By your assured friend, Anne Boleyn. [To Master Stephyns this be delivered.] Burnet[246] refers to this letter, as follows: ‘When he [Gardiner] went to Rome, in the year 1529, Anne Boleyn writ a very kind letter to him, which I have put in the Collection (Records No. 24). By it, the reader will clearly perceive that he was then in the secret of the King’s designing to marry her as soon as the divorce was obtained. There is another particular in that letter, which corrects a conjecture which I had set down in the beginning of the former book concerning the cramp rings that were blessed by King Henry, which I thought might have been done by him after he was declared head of the Church.[247] That part was printed before I saw this letter: but this letter shows they were used to be blessed before the separation from Rome: for Anne Boleyn sent them as great presents thither. This use of them had been (it seems) discontinued in King Edward’s time: but now, under Queen Mary, it was designed to be revived, and the office for it was written out in a fair MS. yet extant, of which I have put a copy in the Collection (No. 25). But the silence in the writers of that time makes me think it was seldom if ever practised.’ Queen Mary’s Manual, of which we shall have more to say later, seems to have been the source from which Burnet transcribed the Office. In his time it was in the library of R. Smith, titular Bishop of Chalcedon. Numerous allusions in the records of the De Lisle family bear testimony to the popularity of cramp-rings in the reign of Henry VIII.[248] Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and afterwards Duke of Somerset, writes to Lady Lisle, in 1537: ‘Hussey told me you were very desirous to have some cramp-rings against the time that you should be brought a bedd.... I send by the present messenger 18 cramp-rings, which you should have had long ago.’[249] John Husee writes from London on April 17, 1535, to his mistress, Lady Lisle: ‘I send you by Mr. Degory Gramefilld 59 cramp rings of silver, that Christofer Morys giveth you, and one of gold’;[250] and again, on May 2, 1538: ‘Cramp-rings I can get none out of the jewel-house. Mr. Wyll^{m}s says the King had the most part of gold, but has promised me twelve silver.’[251] In a letter of May 13, 1536, John Husee combines denunciation of Anne Boleyn with a promise of cramp-rings to Lady Lisle: