Read Ebook: Lady Jane Grey and Her Times by Taylor Ida A Ida Ashworth

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 921 lines and 82430 words, and 19 pages

Cranmer answered warily. Knowing his master, and his jealousy of being supposed to connive at heresy, save on the one question of the Pope's authority, he cannot have failed to recognise the gravity of the situation. He put, however, a good face upon it. The King, he said, would see that he had a fair trial--"was indifferently heard." His bearing was that of a man secure that justice would be done him. Both he, in his heart, and the King, knew better.

"Oh, Lord God," sighed Henry, "what fond simplicity have you, so to permit yourself to be imprisoned!" False witnesses would be produced, and he would be condemned.

Taking his precautions, therefore, Henry gave the Archbishop his ring--the recognised sign that the matter at issue was taken out of the hands of the Council and reserved for his personal investigation. After which sovereign and prelate parted.

When, at eight o'clock the next morning, Cranmer, in obedience to the summons he had received, arrived at the Council Chamber, his foes, insolent in their premature triumph, kept him at the door, awaiting their convenience, close upon an hour. My lord of Canterbury was become a lacquey, some one reported to the King, since he was standing among the footmen and servants. The King, comprehending what was implied, was wroth.

"Have they served my lord so?" he asked. "It is well enough; I shall talk with them by and by."

Accordingly when Cranmer, called at length and arraigned before the Council, produced the ring--the symbol of his enemies' discomfiture--and was brought to the royal presence that his cause might be tried by the King in person, the positions of accused and accusers were reversed. Acting, not without passion, rather as the advocate of the menaced man than as his judge, Henry received the Council with taunts, and in reply to their asseverations that the trial had been merely intended to conduce to the Archbishop's greater glory, warned them against treating his friends in that fashion for the future. Cranmer, for the present, was safe.

Protestant England rejoiced with the Protestant Archbishop. But it rejoiced in trembling. The Archbishop's escape did not imply immunity to lesser offenders, and the severity used in administering the law is shown by the fact that a boy of fifteen was burnt for heresy--no willing martyr, but ignorant, and eager to catch at any chances of life, by casting the blame of his heresy on others. "The poor boy," says Hall, "would have gladly said that the twelve Apostles taught it him ... such was his childish innocency and fear." And England, with the strange patience of the age, looked on.

Side by side with religious persecution ran the story of the King's domestic crimes. To go back no further, in the year 1542 Katherine Howard, Henry's fifth wife, had met her fate, and the country had silently witnessed the pitiful and shameful spectacle. As fact after fact came to light, the tale will have been told of the beautiful, neglected child, left to her own devices and to the companionship of maid-servants in the disorderly household of her grandmother, the Duchess of Norfolk, with the results that might have been anticipated; of how she had suddenly become of importance when it had been perceived that the King had singled her out for favour; and of how, still "a very little girl," as some one described her, she had been used as a pawn in the political game played by the Howard clan, and married to Henry. Only a few months after she had been promoted to her perilous dignity her doom had overtaken her; the enemies of the party to which by birth she belonged had not only made known to her husband misdeeds committed before her marriage and almost ranking as the delinquencies of a misguided child, but had hinted at more unpardonable misdemeanours of which the King's wife had been guilty. The story of Katherine's arraignment and condemnation will have spread through the land, with her protestations that, though not excusing the sins and follies of her youth--she was seventeen when she was done to death--she was guiltless of the action she was specially to expiate at the block; whilst men may have whispered the tale of her love for Thomas Culpeper, her cousin and playmate, whom she would have wedded had not the King stepped in between, and who had paid for her affection with his blood. "I die a Queen," she is reported to have exclaimed upon the scaffold, "but I would rather have died the wife of Culpeper." And it may have been rumoured that her head had fallen, not so much to vindicate the honour of the King as to set him free to form fresh ties.

However that might be, Katherine Howard had been sent to answer for her offences, or prove her innocence, at another bar, and her namesake, Katherine Parr, reigned in her stead.

