The note of pride in the last words is as engaging as the impatience of the harassed male faced with the choosing of girdles.  Even more charming is the letter which he wrote the same day to Sir William Stonor.  He is a little incoherent with joy and gratitude, full of regrets that business keeps him from Stonor and good wishes for the health of the family.  ’I fare like a sorry piper,’ he says.  ’When I begin I cannot leave, but yet once again our blessed Lord be your speed and your help,’ Of Katherine he writes thus: 

I understand by the worshipful report of your mastership the [be]haviours of my cousin Katherine unto you, to my lady your wife and to all other, etc.; and truly it is to me right joyful and comfortable gladness to hear of her and I beseech our blessed Lord ever to preserve her in all virtue and good living to his pleasure, and to reward your mastership with heaven at your ending, for your good disposition to herwards in good exhortations giving.  And that I wot well of old, or else truly she could not be of that disposition, virtuous and goodly, her youth remembered and excused....  Sir, remember your mastership well what ye have written of my Cousin Katherine; truly I shall when I speak with her, tell her every word, and if I find the contrary.  Our vicar here, so God help me, shall cry out upon her[M] within this ten weeks and less, and by that time I shall be ready in every point, by God’s grace, and so I would she were, forsooth ye may believe me of it.[26]

[Footnote M:  I.e. call the banns.]

This letter was written on June 24, 1478, and Thomas probably married his little Katherine in August or September, for when Dame Elizabeth writes to her husband on October 5, she says, ’My son Betson and his wife recommend them to you’[27] The poor child was to learn soon enough some of the sorrows of a wife, for a year later Thomas Betson fell dangerously ill, and she was nursing him and looking after his business for all the world as though she were a grave matron and not a bride of sixteen.  Moreover, she must already have been expecting the birth of her eldest son.  William Stonor’s attitude towards his partner’s illness is not without humour.  He was torn between anxiety for the life of a friend and an even greater anxiety that Betson should not die without setting straight the business obligations between them.  We hear of the illness and of Katherine’s labours in a letter from one of Stonor’s agents to his master: 

Sir, according to the commandment of your mastership, we were at Stepney by nine of the clock; at such time as we came thither we saw the gentleman forthwith, and in good faith he made us good cheer as a sick man might by countenance notwithstanding, for in good faith we saw by his demeanour that he might not prosper in this world, for Mistress Bevice and other gentlewomen and his uncle were of the same opinion.  And we desired and prayed him to be of good comfort and so