The Fifth Queen Crowned
good man that shall slay him is some German lord. Who he shall be we
know not yet; maybe it shall be this very stranger that to-night shall
sit to hear us.'
His brethren muttered a low, deep, and uniform prayer that soon, soon
the Lord should send them this boon.
But he had not got beyond the eleventh verse of this history before
there came from without a sound of trumpets, and through the windows the
light of torches and the scarlet of the guard that, it was said, the
King had sent to do honour to this stranger.
'Come in, be ye who ye may!' the printer cried to the knockers at his
door.
There entered the hugest masked man that they ever had seen. All in
black he was, and horrifying and portentous he strode in. His sleeves
and shoulders were ballooned after the German fashion, his sword clanked
on the tiles. He was a vision of black, for his mask that appeared as
big as another man's garment covered all his face, though they could see
he had a grey beard when sitting down. He gazed at the fire askance.
He said--his voice was heavy and husky--
'_Gruesset Gott_,' and those of the citizens that had painfully attained
to so much of that tongue answered him with--
'_Lobet den Herr im Himmels Reich!_'
He had with him one older man that wore a half-mask, and was trembling
and clean-shaven, and one younger, that was English, to act as
interpreter when it was needed. He was clean-shaven, too, and in the
English habit he appeared thin and tenuous. They said he was a gentleman
of the Archbishop's, and that his name was Lascelles.
He opened the meeting with saying that these great strangers were come
from beyond the seas, and would hear answers to certain questions. He
took a paper from his pouch and said that, in order that he might stick
to the points that these strangers would know of, he had written down
those questions on that paper.
'How say ye, masters?' he finished. 'Will ye give answers to these
questions truly, and of your knowledge?'
'Aye will we,' the printer said, 'for to that end we are gathered here.
Is it not so, my masters?'
And the assembly answered--
'Aye, so it is.'
Lascelles read from his paper:
'How is it with this realm of England?'
The printer glanced at the paper that was upon his lectern. He made
answer--
'Well! But not over well!'
And at these words Lascelles feigned surprise, lifting his well-shapen
and white hand in the air.
'How is this that ye say?' he uttered. 'Are ye all of this tale?'
A deep 'Aye!' came from all these chests. There was one old man that
could never keep still. He had huge limbs, a great ruffled poll of
grizzling hair, and his legs that were in jerkins of red leather kicked
continuously in little convulsions. He peered every minute at some new
thing, very closely, holding first his tablets so near that he could see
only with one eye, then the whistle that hung round his neck, then a
little piece of paper that he took from his poke. He cried out in a deep
voice--'Aye! aye! Not over well. Witchcraft and foul weather and rocks,
my mates and masters all!' so that he appeared to be a seaman--and
indeed he traded to the port of Antwerp, in the Low Countries, where he
had learned of some of the Faith.
'Why,' Lascelles said, 'be ye not contented with our goodly King?'
'Never was a better since Solomon ruled in Jewry,' the shipman cried
out.
'Is it, then, the Lords of the King's Council that ye are discontented
with?'
'Nay, they are goodly men, for they are of the King's choosing,' one
answered--a little man with a black pill-hat.
'Why, speak through your leader,' the stranger said heavily from the
hearth-place. 'Here is too much skimble-skamble.' The old man beside him
leaned over his chair-back and whispered in his ear. But the stranger
shook his head heavily. He sat and gazed at the brands. His great hands
were upon his knees, pressed down, but now and again they moved as if he
were in some agony.
'It is well that ye do as the Lord commandeth,' Lascelles said; 'for in
Almain, whence he cometh, there is wont to be a great order and
observance.' He held his paper up again to the light. 'Master Printer,
answer now to this question: Find ye aught amiss with the judges and
justices of this realm?'
'Nay; they do judge indifferent well betwixt cause and cause,' the
printer answered from his paper.
'Or with the serjeants, the apparitors, the collectors of taxes, or the
Parliament men?'
'These, too, perform indifferent well their appointed tasks,' the
printer said gloomily.
'Or is it with the Church of this realm that ye find fault?'
'Body of God!' the stranger said heavily.
'Nay!' the printer answered, 'for the supreme head of that Church is the
King, a man learned before all others in the law of God; such a King as
speaketh as though he were that mouthpiece of the Most High that the
Antichrist at Rome claimeth to be.'
'Is it, then, with the worshipful the little Prince of Wales that ye are
discontented?' Lascelles read, and the printer answered that there was
not such another Prince of his years for promise and for performance,
too, in all Christendom.
The stranger said from the hearth-place--
'Well! we are commended,' and his voice was bitter and ironical.
'How is it, then,' Lascelles read on, 'that ye say all is not over well
in the land?'
The printer's gloomy and black features glared with a sudden rage.
'How should all be well with a land,' he cried, 'where in high places
reigns harlotry?' He raised his clenched fist on high and glared round
upon his audience. 'Corruption that reacheth round and about and down
till it hath found a seedbed even in this poor house of my father's? Or
if it is well with this land now, how shall it continue well when
witchcraft rules near the King himself, and the Devil of Rome hath there
his emissaries.'
