“See,” she said, “you are surrounded now by traitors that will bring you down. In foreign lands your cause wavers. I tell you, five minutes agone I wished you swept away.”
Cromwell raised his eyebrows.
“Why, I knew that this was difficult fighting,” he said. “But I know not what giveth me your good wishes.”
“My lord,” she answered, “it came to me in my mind: What man is there in the land save Privy Seal that so loveth his master’s cause?”
Cromwell laughed.
“How well do you love this King,” he said.
“I love this King; I love this land,” she said, “as Cato loved Rome or Leonidas his realm of Sparta.”
Cromwell pondered, looking down at his foot; his lips moved furtively, he folded his hand inside his sleeves; and he shook his head when again she made to speak. He desired another minute for thought.
“This I perceive to be the pact you have it in your mind to make,” he said at last, “that if you come to sway the King towards Rome I shall still stay his man and yours?”
She looked at him, her lips parted with a slight surprise that he should so well have voiced thoughts that she had hardly put into words. Then her faith rose in her again and moved her to pitiful earnestness.
“My lord,” she uttered, and stretched out one hand. “Come over to us. ’Tis such great pity else—’tis such pity else.”
She looked again at Throckmorton, who, in the distance, was surveying the Archbishop’s spy with a sardonic amusement, and a great mournfulness went through her. For there was the traitor and here before her was the betrayed. Throckmorton had told her enough to know that he was conspiring against his master, and Cromwell trusted Throckmorton before any man in the land; and it was as if she saw one man with a dagger hovering behind another. With her woman’s instinct she felt that the man about to die was the better man, though he were her foe. She was minded—she was filled with a great desire to say: “Believe no word that Throckmorton shall tell you. The Duke of Cleves is now abandoning your cause.” That much she had learnt from Udal five minutes before. But she could not bring herself to betray Throckmorton, who was a traitor for the sake of her cause. “ ’Tis such pity,” she repeated again.
“Good wench,” Cromwell said, “you are indifferent honest; but never while I am the King’s man shall the Bishop of Rome take toll again in the King’s land.”
She threw up her hands.
“Alack!” she said, “shall not God and His Son our Saviour have their part of the King’s glory?”
“God is above us all,” he answered. “But there is no room for two heads of a State, and in a State is room but for one army. I will have my King so strong that ne Pope ne priest ne noble ne people shall here have speech or power. So it is now; I have so made it, the King helping me. Before I came this was a distracted State; the King’s writ ran not in the east, not in the west, not in the north, and hardly in the south parts. Now no lord nor no bishop nor no Pope raises head against him here. And, God willing, in all the world no prince shall stand but by grace of this King’s Highness. This land shall have the wealth of all the world; this King shall guide this land. There shall be rich husbandmen paying no toll to priests, but to the King alone; there shall be wealthy merchants paying no tax to any prince nor emperor, but only to this King. The King’s court shall redress all wrongs; the King’s voice shall be omnipotent in the council of the princes.”
“Ye speak no word of God,” she said pitifully.
“God is very far away,” he answered.
“Sir, my lord,” she cried, and brushed again the tress from her forehead. “Ye have made this King rich with gear of the Church: if ye will be friends with me ye shall make this King a pauper to repay; ye have made this King stiffen his neck against God’s Vicegerent: if you and I shall work together ye shall make him re-humble himself. Christ the King of all the world was a pauper; Christ the Saviour of all mankind humbled Himself before God that was His Saviour.”
Cromwell said “Amen.”
“Sir,” she said again; “ye have made this King rich, but I will give to him again his power to sleep at night; ye have made this realm subject to this King, but, by the help of God, I will make it subject again to God. You have set up here a great State, but oh, the children of God do weep since ye came. Where is a town where lamentation is not heard? Where is a town where no orphan or widow bewails the day that saw your birth?” She had sobs in her voice and she wrung her hands. “Sir,” she cried, “I say you are as a dead man already—your day of pride is past, whether ye aid us or no. Set yourself then to redress as heartily as ye have set yourself in the past to make sad. That land is blest whose people are happy; that State is aggrandised whence there arise songs praising God for His blessings. You have built up a great city of groans; set yourself now to build a kingdom where ‘Praise God’ shall be sung. It is a contented people that makes a State great; it is the love of God that maketh a people rich.”
Cromwell laughed mirthlessly:
“There are forty thousand men like Wriothesley in England,” he said. “God help you if you come against them; there are forty times forty thousand and forty times that that pray you not again to set disorder loose in this land.