It was now three years since Katherine Parr had replaced the unhappy child who had been her immediate predecessor. For three perilous years she had occupied--with how many fears, how many misgivings, who can tell?--the position of the King's sixth wife. On a July day in 1543 Lady Latimer, already at thirty twice a widow, had been raised to the rank of Queen. If the ceremony was attended with no special pomp, neither had it been celebrated with the careful privacy observed with respect to some of the King's marriages. His two daughters, Mary--approximately the same age as the bride, and who was her friend--and Elizabeth, had been present, as well as Henry's brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and other officers of State. Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, afterwards her dangerous foe, performed the rite, in the Queen's Closet at Hampton Court.

Sir Thomas Seymour, Hertford's brother and Lord Admiral of England, was not at Hampton Court on the occasion, having been despatched on some foreign mission. More than one reason may have contributed to render his absence advisable. A wealthy and childless widow, of unblemished reputation, and belonging by birth to a race connected with the royal house, was not likely to remain long without suitors, and Lord Latimer can scarcely have been more than a month in his grave before Thomas Seymour had testified his desire to replace him and to become Katherine's third husband. Nor does she appear to have been backward in responding to his advances.

Twice married to elderly men whose lives lay behind them, twice set free by death from her bonds, she may fairly have conceived that the time was come when she was justified in wedding, not for family or substantial reasons, not wholly perhaps, as before, in wisdom's way, but a man she loved.

Seymour was not without attractions calculated to commend him to a woman hitherto bestowed upon husbands selected for her by others. Young and handsome, "fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately, in voice magnificent, but somewhat empty in matter," the gay sailor appears to have had little difficulty in winning the heart of a woman who, in spite of the learning, the prudence, and the piety for which she was noted, may have felt, as she watched her youth slip by, that she had had little good of it; and it is clear, from a letter she addressed to Seymour himself when, after Henry's death, his suit had been successfully renewed, that she had looked forward at this earlier date to becoming his wife.

"As truly as God is God," she then wrote, "my mind was fully bent, the other time I was at liberty, to marry you before any man I know. Howbeit God withstood my will therein most vehemently for a time, and through His grace and goodness made that possible which seemed to me most impossible; that was, made me renounce utterly mine own will and follow His most willingly. It were long to write all the processes of this matter. If I live, I shall declare it to you myself. I can say nothing, but as my Lady of Suffolk saith, 'God is a marvellous man.'"

Strange burdens of responsibility have ever been laid upon the duty of obedience to the will of Providence, nor does it appear clear to the casual reader why the consent of Katherine to become a Queen should have been viewed by her in the light of a sacrifice to principle. Whether her point of view was shared by her lover does not appear. It is at all events clear that both were wise enough in the world's lore not to brave the wrath of the despot by crossing his caprice. Seymour retired from the field, and Katherine, perhaps sustained by the inward approval of conscience, perhaps partially comforted by a crown, accepted the dangerous distinction she was offered.

To her brother, Lord Parr, when writing to inform him of her advancement, she expressed no regret. It had pleased God, she told him, to incline the King to take her as his wife, the greatest joy and comfort that could happen to her. She desired to communicate the great news to Parr, as being the person with most cause to rejoice thereat, and added, with a suspicion of condescension, her hope that he would let her hear of his health as friendly as if she had not been called to this honour.

Although the actual marriage had not taken place until some six months after Lord Latimer's death, no time can have been lost in arranging it, since before her husband had been two months in the grave Henry was causing a bill for her dresses to be paid out of the Exchequer.

It was generally considered that the King had chosen well. Wriothesley, the Chancellor, was sure His Majesty had never a wife more agreeable to his heart. Gardiner had not only performed the marriage ceremony but had given away the bride. According to an old chronicle the new Queen was a woman "compleat with singular humility." She had, at any rate, the adroitness, in her relations with the King, to assume the appearance of it, and was a well-educated, sensible, and kindly woman, "quieter than any of the young wives the King had had, and, as she knew more of the world, she always got on pleasantly with the King, and had no caprices."

