“Why,” Lascelles said, “this King is not a very stable man. Still, man he is, a man very jealous and afraid of fleers and flouts. If we can show him—I do accede to it that after what he hath done tonight it shall not be easy, but we may accomplish it—if before this letter is sent we may show him that all his land cries out at him and mocks him with a great laughter because of his wife’s evil ways—why then, though in his heart he may believe her as innocent as you or I do now, it shall not be long before he shall put her away from him. Maybe he shall send her to the block.”
“God help me,” Cranmer said. “What a hellish scheme is this.”
He pondered for a while, standing upright and frailly thrusting his hand into his bosom.
“You shall never get the King so to believe,” he said; “this is an idle invention. I will none of it.”
“Why, it may be done, I do believe,” Lascelles said, “and greatly it shall help us.”
“No, I will none of it,” the Archbishop said. “It is a foul scheme. Besides, you must have many witnesses.”
“I have some already,” Lascelles said, “and when we come to London Town I shall have many more. It was not for nothing that the Great Privy Seal commended me.”
“But to make the King,” Cranmer uttered, as if he were aghast and amazed, “to make the King—this King who knoweth that his wife hath done no wrong—who knoweth it so well as tonight he hath proven—to make him, him, to put her away … why, the tiger is not so fell, nor the Egyptian worm preyeth not on its kind. This is an imagination so horrible—”
“Please it your Grace,” Lascelles said softly, “what beast or brute hath your Grace ever seen to betray its kind as man will betray brother, son, father, or consort?”
The Archbishop raised his hands above his head.
“What lesser bull of the herd, or lesser ram, ever so played traitor to his leader as Brutus played to Caesar Julius? And these be times less noble.”
Part IV
The End of the Song
I
The Queen was at Hampton, and it was the late autumn. She had been sad since they came from Pontefract, for it had seemed more than ever apparent that the King’s letter to Rome must be ever delayed in the sending. Daily, at night, the King swore with great oaths that the letter must be sent and his soul saved. He trembled to think that if then he died in his bed he must be eternally damned, and she added her persuasions, such as that each soul that died in his realms before that letter was sent went before the Throne of Mercy unshriven and unhouselled, so that their burden of souls grew very great. And in the midnights, the King would start up and cry that all was lost and himself accursed.
And it appeared that he and his house were accursed in these days, for when they were come back to Hampton, they found the small Prince Edward was very ill. He was swollen all over his little body, so that the doctors said it was a dropsy. But how, the King cried, could it be a dropsy in so young a child and one so grave and so nurtured and tended? Assuredly it must be some marvel wrought by the saints to punish him, or by the Fiend to tempt him. And so he would rave, and cast tremulous hands above his head. And he would say that God, to punish him, would have of him his dearest and best.
And when the Queen urged him, therefore, to make his peace with God, he would cry out that it was too late. God would make no peace with him. For if God were minded to have him at peace, wherefore would He not smoothe the way to this reconciliation with His vicegerent that sat at Rome in Peter’s chair? There was no smoothing of that way—for every day there arose new difficulties and torments.
The King o’ Scots would come into no alliance with him; the King of France would make no bid for the hand of his daughter Mary; it went ill with the Emperor in his fighting with the Princes of Almain and the Schmalkaldners, so that the Emperor would be of the less use as an ally against France and the Scots.
“Why!” he would cry to the Queen, “if God in His Heaven would have me make a peace with Rome, wherefore will He not give victory over a parcel of Lutheran knaves and swine? Wherefore will He not deliver into my hands these beggarly Scots and these atheists of France?”
At night the Queen would bring him round to vowing that first he would make peace with God and trust in His great mercy for a prosperous issue. But each morning he would be afraid for his sovereignty; a new letter would come from Norfolk, who had gone on an embassy to his French friends, believing fully that the King was minded to marry to one of them his daughter. But the French King was not ready to believe this. And the King’s eyes grew red and enraged; he looked no man in the face, not even the Queen, but glanced aside into corners, uttered blasphemies, and said that he—he!—was the head of the Church and would have no overlord.
The Bishop Gardiner came up from his See in Winchester. But though he was the head of the Papist party in the realm, the Queen had little comfort in him. For he was a dark and masterful prelate, and never ceased to urge her to cast out Cranmer from his archbishopric and to give it to him. And with him
