It was perhaps to this attitude that Mary owed Jane Seymour’s espousal of her cause. The new favourite met Henry’s advances in an exemplary manner. The King sent her a purse full of gold pieces, and with it a letter. After kissing the letter, she returned it to the messenger unopened, and throwing herself on her knees, begged him to represent to the King that she was a gentlewoman of good and honourable parents, without reproach, and that she had no greater riches in the world than her honour. If he wished to make her some present in money, she begged that it might be when God enabled her to make some honourable match. The purse was returned with the letter, and Henry’s admiration for Jane advanced by leaps and bounds. He caused her to be told that he did not intend henceforth to speak with her, except in the presence of some of her kin. He then made Cromwell dislodge from a room to which he himself had private access through certain galleries, and gave it to Jane’s eldest brother and his wife, in order that the young lady might meet him there in all propriety, and yet unknown to the world. “She has been well taught,” said the astute Chapuys, “for the most part by those intimate with the King, who hate the Concubine, that she must by no means comply with the King’s wishes except by way of marriage, in which she is quite firm. She is also advised to tell the King boldly how his marriage is detested by the people, and none consider it lawful; and on the occasion when she shall bring forward the subject, there ought to be present none but titled persons, who will say the same, if the King put them upon their oath of fealty.”[161] Chapuys was greatly in favour of the projected union with Jane Seymour, considering it “a great thing both for the security of the Princess, and to remedy the heresies here, of which the Concubine is the cause and principal nurse, and also to pluck the King from such an abominable and _more than incestuous marriage_.[162] The Princess would be very happy, even if she were excluded from her inheritance by male issue.”