The story of the marriage was an old one in 1546. Seymour had returned from his mission and resumed his former position at Court as the King's brother-in-law and the uncle of his heir, and not even the Queen's enemies--and she had enough of them and to spare--had found an excuse for calling to mind the relations once existing between the Admiral and the King's wife. Nevertheless, and in spite of the blamelessness of her conduct, the satisfaction which had greeted the marriage was on the wane. A hard task would have awaited Queen or courtier who should have attempted to minister to the contentment of all the rival parties striving for predominance in the State and at Court, and to be adjudged the friend of the one was practically equivalent to a pledge of distrust from the other. Whitehall, like the country at large, was divided against itself by theological strife; and whilst the men faithful to the ancient creed in its entirety were inevitably in bitter opposition to the adherents of the new teachers whose headquarters were in Germany, a third party, more unscrupulous than either, was made up of the middle men who moulded--outwardly or inwardly--their faith upon the King's, and would, if they could, have created a Papacy without a Pope, a Catholic Church without its corner-stone.

At Court, as elsewhere, each of these three parties were standing on their guard, ready to parry or to strike a blow when occasion arose, jealous of every success scored by their opponents. The fall of Cromwell had inspired the Catholics with hope, and, with Gardiner as Minister and Wriothesley as Chancellor, they had been in a more favourable position than for some time past at the date of the King's last marriage. It had then been assumed that the new Queen's influence would be employed upon their side--an expectation confirmed by her friendship with the Princess Mary. The discovery that the widow of Lord Latimer--so fervent a Catholic that he had joined in the north-country insurrection known as the Pilgrimage of Grace--had broken with her past, openly displayed her sympathy with Protestant doctrine, and, in common with the King's nieces, was addicted to what was called the "new learning," quickly disabused them of their hopes, rendered the Catholic party at Court her embittered enemies, and lent additional danger to what was already a perilous position by affording those at present in power a motive for removing from the King's side a woman regarded as the advocate of innovation.

There is no need to assume that Katherine's course of action was wholly dictated by interested motives. Yet in this case principle and prudence went hand in hand. Henry was becoming increasingly sick and suffering, and, with the shadow of death deepening above him, the gifts he asked of life were insensibly changing their character. His autocratic and violent temper remained the same, but peace and quiet, a soothing atmosphere of submissive affection, the absence of domestic friction, if not sufficient to ensure his wife immunity from peril, constituted her best chance of escaping the doom of her predecessors. To a selfish man the appeal must be to self-interest. This appeal Katherine consistently made and it had so far proved successful. For the rest, whether she suffered from terror of possible disaster or resolutely shut her eyes to what might have unnerved and rendered her unfit for the part she had to play, none can tell, any more than it can be determined whether, as she looked from the man she had married to the man she had loved, she indulged in vain regrets for the happiness of which she had caught a glimpse in those brief days when she had dreamed of a future to be shared with Thomas Seymour.

In spite, however, of her caution, in spite of the perfection with which she performed the duties of wife and nurse, by 1546 disquieting reports were afloat.

His companion and playfellow was one Barnaby Fitzpatrick, to whom he clung throughout his short life with constant affection. It was Barnaby's office to bear whatever punishment the Prince had merited--a method more successful in the case of the Prince than it might have proved with a less soft-hearted offender, since it is said that "it was not easy to affirm whether Fitzpatrick smarted more for the default of the Prince, or the Prince conceived more grief for the smart of Fitzpatrick."

Katherine Parr is not likely to have regretted the pressure put upon her stepson; and the boy, apologising for his simple and rude letters, adds his acknowledgments for those addressed to him by the Queen, "which do give me much comfort and encouragement to go forward in such things wherein your Grace beareth me on hand."

The King's latest wife was, in fact, a teacher by nature and choice, and admirably fitted to direct the studies of his son and daughters, as well as of any other children who might be brought within the sphere of her influence. That influence, it may be, had something to do with moulding the character and the destiny of a child fated to be unhappily prominent in the near future. This was Lady Jane Grey.

