Форд Мэдокс Форд
The Fifth Queen Crowned
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 ante-chamber 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 pitiful 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.
'Well, there's a fine roister-doister!' the Lady Cicely laughed behind the Queen's back. The Queen stood very still and frowned. To her the disturbance was monstrous and distasteful, for she was minded to have things very orderly and quiet. The boy, in his scarlet, pulled off his bonnet and panted, but he was not still more than a second, and suddenly he called out to the Queen —
'Make that pynot to marry my sister!'
Margot Poins hung round him and cried out —
'Oh no! Oh no!'
He shook her roughly loose.
'An' you do not wed with him how shall I get advancement?' he said. ''A promised me that when 'a should come to be Chancellor 'a would advance me.'
He pushed her from him again with his elbow when she came near.
'Y've grown over familiar,' the Queen said, 'with being too much near me. Y'are grown over familiar. For seven days you shall no longer keep my door.'
Margot Poins raised her arms over her head, then she leant against a window-pane and sobbed into the crook of her elbow. The boy's slender face was convulsed with rage; his blue eyes started from his head; his callow hair was crushed up.
'Shall a man – ' he began to protest.
'I say nothing against that you did beat this Magister,' the Queen said. 'Such passions cannot be controlled, and I pass it by.'
'But will ye not make this man to wed with my sister?' the boy said harshly.
'I cannot. He hath a wedded wife!'
He dropped his hands to his side.
'Alack; then my father's house is down,' he cried out.
'Gentleman Guard,' Katharine said, 'get you for seven days away from my door. I will have another sentry whilst you bethink you of a worthier way to advancement.'
He gazed at her stupidly.
'You will not make this wedding?' he asked.
'Gentleman Guard,' Katharine said, 'you have your answer. Get you gone.'
A sudden rage came into his eyes; he swallowed in his throat and made a gesture of despair with his hand. The Queen turned back into her room and busied herself with her task, which was the writing into a little vellum book of seven prayers to the Virgin that the Lady Elizabeth, Queen Anne Boleyn's daughter, a child then in London, was to turn each one into seven languages, written fair in the volume as a gift, against Christmas, for the King.
'I would not have that boy to guard my door,' the Lady Cicely said to the Queen.
'Why, 'tis a good boy,' Katharine answered; 'and his sister loves me very well.'
'Get your Highness another,' the Lady Cicely persisted. 'I do not like his looks.'
The Queen gazed up from her writing to where the dark girl, her figure raked very much back in her stiff bodice, played daintily with the tassels of the curtain next the window.
'My Lady,' Katharine said, 'my Highness must get me a new maid in place of Margot Poins, that shall away into a nunnery. Is not that grief enough for poor Margot? Shall she think in truth that she has undone her father's house?'
'Then advance the springald to some post away from you,' the Lady Cicely said.
'Nay,' the Queen answered; 'he hath done nothing to merit advancement.'
She continued, with her head bent down over the writing on her knee, her lips moving a little as, sedulously, she drew large and plain letters with her pen.
'By Heaven,' the Lady Cicely said, 'you have too tickle a conscience to be a Queen of this world and day. In the time of Cæsar you might have lived more easily.'
The Queen looked up at her from her writing; her clear eyes were untroubled.
'Aye,' she said. 'Lucio Domitio, Appio Claudio consulibus– '
Cicely Rochford set back her head and laughed at the ceiling.
'Aye, your Highness is a Roman,' she tittered like a magpie.
'In the day of Cæsar it was simple to do well,' the Queen said.
'Why, I do not believe it,' Cicely answered her.
'Cousin! Cousin!' The old Lady Rochford warned her that this was the Queen, not her old playmate.
'But now,' the Queen said, 'with such a coming together and a concourse of peoples about us; with such holes and corners in a great Court – ' She paused and sighed.
'Well, if I may not speak my mind,' Cicely Rochford said to the old lady, 'what good am I?'
'I did even what I might to keep this lamb Margot from the teeth of that wolf Magister,' the Queen said. 'I take shame to myself that I did no more. I will do a penance for it. But still I think that these be degenerate days.'
'Oh, Queen of dreams and fancies,' Cicely Rochford said. 'I am very certain that in the days of your noble Romans it was as it is now. Tell me, if you can, that in all your readings of hic and hoc you lit not upon such basenesses? You will not lay your hand upon your heart and say that never a man of Rome bartered his sister for the hope of advancement, or that never a learned doctor was a corrupter of youth? I have seen the like in the plays of Plautus that here have been played at Court.'
'Why,' the Queen said, 'the days of Plautus were days degenerated and fallen already from the ancient nobleness.'
'You should have Queened it before Goodman Adam fell,' Cicely Rochford mocked her. 'If you go back before Plautus, go back all the way.'
She shrugged her shoulders up to her ears and uttered a little sound like 'Pfui!' Then she said quickly —
'Give me leave to be gone, your Highness, that I may not grow over familiar like the boy with the pikestaff, for if it do not gall you it shall wring the withers of this my old husband's cousin!'
The old Lady Rochford, who was always thinking of what had been said two speeches ago, because she was so slow-witted, raised her gouty hands in the air and opened her mouth. But the Queen smiled faintly at Cicely.
