The Fifth Queen Crowned
shade. God help me; you will recall the decree that said my mother was
not a Queen! God help us! God help us all! You will ennoble my mother's
memory. With a decree! Can all the decrees you can make render my mother
more sacred? When you decreed her not a Queen, did a soul believe it? If
now you decree that a Queen she was, who will believe you? I think I had
rather you left it alone, it is such a foul thing to have been thy
wife!'
The saying of these things had pleased her so much that she gained
control of her tongue.
'You cannot bribe me,' she said calmly. 'You have naught to give that I
have need of.'
But the King was so used to his daughter's speeches that, though he had
seldom seen her so mutinous, he could still ignore them.
'Well,' he said, 'I think you are angered with me for having set the
Magister in gaol----'
'And in addition,' the Lady Mary pursued her own speech, for she deemed
that she had thought of a thing to pain both him and the Queen, 'how
might I with a good conscience tell my cousin that you have a true
inclination to him? I do believe you have; it is this lady that has
given it you. But how much longer will this lady sway you? No doubt the
King o' Scots hath a new lady for you--and she will be on the French
side, for the King o' Scots is the French King's man.'
The King opened his mouth convulsively, but Katharine Howard laid her
hand right across it.
'You must be riding soon,' she said. 'I have had a collation set in my
chamber.' She was so used by now to the violent humours of these
Tudors. 'You have still to direct me,' she added, 'what is to be done
with these rived cattle.'
As they went through the door, the little Prince holding his father's
hand and she moving him gently by the shoulder, the child said--
'I thought ye wad ha' little profit speaking to my sister in her then
mood.'
The King, in the gallery, looked with a gentle apprehension at his wife.
'I trow ye think I ha' done wrong,' he said.
She answered--
'Oh nay; she must come to know one day what your Grace had to tell her.
Now it is over. But I would not have had you heated. For it is ill to
start riding in a sweat. You shall not go for an hour yet.'
That pleased him, for it made him think she was unwilling he should go.
In her own room the Lady Mary sat back in her chair and smiled grimly at
the ceiling.
'Body of God,' she said, 'I wish he had married this wench or ever he
saw my mother.' Nevertheless, upon reflection, she got pleasure from the
thought that her mother, with her Aragonia pride, had given the King
some ill hours before he had put her away to her death. Katharine of
Aragon had been no Katharine Howard to study her lord's ways and twist
him about her finger; and Mary took her rosary from a nail beside her
and told her beads for a quarter hour to calm herself.
V
There fell upon the castle a deep peace when the King and most of the
men were gone. The Queen had the ordering of all things in the castle
and of most in the realm. Beneath her she had the Archbishop and some
few of the lords of the council who met most days round a long table in
the largest hall, and afterwards brought her many papers to sign or to
approve. But they were mostly papers of accounts for the castles that
were then building, and some few letters from the King's envoys in
foreign courts. Upon the whole, there was little stirring, though the
Emperor Charles V was then about harrying the Protestant Princes of
Almain and Germany. That was good enough news, and though the great
castle had well-nigh seven hundred souls, for the most part women, in
it, yet it appeared to be empty. High up upon the upper battlements the
guards kept a lazy watch. Sometimes the Queen rode a-hawking with her
ladies and several lords; when it rained she held readings from the
learned writers amongst her ladies, to teach them Latin better. For she
had set a fashion of good learning among women that did not for many
years die out of the land. In that pursuit she missed the Magister Udal,
for the ladies listened to him more willingly than to another. They were
reading the _True History of Lucian_, which had been translated into
Latin from the Greek about that time.
What occupied her most was the writing of the King's letter to the Pope.
Down in their cellar the Archbishop and Lascelles wrought many days at
this very long piece of writing. But they made it too humble to suit
her, for she would not have her lord to crawl, as if in the dust upon
his belly, so she told the Archbishop. Henry was to show contrition and
repentance, desire for pardon and the promise of amendment. But he was a
very great King and had wrought greatly. And, having got the draft of it
in the vulgar tongue, she set about herself to turn it into Latin, for
she esteemed herself the best Latinist that they had there.
But in that again she missed the Magister at last, and in the end she
sent for him up from his prison to her ante-chamber where it pleased her
to sit. It was a tall, narrow room, with much such a chair and dais as
were in the room of the Lady Mary. It gave on to her bedchamber that was
larger, and it had little, bright, deep windows in the thick walls. From
them there could be seen nothing but the blue sky, it was so high up.
Here she sat, most often with the Lady Rochford, upon a little stool
writing, with the parchments upon her knee or setting a maid to sew. The
King had lately made her a gift of twenty-four satin quilts. Most of her
maids sat in her painted gallery, carding and spinning wool, but usually
she did not sit with them, since she was of opinion that they spoke more
freely and took more pleasure when she was not there. She had brought
many maids with her into Yorkshire for this spinning, for she believed
that this northern wool was the best that could be had. Margot Poins sat
always with these maids to keep them to their tasks, and her brother had
been advanced to keep the Queen's door when she was in her private
rooms, being always without the chamber in which she sat.
