And again, Lascelles said, well knew the Archbishop that the Duke of Norfolk and his following were the ancient friends of France. If the Queen should force the King to this Imperial League, it must turn Norfolk and the Bishop of Winchester for ever to her bitter foes in that land. And along with them all the Protestant nobles and all the Papists too that had lands of the Church.
The Archbishop had been marking his words very eagerly. But suddenly he cried out—
‘But the King! The King! What shall it boot if all these be against her so the King be but for her?’
‘Why,’ Lascelles said, ‘this King is not a very stable man. Still, man he is, a man very jealous and afraid of fleers and flouts. If we can show him—I do accede to it that after what he hath done to-night it shall not be easy, but we may accomplish it—if before this letter is sent we may show him that all his land cries out at him and mocks him with a great laughter because of his wife’s evil ways—why then, though in his heart he may believe her as innocent as you or I do now, it shall not be long before he shall put her away from him. Maybe he shall send her to the block.’
‘God help me,’ Cranmer said. ‘What a hellish scheme is this.’
He pondered for a while, standing upright and frailly thrusting his hand into his bosom.
‘You shall never get the King so to believe,’ he said; ‘this is an idle invention. I will none of it.’
‘Why, it may be done, I do believe,’ Lascelles said, ‘and greatly it shall help us.’
‘No, I will none of it,’ the Archbishop said. ‘It is a foul scheme. Besides, you must have many witnesses.’
‘I have some already,’ Lascelles said, ‘and when we come to London Town I shall have many more. It was not for nothing that the Great Privy Seal commended me.’
‘But to make the King,’ Cranmer uttered, as if he were aghast and amazed, ‘to make the King—this King who knoweth that his wife hath done no wrong—who knoweth it so well as to-night he hath proven—to make him, him, to put her away … why, the tiger is not so fell, nor the Egyptian worm preyeth not on its kind. This is an imagination so horrible—’
‘Please it your Grace,’ Lascelles said softly, ‘what beast or brute hath your Grace ever seen to betray its kind as man will betray brother, son, father, or consort?’
The Archbishop raised his hands above his head.
‘What lesser bull of the herd, or lesser ram, ever so played traitor to his leader as Brutus played to Cæsar Julius? And these be times less noble.’
PART FOUR
The End of the Song
I
THE QUEEN WAS AT HAMPTON, and it was the late autumn. She had been sad since they came from Pontefract, for it had seemed more than ever apparent that the King’s letter to Rome must be ever delayed in the sending. Daily, at night, the King swore with great oaths that the letter must be sent and his soul saved. He trembled to think that if then he died in his bed he must be eternally damned, and she added her persuasions, such as that each soul that died in his realms before that letter was sent went before the Throne of Mercy unshriven and un-houselled, so that their burden of souls grew very great. And in the midnights, the King would start up and cry that all was lost and himself accursed.
And it appeared that he and his house were accursed in these days, for when they were come back to Hampton, they found the small Prince Edward was very ill. He was swollen all over his little body, so that the doctors said it was a dropsy. But how, the King cried, could it be a dropsy in so young a child and one so grave and so nurtured and tended? Assuredly it must be some marvel wrought by the saints to punish him, or by the Fiend to tempt him. And so he would rave, and cast tremulous hands above his head. And he would say that God, to punish him, would have of him his dearest and best.
And when the Queen urged him, therefore, to make his peace with God, he would cry out that it was too late. God would make no peace with him. For if God were minded to have him at peace, wherefore would He not smoothe the way to this reconciliation with His vicegerent that sat at Rome in Peter’s chair? There was no smoothing of that way—for every day there arose new difficulties and torments.
The King o’ Scots would come into no alliance with him; the King of France would make no bid for the hand of his daughter Mary; it went ill with the Emperor in his fighting with the Princes of Almain and the Schmalkaldners, so that the Emperor would be of the less use as an ally against France and the Scots.
