nts,
and whose own breeding and experience had been purely French. Strange
it was that the king's good sense, or even his jealousy, had not
peremptorily enjoined, as a caution of mere decency, the constant
presence of some elderly matrons, uniting rank and station with
experience and good sense. But not the simplest guarantees for
ordinary decorum were apparently established in the royal household.
And the shocking spectacle was daily to be seen, of a young woman,
singularly beautiful, atrociously silly, and without common
self-respect, styling herself Queen of England, yet exacting no more
respect or homage than a housemaid, suffering young men, the most
licentious in all England, openly to speculate on the contingency of
her husband's death, to talk of it in language the coarsest, as
'waiting for dead men's shoes,' and bandying to and fro the chances
that this man or that man, according to the whim of the morning,
should 'have her,' or should _not_ 'have her'--that is, have the
reversion of the queen's person as a derelict of the king. All this,
though most injurious to her prospects, was made known by Anne Boleyn
herself to the female companions who were appointed to watch her
revelations in prison. And certainly no chambermaid ever rehearsed her
own colloquies with these vile profligates in a style of thinking more
abject than did at this period the female majesty of England.
Listening to no accuser, but simply to the unsolicited revelations of
the queen herself, as she lay in bed amongst her female attendants in
the Tower, every man of sense becomes aware, that if these
presumptuous young libertines abstained from daily proposals to the
queen of the most criminal nature, _that_ could arise only from the
reserve and suspicion incident to a state of rivalship, and not from
any deference paid to the queen's personal pretensions, or to her
public character.

Three years, probably one-half of that term, had seen the beginning,
the decay, and the utter extinction of the king's affection for Anne.
It is known now, and at the time it had furnished a theme for
conjecture, that very soon after his marriage the king manifested
uneasiness, and not long after angry suspicions, upon matters
connected with the queen. We have no doubt that she herself, whilst
seeking to amuse the king with fragments of her French experiences,
had, through mere oversight and want of tact, unintentionally betrayed
the risks to which her honour had