s. He speaks of a conspiracy to kill the King which "made them all
quake at the danger he was in."

[169] Chapuys to the Emperor, 19th May. (_Spanish Calendar._)

[170] Chapuys to Granvelle, 20th May. (_Spanish Calendar._)

[171] The local story that the marriage took place at Wolf Hall, the seat
of the Seymours in Wiltshire, and that a barn now standing on the estate
was the scene of the wedding feast, may be dismissed. That festivities
would take place there in celebration of the wedding is certain; and on
more than one occasion Henry was entertained at Wolf Hall, and probably
feasted in the barn itself; but the royal couple were not there on the
occasion of their marriage. The romantic account given by Nott in his
_Life of Surrey_, of Henry's waiting with straining ears, either in Epping
Forest or elsewhere in hunting garb, to hear the signal gun announcing
Anne's death before galloping off to be married at Tottenham Church, near
Wolf Hall, is equally unsupported, and, indeed, impossible. Henry's
private marriage undoubtedly took place, as related in the text, at
Hampton Court, and the public ceremony on the 30th May at Whitehall.

[172] Henry's apologists have found decent explanations for his hurry to
marry Jane. Mr. Froude pointed to the urgent petition of the Privy Council
and the peers that the King would marry at once, and opined that it could
hardly be disregarded; and another writer reminds us that if Henry had not
married Jane privately on the day he did, 20th May, the ceremony would
have had to be postponed--as, in fact, the full ceremony was--until after
the Rogation days preceding Whitsuntide. But nothing but callous
concupiscence can really explain the unwillingness of Henry to wait even a
week before his remarriage.

[173] The Catholics were saying that before Anne's head fell the wax
tapers on Katharine's shrine at Peterborough kindled themselves. (John de
Ponte's letter to Cromwell, Cotton MSS., Titus B 1, printed by Ellis.)

[174] _Spanish Calendar_, 6th June 1536.

[175] The Parliament of 1536 enacted that all Bulls, Briefs, and
Dispensations from Rome should be held void; that every officer, lay or
clerical, should take an oath to renounce and resist all authority of the
Pope on pain of high treason. In Convocation, Cromwell for the King at the
same time introduced a new ecclesiastical constitution, establishing the
Scriptures as the basis of faith, as interpreted by the four first
Councils o