most ungrateful, unnatural and most obstinate person living, both to God and your most dear and benign father. And I advise you to nothing, but I beseech God never to help me, if I know it not so certainly to be your bounden duty, by God’s laws and man’s laws, that I must needs judge that person that shall refuse it, not meet to live in a Christian congregation; to the witness whereof I take Christ, whose mercy I refuse, if I write anything unto you that I have not professed in my heart and know to be true.”[186] We are indebted to Chapuys’ letter to the Emperor, dated 1st July 1536, for a detailed account of the matter that had excited Cromwell’s ire. “When the Princess, having written several good letters to the King her father and to this Queen, expected to be out of her trouble, trusting to the hope held out to her, she found herself in the most extreme perplexity and danger she had ever been in, and not only herself, but all her principal friends. The King, seven or eight days after the departure of the man whom I sent to your Majesty, took a fancy to insist that the Princess should consent to his statutes, or he would proceed by rigour of law against her, and to induce her to yield, sent to her the duke of Norfolk, the earl of Sussex, the bishop of Chester and certain others, whom she confounded by her wise and prudent answers, till they, seeing that they could not conquer her in argument, told her that since she was so unnatural as to oppose the King’s will so obstinately, they could scarcely believe she was his bastard, and if she was their daughter, they would beat her and knock her head so violently against the wall, that they would make it as soft as baked apples, and that she was a traitress and should be punished, and several other words. And her _gouvernante_ was commanded not to allow any one to speak to her, and that she and another should never lose sight of her, day or night. Nevertheless, the said Princess found means to send me immediate information of everything, begging me not to leave her without counsel in her extreme necessity.