The Fifth Queen Crowned
their furs and bows into their fastnesses. One of them was a great lord
of that countryside, and each day he sent into the castle bucks and moor
fowl, and once or twice a wolf. His name was Sir John Peel, and Sir John
Peel, too, the priest was called.
So the priest served that little altar, and of a night, when the Queen
was minded next day to partake of the host, he heard her confession. On
other nights he left them there alone to say their prayers. It was
always very dark with the little red light burning before the altar and
two tapers that they lit beneath a statue of the Virgin, old and black
and ill-carved by antique hands centuries before. And, in that
blackness, they knelt, invisible almost, and still in the black gowns
that they put on for prayers, beside a low pillar that gloomed out at
their sides and vanished up into the darkness of the roof.
Having done their prayers, sometimes they stayed to converse and to
meditate, for there they could be very private. On the night when the
letter to Rome was redrafted, the Queen prayed much longer than the Lady
Mary, who sat back upon a stool, silently, to await her finishing--for
it seemed that the Queen was more zealous for the converting of those
realms again to the old faith than was ever the Lady Mary. The tapers
burned with a steady, invisible glow in the little side chapel behind
the pillar; the altar gleamed duskily before them, and it was so still
that through the unglassed windows they could hear, from far below in
the black countryside, a tenuous bleating of late-dropped lambs.
Katharine Howard's beads clicked and her dress rustled as she came up
from her knees.
'It rests more with thee than with any other in this land,' her voice
reverberated amongst the distant shadows. A bat that had been drawn in
by the light flittered invisibly near them.
'Even what?' the Lady Mary asked.
'Well you know,' the Queen answered; 'and may the God to whom you have
prayed, that softened the heart of Paul, soften thine in this hour!'
The Lady Mary maintained a long silence. The bat flittered, with a
leathern rustle, invisible, between their very faces. At last Mary
uttered, and her voice was taunting and malicious--
'If you will soften my heart much you must beseech me.'
'Why, I will kneel to you,' the Queen said.
'Aye, you shall,' Mary answered. 'Tell me what you would have of me.'
'Well you know!' Katharine said again.
In the darkness the lady's voice maintained its bitter mirth, as it were
the broken laughter of a soul in anguish.
'I will have you tell me, for it is a shameful tale that will shame you
in the telling.'
The Queen paused to consider of her words.
'First, you shall be reconciled with, and speak pleasantly with, the
King your father and my lord.'
'And is it not a shameful thing you bid me do, to bid me speak pleasant
words to him that slew my mother and called me bastard?'
The Queen answered that she asked it in the name of Christ, His pitiful
sake, and for the good of this suffering land.
'None the less, Queen, thou askest it in the darkness that thy face may
not be seen. And what more askest thou?'
'That when the Duke of Orleans his ambassadors come asking your hand in
marriage, you do show them a pleasant and acquiescent countenance.'
The sacredness of that dark place kept Mary from laughing aloud.
'That, too, you dare not ask in the light of day, Queen,' she said. 'Ask
on!'
'That when the Emperor's ambassadors shall ask for your hand you shall
profess yourself glad indeed.'
'Well, here is more shame, that I should be prayed to feign this
gladness. I think the angels do laugh that hear you. Ask even more.'
Katharine said patiently--
'That, having in reward of these favours, been set again on high, having
honours shown you and a Court appointed round you, you shall gladly play
the part of a princess royal to these realms, never gibing, nor sneering
upon this King your father, nor calling upon the memory of the wronged
Queen your mother.'
'Queen,' the Lady Mary said, 'I had thought that even in the darkness
you had not dared to ask me this.'
'I will ask it you again,' the Queen said, 'in your room where the light
of the candles shines upon my face.'
'Why, you shall,' the Lady Mary said. 'Let us presently go there.'
* * * * *
They went down the dark and winding stair. At the foot the procession of
the _coucher de la royne_ awaited them, first being two trumpeters in
black and gold, then four pikemen with lanthorns, then the marshal of
the Queen's household and five or seven lords, then the Queen's ladies,
the Lady Rochford that slept with her, the Lady Cicely Rochford; the
Queen's tiring-women, leaving a space between them for the Queen and the
Lady Mary to walk in, then four young pages in scarlet and with the
Queen's favours in their caps, and then the guard of the Queen's door,
and four pikemen with torches whose light, falling from behind,
illumined the path for the Queen's steps. The trumpeters blew four
shrill blasts and then four with their fists in the trumpet mouths to
muffle them. The brazen cries wound down the dark corridors, fathoms and
fathoms down, to let men know that the Queen had done her prayers and
was going to her bed. This great state was especially devised by the
King to do honour to the new Queen that he loved better than any he had
had. The purpose of it was to let all men know what she did that she
might be the more imitated.
But the Queen bade them guide her to the Lady Mary's door, and in the
doorway she dismissed them all, save only her women and her door guard
and pikemen who awaited her without, some on stools and some against the
wall, ladies and men alike.
The Lady Mary looked into the Queen's face very close and laughed at her
when they were in the fair room and the light of the candles.
