the battle of Flodden field; and King James himself was not taken, but left dead upon the field, while his kingdom went to his poor little baby son.  Though there had been a battle in France it was not another Crecy, for the French ran away so fast that it was called the battle of the Spurs.  However, Henry’s expedition did not come to much, for he did not get all the help he was promised; and he made peace with the French king, giving him in marriage his beautiful young sister Mary—­ though King Louis was an old, helpless, sickly man.  Indeed, he only lived six weeks after the wedding, and before there was time to fetch Queen Mary home again, she had married a gentleman named Charles Brandon.  She told he brother that she had married once to please him, and now she had married to please herself.  But he forgave her, and made her husband Duke of Suffolk.

Henry’s chief adviser, at this time, was Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York; a very able man, and of most splendid tastes and habits—­ outdoing even the Tudors in love of show.  The pope had made him a cardinal—­that is, one of the clergy, who are counted as parish priests in the diocese of Rome, and therefore have a right to choose the pope.  They wear scarlet hats, capes, and shoes, and are the highest rank of all the clergy except the pope.  Indeed, Cardinal Wolsey was in hopes of being chosen pope himself, and setting the whole Church to rights—­for there had been several very wicked men reigning at Rome, one after the other, and they had brought things to such a pass that everyone felt there would be some great judgment from God if some improvement were not made.  Most of Wolsey’s arrangements with foreign princes had this end in view.  The new king of France, Francis I., was young, brilliant and splendid, like Henry, and the two had a conference near Calais, when they brought their queens and their whole Court, and put up tents of velvet, silk, and gold—­while everything was so extraordinarily magnificent, that the meeting has ever since been called the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

However, nothing came of it all.  Cardinal Wolsey thought Francis’s enemy—­the Emperor Charles V.—­more likely to help him to be pope, and make his master go over to that side; but after all an Italian was chosen in his stead.  And there came a new trouble in his way.  The king and queen had been married a good many years, and they had only one child alive, and that was a girl, the Lady Mary—­all the others had died as soon as they were born—­and statesmen began to think that if there never was a son at all, there might be fresh wars when Henry died; while others said that the loss of the children was to punish them for marrying unlawfully.  Wolsey himself began to wish that the pope would say that it had never been a real marriage, and so to set the king free to put Katharine away and take another wife—­ some grand princess abroad.  This was thinking more of what seemed prudent than of the right; and