‘See now, Moll!’ he said.
He fingered the medal upon his chest and cast about for words.
‘Let us have peace in this realm,’ he said. ‘We are very near it.’
She raised her eyelids with a tiny contempt.
‘It hangs much around you,’ he went on. ‘Listen! I will tell ye the whole matter.’
Slowly and sagaciously he disentangled all his coil of policies. His letter to the Holy Father was all drafted and ready to be put into fine words. But, before he sent it, he must be sure of peace abroad. It was like this—
‘Ye know,’ he said, ‘though great wrangles have been in the past betwixt him and thee and mine own self, how my heart has ever been well inclined to my nephew, thy cousin the Emperor. There are in Christendom now only he and France that are anyways strong to stand against me or to invade me. But France I ha’ never loved, and him much.’
‘Ye are grown gentle then,’ Mary said, ‘and forgiving in your old age, for ye know I ha’ plotted against you with my cousin and my cousin with me.’
‘It is a very ancient tale,’ the King said. ‘Forget it, as do I and he.’
‘Why, you live in the sun where the dial face moves. I in the shadow where Time stays still. To me it is every day a new tale,’ the Lady Mary answered.
His face took on an expression of patience and resignation that angered her, for she knew that when her father looked so it was always very difficult to move him.
‘Why, all the world forgets,’ he said.
‘Save only I,’ she answered. ‘I had only one parent—a mother. She is dead: she was done to death.’
‘I have pardoned your cousin that he plotted against me,’ he stuck to his tale, ‘and he me what I did against your mother.’
‘Well, he was ever a popinjay,’ the Lady Mary said.
‘Lately,’ Henry continued, ‘as ye wiz he had grown very thick with Francis of France. He went across the French country into the Netherlands, so strict was their alliance. It is more than I would do to trust myself to France’s word. All Holland marvelled.’
‘What is this to me?’ the Lady Mary said. ‘Will you send me across France to the Netherlands?’
He left her gibe alone.
‘But in these latter months,’ he said, ‘Kat and I ha’ weakened with true messages and loyal conceits this unholy alliance.’
‘Why, I ha’ heard,’ Mary said, ‘ye did send the Duke of Norfolk to tell the King o’ France that my cousin had said in private that he was the greater King of the twain. These be princely princes!’
‘An unholy alliance it was,’ Henry went on his way, ‘for the Emperor is a very good Christian and a loyal son of the Church. But Francis worships the devil—I have heard it said and I believe it—or, at least, he believes not in God and our Saviour; and he pays allegiance to the Church only when it serves his turn, now holding on, now letting go. I am glad this alliance is dissolving.’
‘Why, I am glad to hear you speak like this,’ Mary said bitterly. ‘You are a goodly son to Mother Church.’
The King took her scorn with a shrug of the shoulders.
‘I am glad this alliance is dissolved or dissolving,’ he said, ‘for when it is fully dissolved I will make my peace with Rome. And I long for that day, for I am weary of errors.’
‘Well, this is a very goodly tale,’ Mary said. ‘I am glad you are minded to escape hell-flame. What is it all to me?’
‘The burden of it rests with thee,’ he answered, ‘for thou alone canst make thy cousin believe in my true mind.’
‘God help me,’ Mary said.
‘See you, Moll,’ the King broke in on her eagerly, ‘if you will marry the Infant of Spain—’
‘God’s sakes,’ she said lightly, ‘my cousin’s son will wed no bastard as I be.’
He brushed her jest aside with one hand.
‘See you,’ he said, ‘now I ride to the north to meet the King o’ Scots. That nephew of mine has always been too thick with Francis. But I will be so friendly with him. And see you, with the Scots cut away and the Emperor unloyal, the teeth of Francis are drawn. I might not send my letter to the Pope with all Christendom arrayed together against me. But when they are set by the ears I am strong enow.’
‘Oh, good!’ the Lady Mary said. ‘Strong enow to be humble!’
Her eyes sparkled so much and her bosom so heaved, that Katharine moved solicitously and swiftly to come between them.
‘See you, Moll,’ the King said, ‘forgive the ill I wrought thee, and so shall golden days come again. Once more there shall be a deep peace with contented husbandmen and the spreading of the vines abroad upon the stakes. And once more venite creator spiritus shall be sung in this land. And once more you shall be much honoured; nay, you shall be as one that saved this realm—’
She screamed out—
‘Stay your tongue!’ with such a shrill voice that the King’s words were drowned. Katharine Howard ran in between them, but she pushed her aside, speaking over her shoulder.
‘Before God,’ she said, ‘you gar me forget that you are the King that begot me illegally.’
Katharine turned upon the King and sought to move him from the room. But he was still of opinion that he could convince his daughter and stood his ground, looking over her shoulder as Mary had done.
‘Body of God!’ Mary said. ‘Body of God! That a man could deem me so base!’ She looked, convulsed, into Henry’s eyes. ‘Can you bring my mother alive by the truckling and cajoling and setting lying prince against lying prince? You slew my mother by lies, or your man slew her by poison. It is all one. And will you come to me that you have decreed misbegotten, to help you save your soul!’
There was such a violent hatred in her tone that the King could bring no word out, and she swept on—
‘Could even a man be such a dull villain? To creep into heaven by bribing his daughter! To creep into heaven by strengthening himself with lies about one prince to another till he be strong enow to be humble! This is a king! This is even a man! I would be ashamed of such manhood!’
She took a deep breath.
‘What can you bribe me with? a marriage with my cousin’s son? Why, he has deserted my mother’s cause. I had rather wed a falconer than that prince. You will have me no longer called bastard? Why, I had rather be called bastard than the acknowledged child of such a royal King. You will cover me with brocades and set me on high? By God, the sun in the heaven has looked upon such basenesses that I seek only a patch of 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 no
w 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 antechamber 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 pitif
ul 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 dismissed all her waiting-women. She stood alone in the inner doorway with the Lady Cicely and the Lady Rochford behind her. The Lady Rochford wrung her gouty hands; the Lady Cicely set back her head and laughed.
The Queen spoke no word, but in the new silence it was as if the Magister fell out of the boy’s hands. He staggered amidst the trails of wool, nearly fell, and then made stiff zigzags towards the open outer door, where his prison guards awaited him, since they had no warrant to enter the antechamber. He dragged after him a little trail of fragments of spinning wheels and spindles.
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