The Marquis of Dorset and his family--Bradgate Park--Lady Jane Grey--Her relations with her cousins--Mary Tudor--Protestantism at Whitehall--Religious persecution.

Amongst the households where both affairs at Court and the religious struggle distracting the country were watched with the deepest interest was that of the Marquis of Dorset, the husband of the King's niece and father of Lady Jane Grey.

It was at the country home of the Dorset family, Bradgate Park, that Lady Jane had been born, in 1537. Six miles distant from the town of Leicester, and forming the south-east end of Charnwood Forest, it was a pleasant and quiet place. Over the wide park itself, seven miles in circumference, bracken grew freely; here and there bare rocks rose amidst the masses of green undergrowth, broken now and then by a solitary oak, and the unwooded expanse was covered with "wild verdure."

The house itself had not long been built, nor is there much remaining at the present day to show what had been its aspect at the time when Lady Jane was its inmate. Early in the eighteenth century it was destroyed by fire, tradition ascribing the catastrophe to a Lady Suffolk who, brought to her husband's home as a bride, complained that the country was a forest and the inhabitants were brutes, and, at the suggestion of her sister, took the most certain means of ensuring a change of residence.

But if little outward trace is left of the place where the victim of state-craft and ambition was born and passed her early years, it is not a difficult matter to hazard a guess at the religious and political atmosphere of her home. Echoes of the fight carried on, openly or covertly, between the parties striving for predominance in the realm must have almost daily reached Bradgate, the accounts of the incidents marking the combat taking their colour from the sympathies of the master and mistress of the house, strongly enlisted upon the side of Protestantism. At Lord Dorset's house, though with closed doors, the condition of religious affairs must have supplied constant matter for discussion; and Jane will have listened to the conversation with the eager attention of an intelligent child, piecing together the fragments she gathered up, and gradually realising, with a thrill of excitement, as she became old enough to grasp the significance of what she heard, that men and women were suffering and dying in torment for the sake of doctrines she had herself been taught as a matter of course. Serious and precocious, and already beginning an education said to have included in later years Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chaldaic, Arabic, French, and Italian, the stories reaching her father's house of the events taking place in London and at Court must have imprinted themselves upon her imagination at an age specially open to such impressions, and it is not unnatural that she should have grown up nurtured in the principles of polemics and apt at controversy.

Nor were edifying tales of martyrdom or of suffering for conscience' sake the only ones to penetrate to the green and quiet precincts of Bradgate. At his niece's house the King's domestic affairs--a scandal and a by-word in Europe--must have been regarded with the added interest, perhaps the sharper criticism, due to kinship. Henry was not only Lady Dorset's sovereign, but her uncle, and she had a more personal interest than others in what Messer Barbaro, in his report to the Venetian senate, described as "this confusion of wives." To keep a child ignorant was no part of the training of the day, and Jane, herself destined for a court life, no doubt had heard, as she grew older, many of the stories of terror and pity circulating throughout the country, and investing, in the eyes of those afar off, the distant city--the stage whereon most of them had been enacted--with the atmosphere of mystery and fear and excitement belonging to a place where martyrs were shedding their blood, or heretics atoning for their guilt, according as the narrators inclined to the ancient or the novel faith; where tragedies of love and hatred and revenge were being played, and men went in hourly peril of their lives.

Of this place, invested with the attraction and glamour belonging to a land of glitter and romance, Lady Jane had glimpses on the occasions when, as a near relation of the King's, she accompanied her mother to Court, becoming for a while a sharer in the life of palaces and an actor, by reason of her strain of royal blood, in the pageant ever going forward at St. James's or Whitehall; and though it does not appear that she was finally transferred from the guardianship of her parents to that of the Queen until after the death of Henry in the beginning of the year 1547, it is not unlikely that the book-loving child of nine may have attracted the attention of the scholarly Queen during her visits to Court and that Katherine's belligerent Protestantism had its share in the development of the convictions which afterwards proved so strong both in life and in death.

