The Fifth Queen (62 page)

‘I,’ the boy had cried out, ‘I that by my carrying of letters set this Howard where she sits! I!—and this is my advancement. My sister cast down, and I cast out, and another maid to take my sister’s place.’

And Lascelles, in the guard-chamber, had shown him sympathy and reminded him that there was gospel for saying that princes had short memories.

‘But I did not calm him!’ Lascelles said.

On the contrary, upon Lascelles’ suggestion that the boy had but to hold his tongue and pocket his wrongs, the young Poins had burst out that he would shout it all abroad at every street corner. And suddenly it had come into his head to write such a letter to his Uncle Badge the printer as, printed in a broadside, would make the Queen’s name to stink, until the last generation was of men, in men’s nostrils.

Lascelles rubbed his hands gently and sinuously together. He cast one sly glance at the Archbishop.

‘Well, the letter was written,’ he said. ‘Be sure the broadside shall be printed.’

Cranmer’s head was sunk over his book.

‘This lad,’ Lascelles said softly, ‘who in seven days’ time again shall keep the Queen’s door (for it is not true that the Queen’s Highness is an ingrate, well sure am I), this lad shall be a very useful confidant; a very serviceable guide to help us to a knowledge of who goes in to the Queen and who cometh out.’

The Archbishop did not appear to be listening to his gentleman’s soft voice and, resuming his pen, Lascelles finished his tale with—

‘For I have made this lad my friend. It shall cost me some money, but I do not doubt that your Grace shall repay.’

The Archbishop raised his head.

‘No, before God in heaven on His throne!’ he said. His voice was shrill and high; he agitated his hands in their fine, tied sleeves. ‘I will have no part in these Cromwell tricks. All is lost; let it be lost. I must say my prayers.’

‘Has it been by saying of your Grace’s prayers that your Grace has lived through these months?’ Lascelles asked softly.

‘Aye,’ the Archbishop wrung his hands; ‘you girded me and moved me when Cromwell lay at death, to write a letter to the King’s Highness. To write such a letter as should appear brave and faithful and true to Privy Seal’s cause.’

‘Such a letter your Grace wrote,’ Lascelles said; ‘and it was the best writing that ever your Grace made.’

The Archbishop gazed at the table.

‘How do I know that?’ he said in a whisper. ‘You say so, who bade me write it.’

‘For that your Grace lives yet,’ Lascelles said softly; ‘though in those days a warrant was written for your capture. For, sure it is, and your Grace has heard it from the King’s lips, that that your letter sounded so faithful and piteous and true to him your late leader, that the King could not but believe that you, so loyal in such a time to a man disgraced and cast down beyond hope, could not but be faithful and loyal in the future to him, the King, with so many bounties to bestow.’

‘Aye,’ the Archbishop said, ‘but how do I know what of a truth was in the King’s mind who casteth down to-day one, to-morrow another, till none are left?’

And again Cranmer dropped his anguished eyes to the table.

In those days still—and he slept still worse since the King had bidden him write this letter to Rome—the Archbishop could not sleep on any night without startings and sweats and cryings out in his sleep. And he gave orders that, when he so cried out, the page at his bedside should wake him.

For then he was seeing the dreadful face of his great master, Privy Seal, when the day of his ruin had come. Cromwell had been standing in a window of the council chamber at Westminster looking out upon a courtyard. In behind him had come the other lords of the council, Norfolk with his yellow face, the High Admiral, and many others; and each, seating himself at the table, had kept his bonnet on his head. So Cromwell, turning, had seen them and had asked with his hard insolence and embittered eyes of hatred, how they dared be covered before he who was their president sat down. Then, up against him in the window-place there had sprung Norfolk at the chain of the George round his neck, and Suffolk at the Garter on his knee; and Norfolk had cried out that Thomas Cromwell was no longer Privy Seal of that kingdom, nor president
of that council, but a traitor that must die. Then such rage and despair had come into Thomas Cromwell’s terrible face that Cranmer’s senses had reeled. He had seen Norfolk and the Admiral fall back before this passion; he had seen Thomas Cromwell tear off his cap and cast it on the floor; he had heard him bark and snarl out certain words into the face of the yellow dog of Norfolk.

‘Upon your life you dare not call me traitor!’
and Norfolk had fallen back abashed.

Then the chamber had seemed to fill with an awful gloom and darkness; men showed only like shadows against the window lights; the constable of the Tower had come in with the warrants, and in that gloom the earth had appeared to tremble and quake beneath the Archbishop’s feet.

He crossed himself at the recollection, and, coming out of his stupor, saw that Lascelles was finishing his writings. And he was glad that he was here now and not there then.

‘Prithee, your Grace,’ the gentleman’s soft voice said, ‘let me bear, myself, this letter to the Queen.’