‘Why!’ he would cry to the Queen, ‘if God in His Heaven would have me make a peace with Rome, wherefore will He not give victory over a parcel of Lutheran knaves and swine? Wherefore will He not deliver into my hands these beggarly Scots and these atheists of France?’
At night the Queen would bring him round to vowing that first he would make peace with God and trust in His great mercy for a prosperous issue. But each morning he would be afraid for his sovereignty; a new letter would come from Norfolk, who had gone on an embassy to his French friends, believing fully that the King was minded to marry to one of them his daughter. But the French King was not ready to believe this. And the King’s eyes grew red and enraged; he looked no man in the face, not even the Queen, but glanced aside into corners, uttered blasphemies, and said that he—he!—was the head of the Church and would have no overlord.
The Bishop Gardiner came up from his See in Winchester. But though he was the head of the Papist party in the realm, the Queen had little comfort in him. For he was a dark and masterful prelate, and never ceased to urge her to cast out Cranmer from his archbishopric and to give it to him. And with him the Lady Mary sided, for she would have Cranmer’s head before all things, since Cranmer it was that most had injured her mother. Moreover, he was so incessant in his urging the King to make an alliance with the Catholic Emperor that at last, about the time that Norfolk came back from France, the King was mightily enraged, so that he struck the Bishop of Winchester in the face, and swore that his friend the Kaiser was a rotten plank, since he could not rid himself of a few small knaves of Lutheran princes.
Thus for long the Queen was sad; the little Prince very sick; and the King ate no food, but sat gazing at the victuals, though the Queen cooked some messes for him with her own hand.
One Sunday after evensong, at which Cranmer himself had read prayers, the King came nearly merrily to his supper.
‘Ho, chuck,’ he said, ‘you have your enemies. Here hath been Cranmer weeping to me with a parcel of tales writ on paper.’
He offered it to her to read, but she would not; for, she said, she knew well that she had many enemies, only, very safely she could trust her fame in her Lord’s hands.
‘Why, you may,’ he said, and sat him down at the table to eat, with the paper stuck in his belt. ‘Body o’ God!’ he said. ‘If it had been any but Cranmer he had eaten bread in Hell this night. ‘A wept and trembled! Body o’ God! Body o’ God!’
And that night he was more merry before the fire than he had been for many weeks. He had in the music to play a song of his own writing, and afterwards he swore that next day he would ride to London, and then at his council send that which she would have sent to Rome.
‘For, for sure,’ he said, ‘there is no peace in this world for me save when I hear you pray. And how shall you pray well for me save in the old form and fashion?’
He lolled back in his chair and gazed at her.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘it is a proof of the great mercy of the Saviour that He sent you on earth in so fair a guise. For if you had not been so fair, assuredly I had not noticed you. Then would my soul have gone straightway to Hell.’
And he called that the letter to Rome might be brought to him, and read it over in the firelight. He set it in his belt alongside the other paper, that next day when he came to London he might lay it in the hands of Sir Thomas Carter, that should carry it to Rome.
The Queen said: ‘Praise God!’
For though she was not set to believe that next day that letter would be sent, or for many da
ys more, yet it seemed to her that by little and little she was winning him to her will.
II
GARDINER, BISHOP OF WINCHESTER, had builded him a new tennis court in where his stables had been before poverty had caused him to sell the major part of his horseflesh. He called to him the Duke of Norfolk, who was of the Papist cause, and Sir Henry Wriothesley who was always betwixt and between, according as the cat jumped, to see this new building of his that was made of a roofed-in quadrangle where the stable doors were bricked up or barred to make the grille.
But though Norfolk and Wriothesley came very early in the afternoon, while it was yet light, to his house, they wasted most of the daylight hours in talking of things indifferent before they went to their inspection of this court. They stood talking in a long gallery beneath very high windows, and there were several chaplains and young priests and young gentlemen with them, and most of the talk was of a bear-baiting that there should be in Smithfield come Saturday. Sir Henry Wriothesley matched seven of his dogs against the seven best of the Duke’s, that they should the longer hold to the bear once they were on him, and most of the young gentlemen wagered for Sir Henry’s dogs that he had bred from a mastiff out of Portugal.
