In 1517 no less than three queens--Katharine of Aragon, Margaret of Scotland, and Mary, Queen-Dowager of the same country--were together at Greenwich, and in 1527 a grand entertainment was given there to the French ambassadors, who had come to ask the hand of the Princess Mary, then eleven years old, for the Duke of Orleans, the second son of the King of France, although she was already affianced to the Emperor Charles V. It was at Placentia, too, that the fickle Henry VIII. spent part of his honeymoon with Anne Boleyn, and thence that the newly wedded pair made their triumphal progress up the river for the coronation of the bride at Westminster on May 15, 1533, escorted by a long procession of gaily decked barges, bearing the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, the officers of the royal household, the bishops, and great nobles with their retinues, making up such a goodly pageant as had never before been seen on the Thames. In the autumn of the same year the Princess Elizabeth was born at Greenwich, and baptized in the chapel of the Grey Friars convent. For the next two years the happiness of her father and mother in each other seemed to be complete; they were often together at Placentia, dividing most of their time between it and Hampton Court Palace, but after the birth at the latter of Anne Boleyn's still-born son, the clouds that had already begun to {104} gather before that event became more threatening than ever. At a tournament held in the palace park at Greenwich on May Day 1536, Henry found the excuse he had been long looking for for the condemnation of his wife. The unfortunate queen accidentally dropped a handkerchief, and the king chose to assume that it was meant as a signal for one of the competing knights. Without vouchsafing a word of explanation he started from his seat, called to a few attendants to follow him, and hastened off to London, ordering as he went the execution of Anne's brother. The next morning the same measure was meted out to the queen herself; she was hurried off to the Tower, her request that she might be allowed to take leave of her child being refused. On the 19th of the same month she was executed, her husband, to whom she had addressed a most pathetic appeal, having steadily declined to see her again. The death a year later of her successor, soon after the birth of the future King Edward VI., must have appeared a judgment on the double crime of murder and bigamy, for the king was married to Jane Seymour the day before the death of Anne, and it is just possible that even Henry's hardened conscience may have reproached him, for he avoided Greenwich, with its melancholy associations, for some little time after the loss of his third queen. In January 1540, however, it was the scene of the magnificent reception of the hated Anne of Cleves, whose reluctant suitor had decided to divorce her before the ceremony at which he promised to cherish her till death should part him {105} from her. On