'When I ask you to mince matters in my little room you shall do it. It was Lucius the Praetor that went always accompanied by a carping Stoic to keep him from being puffed up, and it was a good custom.'
'Before Heaven,' Cicely Rochford said in the midst of her curtsey at the door, 'shall I have the office of such a one as Diogenes who derided Alexander the Emperor? Then must my old husband live with me in a tub!'
'Pray you,' the Queen said after her through the door, 'look you around and spy me out a maid to be my tiring-woman and ward my spinsters. For nowadays I see few maids to choose from.'
When she was gone the old Lady Rochford timorously berated the Queen. She would have her be more distant with knights' wives and the like. For it was fitting for a Queen to be feared and deemed awful.
'I had rather be loved and deemed pitiful,' Katharine answered. 'For I was once such a one – no more – than she or thou, or very little more. Before the people I bear myself proudly for my lord his high honour. But I do lead a very cloistered life, and have leisure to reflect upon for what a little space authority endureth, and how that friendship and true love between friends are things that bear the weather better.' She did not say her Latin text, for the old lady had no Latin.
VI
In the underground cell, above the red and gold table that afternoon, Lascelles wrought at a fair copy of the King's letter to the Pope, amended as it had been by Udal's hand. The Archbishop had come into the room reading a book as he came from his prayers, and sate him down in his chair at the tablehead without glancing at his gentleman.
'Prithee, your Grace,' Lascelles said, 'suffer me to carry this letter mine own self to the Queen.'
The Archbishop looked up at him; his mournful eyes started wide; he leaned forward.
'Art thou Lascelles?' he asked.
'Aye, Lascelles I am,' the gentleman answered; 'but I have cut off my beard.'
The Archbishop was very weak and startled; he fell into an anger.
'Is this a time for vanities?' he said. 'Will you be after the wenches? You look a foolish boy! I do not like this prank.'
Lascelles put up his hand to stroke his vanished beard. His risible lips writhed in a foxy smile; his chin was fuller than you would have expected, round and sensuous with a dimple in the peak of it.
'Please it, your Grace,' he said, 'this is no vanity, but a scheme that I will try.'
'What scheme? What scheme?' the Archbishop said. 'Here have been too many schemes.' He was very shaken and afraid, because this world was beyond his control.
'Please it, your Grace,' Lascelles answered, 'ask me not what this scheme is.'
The Archbishop shook his head and pursed his lips feebly.
'Please it, your Grace,' Lascelles urged, 'if this scheme miscarry, your Grace shall hear no more of it. If this scheme succeed I trow it shall help some things forward that your Grace would much have forwarded. Please it, your Grace, to ask me no more, and to send me with this letter to the Queen's Highness.'
The Archbishop opened his nerveless hands before him; they were pale and wrinkled as if they had been much soddened in water. Since the King had bidden him compose that letter to the Pope of Rome, his hands had grown so. Lascelles wrote on at the new draft of the letter, his lips following the motions of his pen. Still writing, and with his eyes down, he said —
'The Queen's Highness will put from her her tirewoman in a week from now.'
The Archbishop moved his fingers as who should say —
'What is that to me!' His eyes gazed into the space above his book that lay before him on the table.
'This Margot Poins is a niece of the master-printer Badge, a Lutheran, of the Austin Friars.' Lascelles pursued his writing for a line further. Then he added —
'This putting away and the occasion of it shall make a great noise in the town of London. It will be said amongst the Lutherans that the Queen is answerable therefor. It will be said that the Queen hath a very lewd Court and companionship.'
The Archbishop muttered wearily —
'It hath been said already.'
'But not,' Lascelles said, 'since she came to be Queen.'
The Archbishop directed upon him his hang-dog eyes, and his voice was the voice of a man that would not be disturbed from woeful musings.
'What use?' he said bitterly; and then again, 'What use?'
Lascelles wrote on sedulously. He used his sandarach to the end of the page, blew off the sand, eyed the sheet sideways, laid it down, and set another on his writing-board.
'Why,' he brought out quietly, 'it may be brought to the King's Highness' ears.'
'What way?' the Archbishop said heavily, as if the thing were impossible. His gentleman answered —
'This way and that!' The King's Highness had a trick of wandering about among his faithful lieges unbeknown; foreign ambassadors wrote abroad such rumours which might be re-reported from the foreign by the King's servants.
'Such a report,' Lascelles said, 'hath gone up already to London town by a swift carrier.'
The Archbishop brought out wearily and distastefully —
'How know you? Was it you that wrote it?'
'Please it, your Grace,' his gentleman answered him, 'it was in this wise. As I was passing by the Queen's chamber wall I heard a great outcry – '
He laid down his pen beside his writing-board the more leisurely to speak.
He had seen Udal, beaten and shaking, stagger out from the Queen's door to where his guards waited to set him back in prison. From Udal he had learned of this new draft of the letter; of Udal's trouble he knew before. Udal gone, he had waited a little, hearing the Queen's voice and what she said very plainly, for the castle was very great and quiet. Then out had come the young Poins, breathing like a volcano through his nostrils, and like to be stricken with palsy, boy though he was. Him Lascelles had followed at a convenient distance, where he staggered and snorted. And, coming upon the boy in an empty guard-room near the great gate, he had found him aflame with passion against the Queen's Highness.
'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 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.
