On a summer evening in August, 1539, five months after Wriothesley left Brussels, a married priest named George Constantyne, of Llan Hawaden in South Wales, rode from Chepstow to Abergavenny with John Barlow, Dean of Westbury. The priest had got into trouble in Wolsey's time, for buying copies of Tyndale's New Testament, and was forced to fly the country and practise as a physician for several years in the Netherlands. Now he had returned to England, and was on his way to his old home in Wales. He walked from Bristol to Westbury, where he supped with Dean Barlow, a brother of his friend the Bishop of St. Davids, who made him heartily welcome, and invited him to be his travelling companion the next day to Pembrokeshire. As the two ecclesiastics rode through the green valleys on the way to Abergavenny, the Dean asked Constantyne if he could tell him why the King's marriage had been so long delayed. The priest replied that he, for his part, was very sorry the King should still be without a wife, when he might by this time have been the father of fair children. As the Dean knew, both the Duchess of Milan and she of Cleves were spoken of, and now the little doctor, Nicholas Wotton, had been sent to Cleves with Mr. Beard, of the Privy Chamber, and the King's painter; so there was good hope of a marriage being concluded with the Duke of Cleves, who favoured God's word, and was a mighty Prince now, holding Guelderland against the Emperor's will. But why, asked the Dean, was the marriage with the Duchess of Milan broken off? Constantyne, who was familiar with all the gossip of the Regent's Court, replied that the Duchess quite refused to marry the King, unless he would accept the Bishop of Rome's dispensation, and give pledges that her life would be safe and her honour respected. "Why pledges?" asked the Dean innocently. "Marry!" returned Constantyne, "she sayeth that, since the King's Majesty was in so little space rid of three Queens, she dare not trust his Council, even if she dare trust His Majesty. For in Flanders the nobles suspect that her great-aunt, Queen Catherine, was poisoned, that Anne Boleyn was innocent of the crimes for which she was put to death, and that the third wife, Queen Jane, was lost for lack of attention in childbed." Such, at least, were the mutterings which he heard at Court before Whitsuntide. The Dean remarked that he was afraid the affair of Milan must be dashed, as Dr. Petre, who was to have gone to fetch the royal bride from Calais, was at the Court of St. James's last Sunday; upon which Constantyne gave it as his opinion that there could be no amity between the King and the Emperor, whose god was the Pope.