His last letters to Bora attest great mutual confidence, even though he does just hint in his usual joking way at their common faults: “I think, that, had you been here, you would also have advised us to do this, so that then for once we should have followed your advice.” “To my well-beloved housewife Catherine Lutheress, Doctoress, Zulsdorferess, pork-butcheress and whatever else she may be. Grace to you and peace in Christ and my poor old love.... I commend to God’s keeping you and all the household; greet all the guests. [Signed] M. L., your old sweetheart.” Writing to his wife who was so anxious about him, he says: “You want to undertake the care of your God just as though He were not almighty and able to create ten Dr. Martins.... Let Master Philip read this letter, for I have not had time to write to him; console yourself with this, that I would be with you were I able, as you know, and as he perhaps also knows from experience with his own wife, and understands it all perfectly.” “We are very grateful to you for your great anxiety that prevents you from sleeping.... Do you pray and leave the rest to God. It is written: ‘Cast thy care upon the Lord, and He shall sustain thee’ (Psalm lv.).”[933] His humour helped to tide him over any minor annoyances for which Catherine and the inmates of his house were responsible. He preferred to oppose the shield of jest to Catherine’s obstinacy, to her feminine desire to interfere in business that was not hers, as well as to her jealous rule in matters pertaining to the management of the household. When in his letters he addresses her as “Lord Katey,” and so forth, his object was to reprove her gently for that imperiousness under which he himself had sometimes to smart. We learn from outside sources that her interference was particularly troublesome to others at the time of Luther’s conflict with the lawyers on the validity of clandestine marriages, when his wife’s friendly interest in certain couples concerned displayed itself in loud and over-zealous advocacy of Luther’s view of the question. It was then that Cruciger, the Wittenberg theologian, described her as the “firebrand in Luther’s house.”[934] He was not merely unable to accustom himself to the humdrum occupations connected with household management, but the annoyance it entailed was so repugnant to him that in 1538 he dissuaded a preacher who wished to marry a second time, telling him that “the management of a family is in our day the most troublesome thing on earth, so that, knowing the wickedness of the world, were I a young man I would rather die than again become a married man, even though, after my Katey, a queen were offered me in marriage.”[935] Evidently he must have found something to regret.