Let us anticipate events a little and narrate the death of Catherine, which took place in 1536, nearly three years after the birth of Elizabeth. The very brief and sketchy accounts which have survived give me the impression that she died of uræmia, but no definite opinion can be given. Henry, of course, lay under the immediate charge of having poisoned her, but I do not know that anybody believed it very seriously. So died this unhappy and well-beloved lady, to whom life meant little but a series of bitter misfortunes. After Elizabeth was born the tragedy began to move with terrible impetus towards its climax. Henry developed an intractable ulcer on his thigh, which persisted till his death, and frequently caused him severe agony whenever the sinus closed. He became corpulent, the result of over-eating and over-drinking. He had been immensely worried for years over the affair of Catherine; as a result his blood-pressure seems to have risen, so that he was affected by frightful headaches, which often incapacitated him from work for days together. He gave up the athleticism which had distinguished his resplendent youth, aged rapidly, and became a harassed, violent, ill-tempered middle-aged man--not at all the sort of man to turn into a cuckold. Yet this is precisely what Anne did. Less than a month after Elizabeth was born--while she was still in the puerperal state--she solicited Sir Henry Norreys, the most intimate friend of the King, to be her lover. A week later, on October 17th, 1533, he yielded. During the next couple of years Anne seems to have gone absolutely out of her senses, if the contemporary stories are true. She seems to have solicited several prominent men of the Court, and even to have stooped to one of the musicians; worst of all, it was said that she had committed incest with her brother, Lord Rocheford. Nor did she behave with the ordinary consideration for the feelings of others that might have brought her hosts of friends--remember, she was a queen!--should the time ever come when she should need them. It does not require any great amount of civility on the part of a queen to win friends. Arrogant and overbearing, she estranged everybody at Court; she acted like a beggar on horseback, and was left without a friend in the place. And she, who owed her husband such a world, behaved towards him with the same arrogance as she showed to others, and in addition jealousy both concerning other women whom she feared and concerning the King’s beloved daughter, Mary. She spoke to the Duke of Norfolk--her uncle on the mother’s side, and one of the greatest peers of the realm--“like a dog”; as he turned away he muttered that she was “une grande putaine.” The most polite interpretation of the French word is “strumpet.” When the Duke used such a word to his own niece, what sort of reputation must have been gathering about her?