As Wyatt complained in a sonnet,[539] There is written her fair neck round about _Noli me tangere_; for Caesar's I am And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
But, for any definite documentary evidence to the contrary, it might be urged that Henry's passion for Anne was subsequent to the commencement of his proceedings for a divorce from Catherine.

Those proceedings began at least as early as March, 1527, while the first allusion to the connection between the King and Anne Boleyn occurs in the instructions to Dr.William Knight, sent in the following autumn to procure a dispensation for her marriage with Henry.[540] The King's famous love-letters, the earliest of which are conjecturally assigned to July, 1527,[541] are without date and with but slight internal indications of the time at which they were written; they may be earlier than 1527, they may be as late as the following winter.

It is unlikely that Henry would have sought for the Pope's dispensation to marry (p.

190) Anne until he was assured of her consent, of which in some of the letters he appears to be doubtful; on the other hand, it is difficult to see how a lady of the Court could refuse an offer of marriage made by her sovereign.

Her reluctance was to fill a less honourable position, into which Henry was not so wicked as to think of forcing her.