passion for Anne was subsequent to the
commencement of his proceedings for a divorce from Catherine. Those
proceedings began at least as early as March, 1527, while the first
allusion to the connection between the King and Anne Boleyn occurs in
the instructions to Dr. William Knight, sent in the following autumn
to procure a dispensation for her marriage with Henry.[540] The King's
famous love-letters, the earliest of which are conjecturally assigned
to July, 1527,[541] are without date and with but slight internal
indications of the time at which they were written; they may be earlier
than 1527, they may be as late as the following winter. It is unlikely
that Henry would have sought for the Pope's dispensation to marry (p. 190)
Anne until he was assured of her consent, of which in some of the
letters he appears to be doubtful; on the other hand, it is difficult
to see how a lady of the Court could refuse an offer of marriage made
by her sovereign. Her reluctance was to fill a less honourable
position, into which Henry was not so wicked as to think of forcing
her. "I trust," he writes in one of his letters, "your absence is not
wilful on your part; for if so, I can but lament my ill-fortune, and
by degrees abate my great folly."[542] His love for Anne Boleyn was
certainly his "great folly," the one overmastering passion of his
life. There is, however, nothing very extraordinary in the letters
themselves; in one he says he has for more than a year been "wounded
with the dart of love," and is uncertain whether Anne returns his
affection. In others he bewails her briefest absence as though it were
an eternity; desires her father to hasten his return to Court; is torn
with anxiety lest Anne should take the plague, comforts her with the
assurance that few women have had it, and sends her a hart killed by
his own hand, making the inevitable play on the word. Later on, he
alludes to the progress of the divorce case; excuses the shortness of
a letter on the ground that he has spent four hours over the book he
was writing in his own defence[543] and has a pain in his head. The