The following seventeenth-century allusion to i Henry IV, III. i. 96-115 has not, I believe, hitherto been recorded. In January i627/28 negotiations were in progress for the marriage of the son of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland (then an elderly widower), with the daughter of William Cecil, second Earl of Salisbury. Salisbury put forward certain proposals for settlements to be made by Northumberland, who strongly objected to two of them in a letter dated January 29th, i627/28. He concluded his rejection of the first proposal with these words: therefore my Lo: lett us runne in a straight line, without turnings and windings, as Henry Hotspurre would have it, when Mortimer and he devided England in a mappe. The original is in the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House (vol. I26, ff. x68-x69). I am indebted to the Most Honourable the Marquis of Salisbury, K.G., for permission to quote from the letter, and to Miss Carolyn Merion for providing a transcript.