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ANNE BOLEYN'S AMUSEMENTS.

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CHAPTER V.

ANNE BOLEYN AND JANE SEYMOUR.

WHILE the King's new Hall was building, Anne Boleyn, though as yet unmarried to Henry VIII., was ever advancing in greater favour with him, and frequently came with him to reside at Hampton Court. And here, in 1533, after attaining the summit of her ambition by being crowned in Westminster Abbey on June 1st, she came in July to spend her honeymoon, and presided as Queen at superb banquetings, masques, interludes, and sports. Sir Thomas More, who soon after heard, when a prisoner in the Tower, of her "dancing and sporting," prophetically exclaimed, "Alas! it pitieth me to think into what misery, poor soul! she will shortly come. These dances of hers will prove such dances, that she will spurn our heads off like footballs, but it will not be long ere her head will dance the like dance."

For the present, however, Anne felt secure and happy enough, and had little to cause her any forebodings, except the awkward habit Henry was acquiring of flirting with the ladies of her Court. While here, she divided her time between hunting, playing bowls with Henry, gambling at cards, shovel-board and other games, and her needlework and music. Of her needlework there were specimens to be seen at Hampton Court for many years after her death.

In music she shared the taste of Henry, and we may suppose that she often accompanied his songs on the virginals, as among the Hampton Court accounts there is reference to this instrument, the prototype of the piano.

It must have been about the period of this visit of Anne Boleyn to the palace, that the beautiful groined ceiling of the gateway between the Base and the Clock Courts was erected. It is of the graceful fan-groin design; and in the quatrefoils of the central circular panel are found, besides the badges of Henry VIII., Anne Boleyn's own badge-the falcon-and her initial, A, entwined with an H in a true-lover's knot.

The King and Queen were again at Hampton Court in

the summer of 1534, when ambassadors from the free city of Lubeck, one of the Hanseatic towns, came over to England to court the alliance of Henry VIII. in a grand northern Protestant confederacy. They came up the river in rich barges, accompanied by their attendants gorgeously clad in scarlet, embroidered with the motto, "Si Deus pro nobis, quis contra nos?" and were received in great state by Henry. A few days after, they came back on a second visit, when Dr. Otto Adam von Pack, the chief of the

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embassy, a man famous for his intrigues in central Germany, made the King a long laudatory Latin oration, which lasted two hours. "Among other things, he reviled horribly the authority of the Pope, and praised inestimably the King for many things, especially for his great learning and enlightenment from God, by which he had come to a knowledge of the truth, both as to the authority of the Pope and about his marriage."

The King was so pleased with this judicious flattery, that he gave the doctor a handsome present.

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(From the picture attributed to Holbein at Warwick Castle.)

The reception of these ambassadors must have taken place in one of the King's State Rooms on the east side of the Clock Court; for the Great Hall, though by this time nearly completed, was as yet not quite ready for use. Its external appearance, of which a good idea can be formed from the annexed plate, was very little different then from what it is now. Its length, which is 118 feet or so on the outside, occupies the whole breadth, and more, of the Clock Court, otherwise called, in the time of Henry VIII., "The Inner Court where the fountaine standeth"; and in height from the ground to the topmost part of the gable-end it stands

92 feet. The range of small windows in the low storey over

which it is raised, appertain to the old buttery and cellars, now subdivided into some thirty wine and coal cellars, storerooms, and other offices. In the corner, on the right hand, is a beautiful bay window, reaching nearly the whole height of the hall, and abutting, in the inside, on the daïs. In the other angles of the hall are octagonal turrets, which rise about as high as the top of the roof, and of which each was formerly surmounted by a leaden "type,” at the apex of which was a lion, leopard, or dragon, holding a vane gilded and painted with the King's arms, and on the top of the eight crocketed pinnacles, at the angles of the octagon, smaller vanes of a like sort. Similar vanes decorated the pinnacles on the tops of the buttresses.

The outline of the gable is peculiar, the pitch of the roof being cut off obtusely and flattened at the apex in a way which is very uncommon, and which is done so as to conform with the interior. Along the top of the roof there appears to have been a sort of decorated parapet or fret-work; and in the middle rose the "femerell," or louvre, unfortunately destroyed about a century and a half ago—a mass of pierced and fretted tracery, ablaze with gilding and colour, and with numerous vanes fluttering and glittering in every breeze.

As, on the eighty or more old Gothic halls in England, there scarcely survives a single good and genuine example of the medieval louvre-the best known, that on Westminster Hall, being far from a satisfactory imitation of the original -the records on this point are of peculiar value. The louvre was made of wood, and consisted of three storeys or tiers,

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EXTERIOR OF THE GREAT HALL. FROM THE CLOCK COURT.

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