"I trust," he writes in one of his letters, "your absence is not wilful on your part; for if so, I can but lament my ill-fortune, and by degrees abate my great folly."[542] His love for Anne Boleyn was certainly his "great folly," the one overmastering passion of his life.

There is, however, nothing very extraordinary in the letters themselves; in one he says he has for more than a year been "wounded with the dart of love," and is uncertain whether Anne returns his affection.

In others he bewails her briefest absence as though it were an eternity; desires her father to hasten his return to Court; is torn with anxiety lest Anne should take the plague, comforts her with the assurance that few women have had it, and sends her a hart killed by his own hand, making the inevitable play on the word.

Later on, he alludes to the progress of the divorce case; excuses the shortness of a letter on the ground that he has spent four hours over the book he was writing in his own defence[543] and has a pain in his head.

The series ends with an announcement that he has been fitting up apartments for her, and with congratulations to himself and to her that the "well-wishing" Legate, Campeggio, who has been sent from Rome to (p.