'Now you shall say your litany over again,' she sneered; 'I will sit me
down and listen.' And in her chair at the table, with her face averted,
she dug with little stabs into the covering rug the stiletto with which
she was wont to mend her pens.
Standing by her, her face fully lit by the many candles that were upon
the mantel, the Queen, dressed all in black and with the tail of her
hood falling down behind to her feet, went patiently through the list of
her prayers--that the Lady Mary should be reconciled with her father,
that she should show at first favour to the ambassadors that sued for
her hand for the Duke of Orleans, and afterwards give a glad consent to
her marriage with the Prince Philip, the Emperor's son; and then, having
been reinstated as a princess of the royal house of England, she should
bear herself as such, and no more cry out upon the memory of Katharine
of Aragon that had been put away from the King's side.
The Queen spoke these words with a serious patience and a level voice;
but when she came to the end of them she stretched out her hand and her
voice grew full.
'And oh,' she said, her face being set and earnest in entreaty towards
the girl's back, 'if you have any love for the green and fertile land
that gave birth both to you and to me----'
'But to me a bastard,' the Lady Mary said.
'If you would have the dishoused saints to return home to their loved
pastures; if you would have the Mother of God and of us all to rejoice
again in her dowry; if you would see a great multitude of souls, gentle
and simple reconducted again towards Heaven----'
'Well, well!' the Lady Mary said; 'grovel! grovel! I had thought you
would have been shamed thus to crawl upon your belly before me.'
'I would crawl in the dust,' Katharine said. 'I would kiss the mire from
the shoon of the vilest man there is if in that way I might win for the
Church of God----'
'Well, well!' the Lady Mary said.
'You will not let me finish my speech about our Saviour and His mother,'
the Queen said. 'You are afraid I should move you.'
The Lady Mary turned suddenly round upon her in her chair. Her face was
pallid, the skin upon her hollowed temples trembled--
'Queen,' she called out, 'ye blaspheme when ye say that a few paltry
speeches of yours about God and souls will make me fail my mother's
memory and the remembrances of the shames I have had.'
She closed her eyes; she swallowed in her throat and then, starting up,
she overset her chair.
'To save souls!' she said. 'To save a few craven English souls! What are
they to me? Let them burn in the eternal fires! Who among them raised a
hand or struck a blow for my mother or me? Let them go shivering to
hell.'
'Lady,' the Queen said, 'ye know well how many have gone to the stake
over conspiracies for you in this realm.'
'Then they are dead and wear the martyr's crown,' the Lady Mary said.
'Let the rest that never aided me, nor struck blow for my mother, go rot
in their heresies.'
'But the Church of God!' the Queen said. 'The King's Highness has
promised me that upon the hour when you shall swear to do these things
he will send the letter that ye wot of to our Father in Rome.'
The Lady Mary laughed aloud--
'Here is a fine woman,' she said. 'This is ever the woman's part to
gloss over crimes of their men folk. What say you to the death of Lady
Salisbury that died by the block a little since?'
She bent her body and poked her head forward into the Queen's very face.
Katharine stood still before her.
'God knows,' she said. 'I might not stay it. There was much false
witness--or some of it true--against her. I pray that the King my Lord
may atone for it in the peace that shall come.'
'The peace that shall come!' the Lady Mary laughed. 'Oh, God, what
things we women are when a man rules us. The peace that shall come? By
what means shall it have been brought on?'
'I will tell you,' she pursued after a moment. 'All this is cogging and
lying and feigning and chicaning. And you who are so upright will crawl
before me to bring it about. Listen!'
And she closed her eyes the better to calm herself and to collect her
thoughts, for she hated to appear moved.
'I am to feign a friendship to my father. That is a lie that you ask me
to do, for I hate him as he were the devil. And why must I do this? To
feign a smooth face to the world that his pride may not be humbled. I am
to feign to receive the ambassadors of the Duke of Orleans. That is
cogging that you ask of me. For it is not intended that ever I shall wed
with a prince of the French house. But I must lead them on and on till
the Emperor be affrighted lest your King make alliance with the French.
What a foul tale! And you lend it your countenance!'
'I would well----' Katharine began.
'Oh, I know, I know,' Mary snickered. 'Ye would well be chaste but that
it must needs be other with you. It was the thief's wife said that.
'Listen again,' she pursued, 'anon there shall come the Emperor's men,
and there shall be more cogging and chicaning, and honours shall be
given me that I may be bought dear, and petitioning that I should be set
in the succession to make them eager. And then, perhaps, it shall all be
cried off and a Schmalkaldner prince shall send ambassadors----'
'No, before God,' Katharine said.
'Oh, I know my father,' Mary laughed at her. 'You will keep him tied to
Rome if you can. But you could not save the venerable Lady of Salisbury,
nor you shall not save him from trafficking with Schmalkaldners and
Lutherans if it shall serve his monstrous passions and his vanities. And
if he do not this yet he will do other villainies. And you will cosset
him in them--to save his hoggish dignity and buttress up his heavy
pride. All this you stand there and ask.'
'In the name of God I ask it,' Katharine said. 'There is no other way.'
'Well then,' the Lady Mary said, 'you shall ask it many times. I will