But when this talk had mostly died down, and when already twilight had long fallen, the Bishop said—
‘Come, let us visit this new tennis place of mine. I think I shall show you somewhat that you have not before seen.’
He bade, however, his gentlemen and priests to stay where they were, for they had all many times seen the court or building. When he led the way, prelatical and black, for the Duke and Wriothesley, into the lower corridors of his house, the priests and young gentlemen bowed behind his back, one at the other.
In the courtyard there were four hounds of a heavy and stocky breed that came bounding and baying all round them, so that it was only by vigilance that Gardiner could save Wriothesley’s shins, for he was a man that all dogs and children hated.
‘Sirs,’ the Bishop said, ‘these dogs that ye see and hear will let no man but me—not even my grooms or stablemen—pass this yard. I have bred them to that so I may be secret when I will.’
He set the key in the door that was in the bottom wall of the court.
‘There is no other door here save that which goes into the stable where the grille is. There I have a door to enter and fetch out the balls that pass there.’
In the court itself it was absolute blackness.
‘I trow we may talk very well without lights,’ he said. ‘Come into this far corner.’
Yet, though there was no fear of being overheard, each of these three stole almost on tiptoe and held his breath, and in the dark and shadowy place they made a more dark and more shadowy patch with their heads all close together.
Suddenly it was as if the Bishop dropped the veil that covered his passions.
‘I may well build tennis courts,’ he said, and his voice had a ring of wild and malignant passion. ‘I may well build courts for tennis play. Nothing else is left for me to do.’
In the blackness no word came from his listeners.
‘You too may do the like,’ the Bishop said. ‘But I would you do it quickly, for soon neither the one nor the other of you but will be stripped so bare that you shall not have enough to buy balls with.’
The Duke made an impatient sound like a drawing in of his breath, but still he spoke no word.
‘I tell you, both of you,’ the Bishop’s voice came, ‘that all of us have been fooled. Who was it that helped to set on high this one that now presses us down? I did! I! …
‘It was I that called the masque at my house where first the King did see her. It was I that advised her how to bear herself. And what gratitude has been shown me? I have been sent to sequester myself in my see; I have been set to gnaw my fingers as they had been old bones thrown to a dog. Truly, no juicy meats have been my share. Yet it was I set this woman where she sits.…’
‘I too have my griefs,’ the Duke of Norfolk’s voice came.
‘And I, God wot,’ came Wriothesley’s.
‘Why, you have been fooled,’ Gardiner’s voice; ‘and well you know it. For who was it that sent you both, one after the other, into France thinking that you might make a match between the Lady Royal and the Duke of Orleans?—Who but the Queen?—For well she knew that ye loved the French and their King as they had been your brothers. And well we know now that never in the mind of her, nor in that of the King whom she bewitches and enslaves, was there any thought save that the Lady Royal should be wedded to Spain. So ye are fooled.’
He let his voice sink low; then he raised it again—
‘Fooled! Fooled! Fooled! You two and I. For who of your friends the French shall ever believe again word that you utter. And all your goods and lands this Queen will have for the Church, so that she may have utter power with a parcel of new shavelings, that will not withstand her. So all the land will come in to her leash.… We are fooled and ruined, ye and I alike.’
‘Well, we know this,’ the Duke’s voice said distastefully. ‘You have no need to rehearse griefs that too well we feel. There is no lord, either of our part or of the other, that would not have her down.’
‘But what will ye do?’ Gardiner said.
‘Nothing may we do!’ the voice of Wriothesley with its dismal terror came to their ears. ‘The King is too firmly her Highness’s man.’
‘Her “Highness,” ’ the Bishop mocked him with a bitter scorn. ‘I believe you would yet curry favour with this Queen of straw.’
