“But that were an ignoble flattery,” Katharine said.
He answered quietly:
“No! no! For indeed his Highness hath given all he could give. It is the hard world that hath pushed him against you and against his good will. Believe me, his Highness loveth good doctrine better than you, I, or the Bishop of Rome. So that. …”
He paused, and concluded:
“This Lord Cromwell moves in the shadow of a little thing that casts hardly any shadow. You have seen it?”
She shook her head negligently, and he laughed:
“Why, you will see it yet. A small, square thing upon a green hill. The noblest of our land kneel before it, by his Highness’ orders. Yet the worship of idols is contemned now.” He let his malicious eyes wander over her relaxed, utterly resting figure.
“I would ye would suffer me to kiss you on the mouth,” he sighed.
“Why, get you gone,” she said, without anger.
“Oh, aye,” he said, with some feeling. “It is pleasant to be desired as I desire you. But it is true that ye be meat for my masters.”
“I will take help from none of your lies.” She returned to her main position.
He removed his bonnet, and bowed so low to her that his great and shining beard hung far away from his chest.
“Madam Howard,” he mocked, “my lies will help you well when the time comes.”
Part III
The King Moves
I
March was a month of great storms of rain in that year, and the river-walls of the Thames were much weakened. April opened fine enough for men to get about the land, so that, on a day towards the middle of the month, there was a meeting of seven Protestant men from Kent and Essex, of two German servants of the Count of Oberstein, and of two other German men in the living-room of Badge, the printer, in Austin Friars. It happened that the tide was high at four in the afternoon, and, after a morning of glints of sun, great rain fell. Thus, when the Lord Oberstein’s men set out into the weather, they must needs turn back, because the water was all out between Austin Friars and the river. They came again into the house, not very unwillingly, to resume their arguments about Justification by Faith, about the estate of the Queen Anne, about the King’s mind towards her, and about the price of wool in Flanders.
The printer himself was gloomy and abstracted; arguments about Justification interested him little, and when the talk fell upon the price of wool, he remained standing, absolutely lost in gloomy dreams. It grew a little dark in the room, the sky being so overcast, and suddenly, all the voices having fallen, there was a gurgle of water by the threshold, and a little flood, coming in between sill and floor, reached as it were, a tiny finger of witness towards his great feet. He looked down at it uninterestedly, and said:
“Talk how you will, I can measure this thing by words and by print. Here hath this Queen been with us a matter of four months. Now in my chronicle the pageants that have been made in her honour fill but five pages.” Whereas the chronicling of the jousts, pageants, merry-nights, masques and hawkings that had been given in the first four months of the Queen Jane had occupied sixteen pages, and for the Queen Anne Boleyn sixty and four. “What sort of honour is it, then, that the King’s Highness showeth the Queen?” He shook his head gloomily.
“Why, goodman,” a woolstapler from the Tower Hamlets cried at him, “when they shot off the great guns against her coming to Westminster in February all my windows were broken by the shrinking of the earth. Such ordnance was never yet shot off in a Queen’s honour.”
The printer remained gloomily silent for a minute; the wind howled in the chimney-place, and the embers of the fire spat and rustled.
“Even as ye are held here by the storm, so is the faith of God in these lands,” he said. “This is the rainy season.” More water came in beneath the door, and he added, “Pray God we be not all drowned in our holes.”
A motionless German, who had no English, shifted his feet from the wet floor to the crossbar of his chair. Gloom, dispiritude, and dampness brooded in the low, dark room. But a young man from Kent, who, being used to ill weather, was not to be cast down by gloomy skies, cried out in his own dialect that they had arms to use and leaders to lead them.
“Aye, and we have racks to be stretched on and hangmen to stretch them,” the printer answered. “Is it with the sound of ordnance that a Queen is best welcomed? When she came to Westminster, what welcome had she? Sirs, I tell you the Mayor of London brought only barges and pennons and targets to her honour. The King’s Highness ordered no better state; therefore the King’s Highness honoureth not this Queen.”
A scrivener who had copied chronicles for another printer answered him:
“Master Printer John Badge, ye are too much in love with velvet; ye are too avid of gold. Earlier records of this realm told of blows struck, of ships setting sail, of godly ways of life and of towns in France taken by storm. But in your books of the new reign we read all day of cloths of estate, of cloth of gold, of blue silk full of eyes of gold, of
