this was not said in jest, since Heneage related it as a hint to Wolsey, that he might know what to do, if he wished to please her. In the same letter he suggested to the Cardinal that she was a little displeased at not having received a token or present from him; she was afraid she was forgotten, he said, and 'the lady, her mother, desired him to send unto his Grace, and desire his Grace to bestow a morsel of tunny upon her.' Wolsey made her presents also at times of a more valuable character, as we find her acknowledging in language of exaggerated gratitude;[1] and, perhaps, the most painful feature in all her earlier history lies in the contrast between the servility with which she addressed the Cardinal so long as he was in power, and the bitterness with which the Bishop of Bayonne (and, in fact, all contemporary witnesses) tells us, that she pressed upon his decline. Wolsey himself spoke of her under the title of 'the night-crow,'[2] as the person to whom he owed all which was most cruel in his treatment; as 'the enemy that never slept, but studied and continually imagined, both sleeping and waking, his utter destruction.'[3]
Taking these things together, and there is nothing
- ↑ Ellis, first series, vol. i. p. 135. 'My Lord, in my most humblest wise that my poor heart can think, I do thank your Grace for your kind letter, and for your rich and goodly present; the which I shall never be able to deserve without your great help; of the which I have hitherto had so great plenty, that all the days of my life I am most bound of all creatures, next to the King's Grace, to love and serve your Grace. Of the which I beseech you never to doubt that ever I shall vary from this thought as long as any breath is in my body.'
- ↑ Cavendish: Life of Wolsey, p. 316. Singer's edition.
- ↑ Cavendish, pp. 364,-5.
