be ready to
contribute to his supply: and they pointed out to him the confiscation
of heretics, as the means of filling his exchequer, and of adding
a hundred thousand pounds a year to the crown revenues.[*] The
insinuations of his new queen, to whom youth, beauty, and address had
given a powerful influence over him, seconded all these reasons; and
James was at last engaged, first to delay his journey, then to send
excuses to the king of England, who had already come to York in order to
be present at the interview.[**]

* Buchanan, lib. xiv. Drummond in Ja. V. Pitscotie, ibid.
Knox.

** Henry had sent some books, richly ornamented, to his
nephew, who, as soon as he saw by the titles, that they had
a tendency to defend the new doctrines, threw them into the
fire, in the presence of the person who brought them;
adding, it was better he should destroy them, than they him.
See Epist. Reginald Pole, part i. p. 172.

Henry, vexed with the disappointment, and enraged at the affront, vowed
vengeance against his nephew; and he began, by permitting piracies at
sea and incursions at land, to put his threats in execution. But he
received soon after, in his own family, an affront to which he was much
more sensible, and which touched him in a point where he always showed
an extreme delicacy. He had thought himself very happy in his new
marriage: the agreeable person and disposition of Catharine had
entirely captivated his affections; and he made no secret of his devoted
attachment to her. He had even publicly, in his chapel, returned solemn
thanks to Heaven for the felicity which the conjugal state afforded him;
and he directed the bishop of Lincoln to compose a form of prayer
for that purpose. But the queen's conduct very little merited this
tenderness: one Lascelles brought intelligence of her dissolute life to
Cranmer; and told him that his sister, formerly a servant in the family
of the old duchess of Norfolk, with whom Catharine was educated, had
given him a particular account of her licentious manners. Derham and
Mannoc, both of them servants to the duchess, had been admitted to her
bed; and she had even taken little care to conceal her shame from
the other servants of the family. The primate, struck with this
intelligence, which it was equally dangerous to conceal or to discover,
communicated the matter to the earl of Hertford and to the chancellor.
They agreed, that the matter shou