The Fifth Queen Crowned
James had come into England to the meeting. Well would the King, to
save his soul, placate and cosset his wife. But that he never dare do
whilst James was potent at his back.
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 Caesar 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
unhouselled, 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 days 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