From these sources, from the Walsingham Papers from the French diplomatic correspondence, from the Foreign, Domestic, and Venetian Calendars of State Papers, and from the various contemporary and later chroniclers of the times, it is proposed to construct a consecutive narrative of most of the important attempts made to persuade the “Virgin Queen” to abandon her much-boasted celibacy. In October, 1532, exactly eleven months before the birth of Elizabeth, Henry VIII. paid his pompous visit to the French king, accompanied by his privately married wife, Anne Boleyn, Marchioness of Pembroke. He had deeply offended the Spanish Emperor by his treatment of Queen Catharine, and felt the need of drawing closer the bonds of union with Francis I., which twelve years before had been tied on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and almost as soon as the little Princess Elizabeth was born, negotiations were opened for her marriage with the child-prince, Duke of Angoulême, third son of Francis I. Henry asked for too much, as was his wont. He required the French king and his nobles to make a declaration of approval of the Act of Succession which had been passed in England defying the Pope and settling the crown on the issue of Anne Boleyn. Francis was to press the Pope to revoke the anathemas that the Church had hurled upon the schismatic king, and the little prince was to be brought up in England, holding his dukedom as an independent fief of the French crown. The last two demands might have been complied with, as they could subsequently have been revoked, but the eldest son of the Church could never accept the first article, which would have brought him into definite defiance of the papacy; and the negotiation fell through.