"I do wrong I?

Oh, you men, you are all of a piece! What right, what reason is on your side! Am I the king's wife or am I not? If I am not, how can Mary be Princess of England? Did not the king feign that the Bishop of Tarbes inquired into her legitimacy on her betrothal to the French prince? How long would her position be honored if I swallowed this insult? First I would go, then my child! And what hurt can she fear from her mother's proving her own right and legitimacy?"

"But perchance" Campeggio ventured very significantly, "perchance it should not be proved? If your Grace's contention was not accepted? Then would the princess be disproved heiress without in "

A rattle of angry words drowned his speech. Catherine was leaning forward in her chair, her hands gripping its arms, her face twitching with the wrath that was vibrant in her voice.

"My contentions not accepted? My rights as an honest woman and a queen denied in the face of God and His Justice? Who would do this thing, my lord? Would you? Would your master, the pope? Never will I believe such infamy of an agent of God's! 'Twas a former pope's dispensation married us: if that prove now at fault, what security will hereafter be placed in any papal bull? There is no law in Heaven or earth that can unmarry me from Henry and no power that will force me to yield one jot of my right though I were broken on the wheel! Can you face these words, my lord legate, can you deny me the truth? — Ah, you men, how you patter and shuffle and lie to reach your ends, yet crave ever a fair appearance, however foul the secret mire you wallow in! I am sickened with this talk of sin and conscience do I not know Henry's conscience? I have

been his wife for nineteen years and I know and you know that he is a man to be fed and flattered, with no scruple save to make a show with, and no law save the limit of his power. You know and I know that his infamy flaunts through this palace, whose shame is hanging over England like a curse—”

"Madame!" Again the upraised, feeble hand. "Doubtless in hopes of a succession"

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The succession!" Never had the Italian heard fiercer scorn than was flung into those two words. "The succession of Mistress Anne Boleyn! Oh, worthy dam Oh, worthy heritors of a crown! I know the lady, my lord, she was maid to me till I sent her packing for a low wanton intrigue with Henry Percy - a saucy, upstart, scheming jade, who has been love to Thomas Wyatt, a poet rake, these many years, whose favors are every courtier's for the asking -or the paying! — a sly, black-eyed, double-fingered hussy who hath bewitched Henry Tudor with the arts the devil, her master, doth lend her! And this is the woman you would put on the throne of England! Oh, she would soon have you and your kind overboard—a loose-tongued, free-thinking Lutheran —”

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'Your Highness! Your Highness!

Spare your words. I know your heart, you are all men together. What is there in a man that makes him so like a devil? . . . No, no, I do not mean you, my Lord Cardinal; you may mean only kindness, indeed I trust you do, but I have been so embittered with the man Wolsey, whose falsity and ambitions I will cast into his teeth an he come beseeching me again to throw my fair name into the mire to cushion his pathway! . . . I know the man. . . You are not he - but you are all men. You hang together you condone each other's vices

you veil each other's crimes. An' a woman good God, let a woman but glance so fleetingly aside and what a stone throwing is there! All your hands against her.. What, my lord, are all your arguments to me? Are they for the right, the justice of the cause? Not one! 'Tis all for expediency and prudence. It is, 'Bethink you, Madame, of the Princess Mary and anger not the king,' and, Softly, lady, let the king have his way. Consider how much he yearneth towards this new wife — and go you to a convent and pray God bless the union.' And, 'True, your Majesty, you are the king's wife and the crown is yours, but your head has grown gray under it put it on a fairer brow, do not trouble to defend yourself when they call you no wife and your marriage a deadly sin — it will stir up strife and embarrass the pope and annoy Charles and disappoint Henry. All other men are freed when their old wives cloy. 'Tis the way of the world. Let thy honor, thy daughter's honor, go—'tis for the best 'twill please the king!'"

Campeggio did not meet her eyes, he was staring out the window on the blue, wind-ruffled Thames: the wrinkles on his face looked deep and sunken. Then he turned to her and his hands, with Italian expressiveness, went out in a gesture of deprecating admission.

"My dear lady," he said in his softly ironic tones, "this is Life."

But there was no response in Catherine to such philosophizing; she had no intellectual interest in the generalization.

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"Neither the realm nor the greatest punishment," she said, speaking more quietly, though with breath shortened by passion, nor even being torn limb from limb shall alter me in this, and if after death I were to return, I would die again and yet again, rather than give way."

ว

CHAPTER XVII

A TRAGIC FARCE

'HE great Hall of Blackfriars was the theater selected for gaping England to witness upon a June day, 1529, the novel spectacle of its king and queen debating in open court the validity of their marriage. The pope had wished the inquiry private, but Henry's theatric taste made him stage it with splendor, and his thirst for popularity inspired him to take the people into his confidence to try and win them by a personal appeal.

The hall had been most sumptuously fitted up for its farce of justice, with the two legates in their scarlet robes in chairs draped with cloth of gold on a raised platform, and with the king and queen, amid more golden drapings and canopies, raised on either side of them, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and his bishops and the counselors for the king and queen in front, while all about the sides of the hall were packed the peers and members of court, the officials, the clergy, and all the commoners who could effect an entrance.

Back among them, shrouded in a veil, was a girl whose delicate features, sharpened with eager suspense, took on the irony of derision as the sentences of the king's address rang out, declaring the anxiety of the royal conscience and the pious resolve to continue no longer in the mortal sin of an unholy wedlock. Not so would she have pos*tured!

The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk beside her. nodded. her understanding of Anne's thought.

carry

"Appeal to men and they will turn against you all with a high hand and they clap you to the skies for valiance," she whispered. "The world loves its conquerors."

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"Amen," grunted big Brereton, who, with Norris, pressed close to them in the throng. This clatter of priests' tongues deafens me!"

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"Priests' tongues!" sniffed the old duchess. “ Nay, it hath gone further than priests—all England is wagging. Not a toothless grandam in her chimney corner but hath her opinion on whether the king be rightfully married or not, not a dog-faced peasant but knows the opinion of Heaven in the matter."

"Heaven's will is clear enough," Anne gave back. ""Tis but the opinion of those slant-eyed foxes that I crave!"

It had been a time of fretting impatience for Anne. In December she had returned to court, where Suffolk House was given for her establishment, and though she had every assurance of success, from the sight of the pope's commission granting power to Wolsey and Campeggio to try the case, and promising not to revoke that authority, to Henry's account of the decretal that defined the law in his favor, fairly prejudging the case, yet a haunting fear possessed her of some blow in the dark.

There had been too much delay. She did not trust that pope: it was whispered that Catherine had private assurances from the emperor that nothing would be done against her, and Anne was more than convinced that Pope Clement was lying impartially to both sides, cozening them in desperate opportunism till he could see which of