singularly sincere for a
court. Sir Henry loyally supported the King's demand for a divorce, but
he was by no means ready to support a second marriage without the papal
preliminary. Hence he was not a persona grata to Anne Boleyn. Nor
would he stoop to curry favour at the expense of an honest conviction.
When Anne warned him that he was likely to lose his office as soon as
she became Queen, he promptly replied that he would spare her all
concern about that, and went straight to the King to resign the office
of Controller. The latter showed the depth of his affection by urging
Sir Henry, twice, to reconsider his determination. But he wisely
preferred to quit his apartments under the King's roof,--without,
however, breaking the bond of mutual attachment. Five years after this
picture was painted he died; in May, 1532. Holbein also painted Lady
Guildford's portrait; an oil painting in Mr. Frewer's collection. And
Sir Henry selected him as one of the chief artists commissioned to
decorate the interior of the Banqueting Hall specially erected for the
celebration of the French Alliance in 1527. By all of which it would
seem that in securing a new patron the painter had once more made a
friend.

Erasmus had asked AEgidius to assist Holbein's success in any way he
could. And it was probably owing to a letter from the Antwerp scholar
that a friendship of many years sprang up between the painter and
Nicholas Kratzer of Munich, then Astronomer-Royal at the Court of Henry
VIII. It began with what was once a fine portrait. But the oil painting,
now in the Louvre (Plate 23), has suffered such severe injuries as to be
but a poor ghost of what it was originally. Only the composition, and
the fidelity with which all his friend's scientific instruments are drawn
attest Holbein. He never adds a detail for merely pictorial purposes;
and never shuffles one that concerns the personality of a sitter. No
biographer with his pen sets every straw to show the winds of character
and circumstance more deliberately than does this historian with his
brush. Something of Kratzer's shrewd wit,--for he was a "character"--can
still be read in his half-destroyed picture. Years later we shall
see the intimate friend of both him and his painter writing of the
astronomer as a man "brim-full" of humour and fancy. And once, we may be
sure, it sparkled in the eyes of Kratzer's portrait as brilliantly as in
his own.

Illustration: PLATE 23
NICHOLAS KRATZE