while serving another queen in secret, Lady Willoughby was a constant friend and open foe. No frown abashed her eye. The Barbican in which she lived was not more stanch than she. A native of Castille, she could intrigue with monks and friars to whom an English lady dared not speak; and there was nothing on the earth beneath or in the heavens above that Lady Willoughby would not dare for Catharine's sake.

4. Catharine was calling in her pride and agony on Clement, when that aged and unhappy pontiff passed away, and Alessandro Farnese, his chief assailant in the Sacred College, was elected Pope as Paul the Third. A man of taste and liberal thought, Farnese had always been an advocate for the divorce; yet Catharine fancied he must stand to what his predecessor in the Papacy had done. Nor was she wholly wrong. Charles brought his sword to bear on Paul. A timid man, with illegitimate children to establish, Paul was anxious to avoid a quarrel with the Emperor. Charles might give his natural son, Pietro Luigi, an Italian duchy. Charles had a natural daughter, Marguerite, whom the Pope desired to have for Ottavio Farnese. What could England do for Paul compared with Spain and Austria? On the call of Charles, the Pontiff, casting to the winds his true conviction, laid the country under curse and ban, for having done a thing which Paul himself had always said was right!

5. The King's offences were recited in the papal

bull. Ninety days were allowed to him for repentance; sixty days were given to his abettors. In default of his submission, he and his kingdom were cast out bodily from the fold of Christ. Henry was deprived of his crown. Queen Anne and her children were pronounced incapable of inheriting either name or property; and this papal malediction was to cling to them and their descendants after them. All prelates, priests, and friars, were enjoined to quit the blighted kingdom. Subjects were relieved from their oaths; tenants from their covenants. Peers and commoners were called to arm. All treaties and alliances were dissolved. The English flag was treated as a pirate flag, left to be hunted down in every sea. No ships from English harbours were to be received in Christian ports. All trade, all intercourse, must cease with the schismatic isles, and Christian princes were enjoined to march against the royal heretic and capture every one who took his part.

6. This bull was sealed to pacify the recluse at Kimbolton, but the Pope, who was not hiding in a convent, dared not publish to the world what he had done. Who was to execute this sentence of the Church? Misled by monks and women, Catharine seemed to think a papal bull would strike a wilful sovereign and a powerful kingdom to the dust; but neither Paul nor Charles indulged in her fallacious dreams. The English king and people would reject the bull, and if a foreign army were

to land, all parties would combine to drive them from the English soil. Paul had a hundred reasons for conciliating a defender of the faith and a recipient of the golden rose. Charles dared not press his uncle much; for France, in spite of Elinor's marriage to the King, was pushing him on every side. Yes; I am sorry for my aunt,' he muttered in his frigid tones; but I must think of my affairs; the French are stirring; I may lose an ally when I need him most; no, I must wait and see.' Charles put his trust in Chapuys, and the cunning Savoyard was not unequal to his task.

7. Chapuys and the English conspirators, as Chapuys frankly calls his friends, were courting the new mistress, and trying to corrupt the two great men in church and state. Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, stood beyond their reach. A good man and a wise, the primate was attached no less by habit than conviction to that new learning, that progressive science, that national independence, of which Queen Anne was now the recognised flag, as her daughter was to be in after times the living soul. No man knew the Queen more intimately than he, and no man held her character in greater reverence than he. The wit, the learning, and the brightness which enchanted poets and scholars were to him less precious than the feeling heart and ready hand which carried help into unnumbered homes. To take one step against her peace and credit would have seemed to him an outrage on the

best of women. Nothing could be done with Cranmer, save to bow him out of court, as Warham had been driven into seclusion at an earlier time. The

King no longer sought him out. The clerk no longer summoned him to the board. Retiring to his country-seat in Kent, he spent his days in study and devotion; leaving his royal mistress in the palace to contend against his enemies and her own.

8. Cromwell, Secretary of State, was made of earthier mould than the Archbishop. A worthy pupil of the Cardinal whom he had served, Cromwell professed to be a man of the world: a man whose course was governed, less by theories and fantasies than by the actual state of things. He cared no more for the new Queen at Greenwich than for the old Queen at Kimbolton. All his thoughts were fixed on Henry. Henry was his lord and master. Henry had made him Secretary of state; Henry might make him knight and peer. Yet, if he crossed the humour of that master, he was but too well aware his head would fly. With an unsleeping eye, the secretary watched his master's face, and trimmed his sail according to his forecast of the coming gale. Chapuys believed that in a little time Cromwell might become the Emperor's man.

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CHAPTER II.

STROKE AND STROKE.

1535.

1. STRANGE gusts of passion swept the court. Through Jane Seymour, Lady Exeter and Lady Kildare obtained a hearing for the Irish rebel Offaly. This murderer of Archbishop Allen, beaten from the field, had found a refuge with his sept and the connexions of his sept. Had Brereton caught him, short would have been his shrift; but in a wild and hilly country, with a tenantry of Celtic mutineers, Offaly had long defied pursuit. Ossory and his son received rewards; father and son being named governors of Kilkenny, Waterford, and Tipperary; on condition of resisting every effort made by Rome to sow dissension in the Irish camps. Lord Butler was already treasurer and admiral of Ireland, with a seat in the Council, a command in every Irish port. Red Piers expected, when the war was over, to obtain the deputy's chair. His name, his loyalty, his services, and his connexion with the Queen, entitled him to claim that dignity from the crown. Yet through a court intrigue, Lord Leonard Grey, Lady Kildare's