‘It is a man’s province to be favourable in the eyes of his Prince,’ the buried voice came again. ‘If I could win her favour I would. But well ye know there is no way.’
‘Ye ha’ mingled too much with Lutheran swine,’ the Bishop said. ‘Now it is too late for you.’
‘So it is,’ Wriothesley said. ‘I think you, Bishop, would have done it too had you been able to make your account of it.’
The Bishop snarled invisibly.
But the voice of Norfolk came malignantly upon them.
‘This is all of a piece with your silly schemings. Did I come here to hear ye wrangle? It is peril enow to come here. What will ye do?’
‘I will make a pact with him of the other side?’ the Bishop said.
‘Misery!’ the Duke said; ‘did I come here to hear this madness? You and Cranmer have sought each other’s heads this ten years. Will you seek his aid now? What may he do? He is as rotten a reed as thou or Wriothesley.’
The Bishop cried suddenly with a loud voice—
‘Ho, there! Come you out!’
Norfolk set his hand to his sword and so did Wriothesley. It was in both their minds, as it were one thought, that if this was a treason of the Bishop’s he should there die.
From the blackness of the wall sides where the grille was there came the sound of a terroring lock and a creaking door.
‘God!’ Norfolk said; ‘who is this?’
There came the sound of breathing of one man who walked with noiseless shoes.
‘Have you heard enow to make you believe that these lords’ hearts are true to the endeavour of casting the Queen down?’
‘I have heard enow,’ a smooth voice said. ‘I never thought it had been otherwise.’
‘Who is this?’ Wriothesley said. ‘I will know who this is that has heard us.’
‘You fool,’ Gardiner said; ‘this man is of the other side.’
‘They have come to you!’ Norfolk said.
‘To whom else should we come,’ the voice answered.
A subtler silence of agitation and thought was between these two men. At last Gardiner said—
‘Tell these lords what you would have of us?’
‘We would have these promises,’ the voice said; ‘first, of you, my Lord Duke, that if by our endeavours your brother’s child be brought to a trial for unchastity you will in no wise aid her at that trial with your voice or your encouragement.’
‘A trial!
’ and ‘Unchastity!’ the Duke said. ‘This is a winter madness. Ye know that my niece—St Kevin curse her for it—is as chaste as the snow.’
‘So was your other niece, Anne Boleyn, for all you knew, yet you dogged her to death,’ Gardiner said. ‘Then you plotted with Papists; now it is the turn of the Lutherans. It is all one, so we are rid of this pest.’
‘Well, I will promise it,’ the Duke said. ‘Ye knew I would. It was not worth while to ask me.’
‘Secondly,’ the voice said, ‘of you, my Lord Duke, we would have this service: that you should swear your niece is a much older woman than she looks. Say, for instance, that she was in truth not the eleventh but the second child of your brother Edmund. Say that, out of vanity, to make herself seem more forward with the learned tongues when she was a child, she would call herself her younger sister that died in childbed.’
‘But wherefore?’ the Duke said.
‘Why,’ Gardiner answered, ‘this is a very subtle scheme of this gentleman’s devising. He will prove against her certain lewdnesses when she was a child in your mother’s house. If then she was a child of ten or so, knowing not evil from good, this might not undo her. But if you can make her seem then eighteen or twenty it will be enough to hang her.’
Norfolk reflected.
‘Well, I will say I heard that of her age,’ he said; ‘but ye had best get nurses and women to swear to these things.’
‘We have them now,’ the voice said. ‘And it will suffice if your Grace will say that you heard these things of old of your brother. For your Grace will judge this woman.’
‘Very willingly I will,’ Norfolk said; ‘for if I do not soon, she will utterly undo both me and all my friends.’
He reflected again.
‘Those things will I do and more yet, if you will.’
‘Why, that will suffice,’ the voice said. It took a new tone in the darkness.