When the Magister came to her, she had with her in the little room the
Lady Rochford and the Lady Cicely Rochford that had married the old
knight when she was Cicely Elliott. Udal had light chains on his wrists
and on his ankles, and the Queen sent her guards to await him at her
outer door. The Lady Cicely set back her head and laughed at the
ceiling.
'Why, here are the bonds of holy matrimony!' she said to his chains. 'I
ha' never seen them so plain before.'
The Magister had straws on his cloak, and he limped a little, being
stiff with the damp of his cell.
'_Ave, Regina!_' he said. '_Moriturus te saluto!_' He sought to kneel,
but he could not bend his joints; he smiled with a humorous and rueful
countenance at his own plight.
The Queen said she had brought him there to read the Latin of her
letter. He ducked his brown, lean head.
'_Ha_,' he said, '_sine cane pastor_--without his dog, as Lucretius
hath it, the shepherd watches in vain. Wolves--videlicet, errors--shall
creep into your marshalled words.'
Katharine kept to him a cold face and, a little abashed, he muttered
under his breath--
'I ha' played with many maids, but this is the worst pickle that ever I
was in.'
He took her parchment and read, but, because she was the Queen, he
would not say aloud that he found solecisms in her words.
'Give me,' he said, 'your best pen, and let me sit upon a stool!'
He sat down upon the stool, set the writing on his knee, and groaned
with his stiffness. He took up his task, but when those ladies began to
talk--the Lady Cicely principally about a hawk that her old knight had
training for the Queen, a white sea hawk from Norway--he winced and
hissed a little because they disturbed him.
'Misery!' he said; 'I remember the days when no mouse dared creak if I
sat to my task in the learned tongues.'
The Queen then remembered very well how she had been a little girl with
the Magister for tutor in her father's great and bare house. It was
after Udal had been turned out of his mastership at Eton. He had been in
vile humour in most of those days, and had beaten her very often and
fiercely with his bundle of twigs. It was only afterwards that he had
called her his best pupil.
Remembering these things, she dropped her voice and sat still, thinking.
Cicely Elliott, who could not keep still, blew a feather into the air
and caught it again and again. The old Lady Rochford, her joints swollen
with rheumatism, played with her beads in her lap. From time to time she
sighed heavily and, whilst the Magister wrote, he sighed after her.
Katharine would not send her ladies away, because she would not be alone
with him to have him plague her with entreaties. She would not go
herself, because it would have been to show him too much honour then,
though a few days before she would have gone willingly because his
vocation and his knowledge of the learned tongues made him a man that it
was right to respect.
But when she read what he had written for her, his lean, brown face
turning eagerly and with a ferreting motion from place to place on the
parchment, she was filled with pity and with admiration for the man's
talent. It was as if Seneca were writing to his master, or Pliny to the
Emperor Trajan. And, being a very tender woman at bottom--
'Magister,' she said, 'though you have wrought me the greatest grief I
think ye could, by so injuring one I like well, yet this is to me so
great a service that I will entreat the King to remit some of your
pains.'
He stumbled up from his stool and this time managed to kneel.
'Oh, Queen,' he said, '_Doctissima fuisti_; you were the best pupil that
ever I had----' She tried to silence him with a motion of her hand. But
he twined his lean hands together with the little chains hanging from
them. 'I call this to your pitiful mind,' he brought out, 'not because I
would have you grateful, but to make you mindful of what I suffer--_non
quia grata sed ut clemens sis_. For, for advancement I have no stomach,
since by advancing me you will advance my wife from Paris, and for
liberty I have no use since you may never make me free of her. Leave me
to rot in my cell, but, if it be but the tractate of Diodorus Siculus, a
very dull piece, let me be given some book in a learned tongue. I faint,
I starve, I die for lack of good letters. I that no day in my life have
passed--_nulla die sine_--no day without reading five hours in goodly
books since I was six and breeched. Bethink you, you that love
learning----'
'Now tell me,' Cicely Elliott cried out, 'which would you rather in your
cell--the Letters of Cicero or a kitchen wench?'
The Queen bade her hold her peace, and to the Magister she uttered--
'Books I will have sent you, for I think it well that you should be so
well employed. And, for your future, I will have you set down in a
monastery where there shall be for you much learning and none of my sex.
You have done harm enow! Now, get you gone!'
He sighed that she had grown so stern, and she was glad to be rid of
him. But he had not been gone a minute into the other room when there
arose such a clamour of harsh voices and shrieks and laughter that she
threw her door open, coming to it herself before the other ladies could
close their mouths, which had opened in amazement.
The young Poins was beating the Magister, so that the fur gown made a
greyish whirl about his scarlet suit in the midst of a tangle of spun
wool; spinning wheels were overset, Margot Poins crashed around upon
them, wailing; the girls with their distaffs were crouching against the
window-places and in corners, crying out each one of them.
The Queen had a single little gesture of the hand with which she