yesterday was not contrary.”[237] The Duke presented his supposed fiancée with a cross of diamonds set with four pearls, and one great pearl pendant,[238] and there the matter ended for the moment. Anne of Cleves had landed at Deal, and Henry was taken up with the subject of his own marriage. A letter in the Record Office from Henry VIII. to some person unnamed, commands him to prepare himself “and all other things meet and convenient, to bring unto us our entirely beloved daughters, the ladies Mary and Elizabeth, in such honourable sort as you can”. They were among the foremost to receive their father’s bride, and took part in the wedding festivities. These were however clouded by the royal bridegroom’s disappointment on seeing the lady. Reports of her beauty, and also of her want of beauty have been greatly exaggerated. Henry remarked to Cromwell that she was “nothing so fair as she had been reported,” that she was “well and seemly, but nothing else”.[239] The wedding took place on the feast of the Epiphany, 1540, with marked reluctance on Henry’s part. He afterwards said that he would never have married her, “but for fear of making a ruffle in the world, and of driving her brother into the hands of the Emperor and the French King”.[240] But his discontent was kept secret for a time, although the day after his marriage he pointedly asked Cromwell, “What remedy?” Cromwell said he knew of none, and hoped for the best. He had been more facile in the case of Queen Katharine and of Anne Boleyn, but his ingenuity seemed to have forsaken him at the moment when it might have saved him from ruin. His fall was as swift and as unforeseen by himself, as that of any of the victims of his policy. On the 11th June, the French ambassador wrote to Francis I.: “I have just been informed that Master Thomas Cramvel Keeper of the Privy Seal of this King, and his Vicar General in things spiritual, who since the death of the Cardinal had the principal management of the affairs of this kingdom and had lately been made Grand Chamberlain, was an hour ago led prisoner to the Tower of London, and all his goods seized and confiscated. Although this might be thought a private matter and of little importance, inasmuch as they have but reduced a personage thus to the condition from which they raised him, treating him only as they all say he deserved, nevertheless, considering the consequence of the matter, ... especially as regards the innovations in religion, of which the said Cramvel had been the principal author, the news seems to me of so much importance, that it ought to be communicated forthwith.” Later on he adds:—