The Archbishop shivered frostily in his robes.

‘I will have no more Cromwell tricks,’ he said. ‘I have said it’; and he affected an obdurate tone.

‘Then, indeed, all is lost,’ Lascelles answered; ‘for this Queen is very resolved.’

The Archbishop cast his eyes up to the cold stone ceiling above him. He crossed himself.

‘You are a very devil,’ he said, and panic came into his eyes, so that he turned them all round him as if he sought an issue at which to run out.

‘The Papist lords in this castle met on Saturday night,’ Lascelles said; ‘their meeting was very secret, and Norfolk was their head. But I have heard it said that not one of them was for the Queen.’

The Archbishop shrank within himself.

‘I am not minded to hear this,’ he said.

‘Not one of them was for the Queen altogether; for she will render all lands and goods back to the Church, and there is no one of them but is rich with the lands and goods of the Church. That they that followed Cromwell are not for the Queen well your Grace knoweth,’ his gentleman continued.

‘I will not hear this; this is treason,’ the Archbishop muttered.

‘So that who standeth for the Queen?’ Lascelles whispered. ‘Only a few of the baser sort that have no lands to lose.’

‘The King,’ the Archbishop cried out in a terrible voice; ‘the King standeth for her!’

He sprang up in his chair and then sank down again, covering his mouth with his hands, as if he would have intercepted the uttered words. For who knew who listened at what doors in these days. He whispered horribly—

‘What a folly is this. Who shall move the King? Will reports of his ambassadors that Cleves, or Charles, or Francis miscall the Queen? You know they will not, for the King is aware of how these princes batten on carrion. Will broad sheets of the Lutheran? You know they will not, for the King is aware of how those coggers come by their tales. Will the King go abroad among the people any more to hear what they say? You know he will not. For he is grown too old, and his fireside is made too sweet—’

He wavered, and he could not work himself up with a longer show of anger.

‘Prithee,’ Lascelles said, ‘let me bear this letter myself to the Queen.’ His voice was patient and calm.

The Archbishop lay back, impotent, in his chair. His arms were along the arms of it: he had dropped his book upon the table. His long gown was draped all over him down to his feet; his head remained motionless; his eyes did not wink, and gazed at despair; his hands drooped, open and impotent.

Suddenly he moved one of them a very little.

I
T WAS THE
Q
UEEN’S HABIT
to go every night, when the business of the day was done, to pray, along with the Lady Mary, in the small chapel that was in the roof of the castle. To vespers she went with all the Court to the big chapel in the courtyard that the King had builded especially for her. But to this little chapel, that was of Edward IV’s time, small and round-arched, all stone and dark and bare, she went with the Lady Mary alone. Her ladies and her door-guards they left at the stair foot, on a level with the sleeping rooms of the poorer sort, but up the little stairway they climbed by themselves, in darkness, to pray privately for the conversion of England. For this little place was so small and so forgotten that it had never been desecrated by Privy Seal’s men. It had had no vessels worth the taking, and only very old vestments and a few ill-painted pictures on the stone walls that were half hidden in the dust.

Katharine had found this little place when, on her first day at Pontefract, she had gone a-wandering over the castle with the King. For she was curious to know how men had lived in the old times; to see their rooms and to mark what old things were there still in use. And she had climbed thus high because she was minded to gaze upon the huge expanse of country and of moors that from the upper leads of the castle was to be seen. But this little chapel had seemed to her to be all the more sacred because it had been undesecrated and forgotten. She thought that you could not find such another in the King’s realm at that time; she was very assured that not one was to be found in any house of the King’s and hers.

And, making inquiries, she had found that there was also an old priest there served the chapel, doing it rather secretly for the well-disposed of the castle’s own guards. This old man had fled, at the approach of the King’s many, into the hidden
valleys of that countryside, where still the faith lingered and lingers now. For, so barbarous and remote those north parts were, that a great many people had never heard that the King was married again, and fewer still, or none, knew that he and his wife were well inclined again towards Rome.

This old priest she had had brought to her. And he was so well loved that along with him came a cluster of weather-battered moorsmen, right with him into her presence. They kneeled down, being clothed with skins, and several of them having bows of a great size, to beg her not to harm this old man, for he was reputed a saint. The Queen could not understand their jargon but, when their suit was interpreted to her by the Lord Dacre of the North, and when she had had a little converse with the old priest, she answered that, so touched was her heart by his simplicity and gentleness, that she would pray the good King, her lord and master, to let this priest be made her confessor whilst there they stayed. And afterwards, if it were convenient, in reward for his faithfulness, he should be made a prior or a bishop in those parts. So the moorsmen, blessing her uncouthly for her fairness and kind words, went back with 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.