erent circumstances, or at different periods of her life. Previous to
her engagement with the king, she was the object of fleeting attentions
from the young noblemen about the court. Lord Percy, eldest son of Lord
Northumberland, as we all know, was said to have been engaged to her. He
was in the household of Cardinal Wolsey; and Cavendish, who was with him
there, tells a long romantic story of the affair, which, if his account be
true, was ultimately interrupted by Lord Northumberland himself. The story
is not without its difficulties, since Lord Percy had been contracted,
several years previously, to a daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury,[181]
whom he afterwards married, and by the law he could not have formed a
second engagement so long as the first was undissolved. And again, he
himself, when subsequently examined before the privy council, denied
solemnly on his oath that any contract of the kind had existed.[182] At the
same time, we cannot suppose Cavendish to have invented so circumstantial a
narrative, and Percy would not have been examined if there had been no
reason for suspicion. Something, therefore, probably had passed between him
and the young maid of honour, though we cannot now conjecture of what
nature; and we can infer only that it was not openly to her discredit, or
she would not have obtained the position which cost her so dear. She
herself confessed subsequently, before Archbishop Cranmer, to a connection
of some kind into which she had entered before her acquaintance with Henry.
No evidence survives which will explain to what she referred, for the act
of parliament which mentions the fact furnishes no details.[183] But it was
of a kind which made her marriage with the king illegal, and
illegitimatised the offspring of it; and it has been supposed, therefore,
that, in spite of Lord Percy's denial, he had really engaged himself to
her, and was afraid to acknowledge it.[184] This supposition, however, is
not easy to reconcile with the language of the act, which speaks of the
circumstance, whatever it was, as only "recently known;" nor could a
contract with Percy have invalidated her marriage with the king, when Percy
having been pre-contracted to another person, it would have been itself
invalid. A light is thrown upon the subject by a letter found among
Cromwell's papers, addressed by some unknown person to a Mr. Melton, also
unknown, but written obviously when "Mistress Anne" was a young lady about
the