Garcilasso de la Vega, to whom Mr. Rogers refers, says nothing about Primero or the followers of Columbus playing at the game; he only mentions, in his 'History of the Conquest of Florida,' that the soldiers who were engaged in that expedition, having burnt all their cards after the battle of Mauvila, [about 1542], made themselves new ones of parchment, which they painted admirably, as if they had followed the business all their lives; but as they either could not, or would not, make so many as were wanted, players had the cards in their turn for a limited time.[123] Although we have no positive evidence of the fact, it is yet not unlikely that there were cards in the ships of Columbus; unless indeed they had been especially prohibited to the crews on this occasion, as they were to the soldiers and sailors of the Spanish Armada in 1588.[124] Herrera has recorded in his 'History of the Spanish Discoveries in America,' that Montezuma, emperor of Mexico, who was made prisoner by Cortes in 1519, took great pleasure in seeing the Spanish soldiers play at cards. Barrington, in his 'Observations on the Antiquity of Card-playing in England,' says, "During the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, this amusement seems not to have been common in England, as scarcely any mention of it occurs either in Rymer's Fœdera, or the statute book." Had Mr. Barrington been as well read in old poems and plays as he was in the more ancient statutes, it is likely that he would have been of a different opinion. He says, "It is not improbable, however, that Philip the Second, with his suite, coming from the court of Charles V, made the use of cards much more general than it had been, of which some presumptive proofs are not wanting." The supposition is plausible; but as the presumptive proofs which he alleges, were as likely to be found in the reign of Edward IV, as in the reign of Mary, they are of no weight in the determination of the question. As Catherine, the wife of Henry VIII, was a Spanish princess, and as it is recorded that, amongst her other accomplishments, she could "play at tables, tick-tack, or gleek, with cardes or dyce,"[125] the persons forming her suite were just as likely as those of the suite of Philip II, to have brought into England Spanish cards with the marks of swords and clubs proper--_Espadas_ and _Bastos_: but there can scarcely be a doubt that such cards were known in England long before. Mr. Barrington's partiality to his theory about Spanish cards, and of the game becoming much more general in England after the marriage of Philip and Mary, has probably caused him either to entirely overlook, or attach too little importance to a presumptive proof, to be found in the statute-book, of cards being a common amusement in England in the reign of Henry VIII. In a statute relating to plays and games, passed in the thirty-third year of that king's reign, 1541, we find the following restrictions.