There is at this date little trace of any connection between Jane and her cousins, the King's children. A strong affection on the part of Edward is said to have existed, and to it has been attributed his consent to set his sisters aside in Lady Jane's favour. "She charmed all who knew her," says Burnet, "in particular the young King, about whom she was bred, and who had always lived with her in the familiarity of a brother." For this statement there is no contemporary authority, and, so far as can be ascertained, intercourse between the two can have been but slight. Between Edward and his younger sister, on the other hand, the bond of affection was strong, their education being carried on at this time much together at Hatfield; and "a concurrence and sympathy of their natures and affections, together with the celestial bond, conformity in religion," made it the more remarkable that the Prince should have afterwards agreed to set aside, in favour of his cousin, Elizabeth's claim to the succession. It is true that in their occasional meetings the studious boy and the serious-minded little girl may have discovered that they had tastes in common, but such casual acquaintanceship can scarcely have availed to counterbalance the affection produced by close companionship and the tie of blood; and grounds for the Prince's subsequent conduct, other than the influence and arguments of those about him, can only be matter of conjecture.

Of the relations existing between Jane and the Prince's sisters there is little more mention; but the entry by Mary Tudor in a note-book of the gift of a gold necklace set with pearls, made "to my cousin, Jane Gray," shows that the two had met in the course of this summer, and would seem to indicate a kindly feeling on the part of the older woman towards the unfortunate child whom, not eight years later, she was to send to the scaffold. Could the future have been laid bare it would perhaps not have been the victim who would have recoiled from the revelation with the greatest horror.

Although what was to follow lends a tragic significance to the juxtaposition of the names of the two cousins, there was nothing sinister about the King's elder daughter as she filled the place at Court in which she had been reinstated at the instance of her step-mother. A gentle, brown-eyed woman, past her first youth, and bearing on her countenance the traces of sickness and sorrow and suffering, she enjoyed at this date so great a popularity as almost, according to a foreign observer, to be an object of adoration to her father's subjects, obstinately faithful to her injured and repudiated mother. But, ameliorated as was the Princess's condition, she had been too well acquainted, from childhood upwards, with the reverses of fortune to count over-securely upon a future depending upon her father's caprice.

It does not appear whether or not Mary took the admonitions of her nine-year-old Mentor to heart. The pleasures of court life are not likely to have exercised a perilous fascination over the Princess, her spirits clouded by the memory of her melancholy past and the uncertainty of her future, and probably represented to her a more or less wearisome part of the necessary routine of existence.

Whilst the entertainments the Prince deplored went forward at Whitehall, they were accompanied by other practices he would have wholly approved. Not only was his step-mother addicted to personal study of the Scriptures, but she had secured the services of learned men to instruct her further in them; holding private conferences with these teachers; and, especially during Lent, causing a sermon to be delivered each afternoon for her own benefit and that of any of her ladies disposed to profit by it, when the discourse frequently turned or touched upon abuses in the Church.

It was a bold stroke, Henry's claims to the position of sole arbiter on questions of doctrine considered. Nevertheless the Queen acted openly, and so far her husband had testified no dissatisfaction. Yet the practice must have served to accentuate the dividing line of theological opinion, already sufficiently marked at Court; some members of the royal household, like Princess Mary, holding aloof; others eagerly welcoming the step; the Seymours, Cranmer, and their friends looking on with approval, whilst the Howard connection, with Gardiner and Wriothesley, took note of the Queen's imprudence, and waited and watched their opportunity to turn it to their advantage and to her destruction.

Such was the internal condition of the Court. The spring had meanwhile been marked by rejoicings for the peace with foreign powers, at last concluded. On Whit-Sunday a great procession proceeded from St. Paul's to St. Peter's, Cornhill, accompanied by a banner, and by crosses from every parish church, the children of St. Paul's School joining in the show. It was composed of a motley company. Bishop Bonner--as vehement in his Catholicism as Gardiner, and so much less wary in the display of his opinions that his brother of Winchester was wont at times to term him "asse"--carried the Blessed Sacrament under a canopy, with "clerks and priests and vicars and parsons"; the Lord Mayor was there in crimson velvet, the aldermen were in scarlet, and all the crafts in their best apparel. The occasion was worthy of the pomp displayed in honour of it, for it was--the words sound like a jest--the festival of a "Universal Peace for ever," announced by the Mayor, standing between standard and cross, and including in the proclamation of general amity the names of the Emperor, the King of England, the French King, and all Christian Kings.

