With this arrangement Anne was perfectly content. She expressed her willingness to be divorced, and had desired the Duke of Cleves’ messenger “to commend her to her brother and say she was merry and well entreated. This she did with such alacrity and pleasant gesture, that he may well testify that he found her not miscontented. After she had dined, she sent the King the ring delivered unto her at their pretended marriage, desiring that it might be broken in pieces, as a thing which she knew of no force or value.” Henry sent her many gifts and tokens, “as his sister and none otherwise,” in which capacity she was to be the first lady in the realm, next after the Queen and the King’s children. In his letters Henry exhorts her to be “quiet and merry,” which injunction she seems to have obeyed, without any great effort, and he subscribes himself “Your loving brother and friend”. A _douceur_ was administered to the Duke of Cleves, and all parties concerned were as well pleased and friendly as possible. After Henry’s fifth marriage, Anne was spoken of as “the old Queen, the King’s sister”. Whatever others said of these startling events, Mary apparently said nothing. Not a single remark of hers is chronicled that might be an indication of her feelings on the fall of Cromwell. He had been her greatest foe, but had seemed in later years to befriend her, and she believed that she owed her father’s restored favour to his intercession. Whether he really aspired to her hand, and whether she knew of it, must remain one of the mysteries of the reign. That he had worked with Henry on her behalf is certain, and perhaps her fear of him was balanced by gratitude, a sentiment which Mary alone of all the Tudors seems to have cherished. Many of her appeals to Cromwell had been penned in charitable solicitude for servants of her own and her mother’s, for she never forgot a service rendered, and never hesitated to become importunate, where the welfare and comfort of her dependants were concerned. Among a number of such appeals is one of the year 1537, in which she desires him to have in remembrance “mine earnest suit made unto you for mistress Coke, my mother’s old servant, touching the farm of Rysbridge, belonging to the new college in Oxford, the warden whereof hath neither used you nor me, as I think gently therein. And therefore, as my sheet-anchor, next the king’s majesty, I recommend it wholly unto you, and even so beseech our Lord to send you no worse to fare than I would myself.”[246]