The Fifth Queen Crowned
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.
'Now for you, Sir Henry Wriothesley,' it said. 'These simple things you
shall promise. Firstly, since you have the ear of the Mayor of London
you shall advise him in no way to hinder certain meetings of Lutherans
that I shall tell you of later. And, though it is your province so to
do, you shall in no wise hinder a certain master printer from printing
what broadsides and libels he will against the Queen. For it is
essential, if this project is to grow and flourish, that it shall be
spread abroad that the Queen did bewitch the King to her will on that
night at Pontefract that you remember, when she had her cousin in her
bedroom. So broadsides shall be made alleging that by sorcery she
induced the King to countenance his own shame. And we have witnesses to
swear that it was by appointment, not by chance, that she met with
Culpepper upon the moorside. But all that we will have of you is that
you will promise these two things--that the Lutherans may hold certain
meetings and the broadsides be printed.'
'Those I will promise,' came in Wriothesley's buried voice.
'Then I will no more of you,' the other's words came. They heard his
hands feeling along the wall till he came to the door by which he had
entered. The Bishop followed him, to let him out by a little door he had
had opened for that one night, into the street.
When he came back to the other two and unfolded to them what was the
scheme of the Archbishop's man, they agreed that it was a very good
plan. Then they fell to considering whether it should not serve their
turn to betray this plan at once to the Queen. But they agreed that, if
they preserved the Queen, they would be utterly ruined, as they were
like to be now, whereas, if it succeeded, they would be much the better
off. And, even if it failed, they lost nothing, for it would not readily
be believed that they had aided Lutherans, and there were no letters or
writings.
So they agreed to abide honourably by their promises--and very certain
they were that if clamour enough could be raised against the Queen, the
King would be bound into putting her away, though it were against his
will.
III
In the Master Printer Badge's house--and he was the uncle of Margot and
of the young Poins--there was a great and solemn dissertation towards.
For word had been brought that certain strangers come on an embassy from
the Duke of Cleves were minded to hear how the citizens of London--or at
any rate those of them that held German doctrines--bore themselves
towards Schmalkaldnerism and the doctrines of Luther.
It was understood that these strangers were of very high degree--of a
degree so high that they might scarce be spoken to by the meaner sort.
And for many days messengers had been going between the house of the
Archbishop at Lambeth and that of the Master Printer, to school him how
this meeting must be conducted.
His old father was by that time dead--having died shortly after his
granddaughter Margot had been put away from the Queen's Court--so that
the house-place was clear. And of all the old furnishings none remained.
There were presses all round the wall, and lockers for men to sit upon.
The table had been cleared away into the printer's chapel; a lectern
stood a-midmost of the room, and before the hearth-place, in the very
ingle, there was set the great chair in which aforetimes the old man had
sat so long.
Early that evening, though already it was dusk, the body of citizens
were assembled. Most of them had haggard faces, for the times were evil
for men of their persuasion, and nearly all of them were draped in black
after the German fashion among Lutherans of that day. They ranged
themselves on the lockers along the wall, and with set faces, in a
funereal row, they awaited the coming of this great stranger. There were
no Germans amongst them, for so, it was given out, he would have
it--either because he would not be known by name or for some other
reason.
The Master Printer, in the pride of his craft, wore his apron. He stood
in the centre of the room facing the hearth-place; his huge arms were
bare--for bare-armed he always worked--his black beard was knotted into
little curls, his face was so broad that you hardly remarked that his
nose was hooked like an owl's beak. And about the man there was an air
of sombreness and mystery. He had certain papers on his lectern, and
several sheets of the great Bible that he was then printing by the
Archbishop's license and command. They sang all together and with loud
voices the canticle called 'A Refuge fast is God the Lord.'
Then, with huge gestures of his hands, he uttered the words--
'This is the very word of God,' and began to read from the pages of his
Bible. He read first the story of David and Saul, his great voice
trembling with ecstasy.
'This David is our King,' he said. 'This Saul that he slew is the Beast
of Rome. The Solomon that cometh after shall be the gracious princeling
that ye wot of, for already he is wise beyond his years and beyond most
grown men.'
The citizens around the walls cried 'Amen.' And because the strangers
tarried to come, he called to his journeymen that stood in the inner
doorway to bring him the sheets of the Bible whereon he had printed the
story of Ehud and Eglon.
'This king that ye shall hear of as being slain,' he cried out, 'is that
foul bird the Kaiser Carl, that harries the faithful in Almain. This