A chitter of sound came from his audience, so that it appeared that they
were all of a strain. They moved in their seats; the shipman cried out--
'Ay! witchcraft! witchcraft!'
The huge bulk of the stranger, black and like a bull's, half rose from
its chair.
'Body of God!' he cried out. 'This I will not bear.'
Again the older man leaned solicitously above him and whispered,
pleading with his hands, and Lascelles said hastily--
'Speak of your own knowledge. How should you know of what passes in high
places?'
'Why!' the printer cried out, 'is it not the common report? Do not all
men know it? Do not the butchers sing of it in the shambles, and the
bot-flies buzz of it one to the other? I tell you it is spread from here
into Almain, where the very horse-sellers are a-buzz with it.'
In his chair the stranger cried out--
'Ah! ah!' as if he were in great pain. He struggled with his feet and
then sat still.
'I have heard witnesses that will testify to these things,' the printer
said. 'I will bring them here into this room before ye.' He turned upon
the stranger. 'Master,' he said, 'if ye know not of this, you are the
only man in England that is ignorant!'
The stranger said with a bitter despair--
'Well, I am come to hear what ye do say!'
So he heard tales from all the sewers of London, and it was plain to him
that all the commonalty cried shame upon their King. He screamed and
twisted there in his chair at the last, and when he was come out into
the darkness he fell upon his companion, and beat him so that he
screamed out.
He might have died--for, though the King's guard with their torches and
halberds were within a bowshot of them, they stirred no limb. And it was
a party of fellows bat-fowling along the hedges of that field that came
through the dark, attracted by the glare of the torches, the blaze of
the scarlet clothes, and the outcry.
And when they came, asking why that great man belaboured this thin and
fragile one, black shadows both against the light, the big man answered,
howling--
'This man hath made me bounden to slay my wife.'
They said that that was a thing some of them would have been glad of.
But the great figure cast itself on the ground at the foot of a tree
that stretched up like nerves and tentacles into the black sky. He tore
the wet earth with his fingers, and the men stood round him till the
Duke of Norfolk, coming with his sword drawn, hunted them afar off, and
they fell again to beating the hedges to drive small birds into their
nets.
For, they said, these were evidently of the quality whose griefs were
none of theirs.
IV
The Queen was walking in the long gallery of Hampton Court. The
afternoon was still new, but rain was falling very fast, so that through
the windows all trees were blurred with mist, and all alleys ran with
water, and it was very grey in the gallery. The Lady Mary was with her,
and sat in a window-seat reading in a book. The Queen, as she walked,
was netting a silken purse of a purple colour; her gown was very richly
embroidered of gold thread worked into black velvet, and the heavy day
pressed heavily on her senses, so that she sought that silence more
willingly. For three days she had had no news of her lord, but that
morning he was come back to Hampton, though she had not yet seen him,
for it was ever his custom to put off all work of the day before he came
to the Queen. Thus, if she were sad, she was tranquil; and, considering
only that her work of bringing him to God must begin again that night,
she let her thoughts rest upon the netting of her purse. The King, she
had heard, was with his council. Her uncle was come to Court, and
Gardiner of Winchester, and Cranmer of Canterbury, along with Sir A.
Wriothesley, and many other lords, so that she augured it would be a
very full council, and that night there would be a great banquet if she
was not mistaken.
She remembered that it was now many months since she had been shown for
Queen from that very gallery in the window that opened upon the
Cardinal's garden. The King had led her by the hand. There had been a
great crying out of many people of the lower sort that crowded the
terrace before the garden. Now the rain fell, and all was desolation. A
yeoman in brown fustian ran bending his head before the tempestuous
rain. A rook, blown impotently backwards, essayed slowly to cross
towards the western trees. Her eyes followed him until a great gust blew
him in a wider curve, backwards and up, and when again he steadied
himself he was no more than a blot on the wet greyness of the heavens.
There was an outcry at the door, and a woman ran in. She was crying out
still: she was all in grey, with the white coif of the Queen's service.
She fell down upon her knees, her hands held out.
'Pardon!' she cried. 'Pardon! Let not my brother come in. He prowls at
the door.'
It was Mary Hall, she that had been Mary Lascelles. The Queen came over
to raise her up, and to ask what it was she sought. But the woman wept
so loud, and so continually cried out that her brother was the fiend
incarnate, that the Queen could ask no questions. The Lady Mary looked
up over her book without stirring her body. Her eyes were awakened and
sardonic.
The waiting-maid looked affrightedly over her shoulders at the door.
'Well, your brother shall not come in here,' the Queen said. 'What would
he have done to you?'
'Pardon!' the woman cried out. 'Pardon!'
'Why, tell me of your fault,' the Queen said.
'I have given false witness!' Mary Hall blubbered out. 'I would not do
it. But you do not know how they confuse a body. And they threaten with
cords and thumbscrews.' She shuddered with her whole body. 'Pardon!' she
cried out. 'Pardon!'
And then suddenly she poured forth a babble of lamentations, wringing
her hands, and rubbing her lips together. She was a woman passed of
thirty, but thin still and fair like her brother in the face, for she