If soldiers had for the moment consented to proclaim a truce and to name it, merrily, eternal, theologians had agreed to no like suspension of hostilities, and the perennial religious strife showed no signs of intermission.

"Sire," wrote Admiral d'Annebaut, sent by Francis to London to ratify the peace, "I know not what to tell your Majesty as to the order given me to inform myself of the condition of religious affairs in England; except that Henry has declared himself head of the Anglican Church, and woe to whomsoever refuses to recognise him in that capacity. He has also usurped all ecclesiastical property, and destroyed all the convents. He attends Mass nevertheless daily, and permits the papal nuncio to live in London. What is strangest of all is that Catholics are there burnt as well as Lutherans and other heretics. Was anything like it ever seen?"

Punishment was indeed dealt out with singular impartiality. During the spring Dr. Crome had been examined touching a sermon he had delivered against Catholic doctrine. Two or three weeks later, preaching once more at Paul's Cross, he had boldly declared he was not there for the purpose of denying his former assertions; but a second "examination" had proved more effective, and on the Sunday following the feast of Corpus Christi he eschewed his heresies. "Our news here," wrote a merchant of London to his brother on July 2, "of Dr. Crome's canting, recanting, decanting, or rather double-canting, be this." The transaction was representative of many others, which, with their undercurrent of terror, struggle, intimidation, menace, and remorse, formed a melancholy and recurrent feature of the day, the victory remaining sometimes with a man's conscience--whatever it dictates might be--sometimes with his fears.

The King was, in fact, still endeavouring to stem the torrent he had set loose. In his speech to Parliament on Christmas Eve, 1545, after commending and thanking Lords and Commons for their loyalty and affection towards himself, he had spoken with severity of the discord and dissension prevalent in the realm; the clergy, by their sermons against each other, sowing debate and discord amongst the people.... "I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverently that most precious jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rimed, sung and jangled in every ale-house and tavern ... and yet I am even as much sorry that the readers of the same follow it in doing so faintly and so coldly. For of this I am sure, that charity was never so faint amongst you, and virtuous and godly living was never less used, nor God Himself amongst Christians was never less reverenced, honoured, and served."

Delivered scarcely more than a year before his death, Henry's speech was a singular commentary upon the condition of the realm, consequent upon his own policy, during the concluding years of his reign.

Anne Askew--Her trial and execution--Katherine Parr's danger--Plot against her--Her escape.

As the months of 1546 went by the measures taken by the King and his advisers to enforce unanimity of practice and opinion in matters of religion did not become less drastic. A great burning of books disapproved by Henry took place during the autumn, preceded in July by the condemnation and execution of a victim whose fate attracted an unusual amount of attention, the effect at Court being enhanced by the fact that the heroine of the story was personally known to the Queen and her ladies. It was indeed reported that one of the King's special causes of displeasure was that she had been the means of imbuing his nieces--among whom was Lady Dorset, Jane Grey's mother--as well as his wife, with heretical doctrines.

Added to the species of glamour commonly surrounding a spiritual leader, more particularly in times of persecution, Anne Askew was beautiful and young--not more than twenty-five at the time of her death--and the thought of her racked frame, her undaunted courage, and her final agony at the stake, may well have haunted with the horror of a night-mare those who had been her disciples, and who looked on from a distance, and with sympathy they dared not display.

There were other circumstances increasing the interest with which the melancholy drama was watched. Well born and educated, Anne had been the wife of a Lincolnshire gentleman of the name of Kyme. Their life together had been of short duration. In a period of bitter party feeling and recrimination, it is difficult to ascertain with certainty the truth on any given point; and whilst a hostile chronicler asserts that Anne left her husband in order "to gad up and down a-gospelling and gossipping where she might and ought not, but especially in London and near the Court," another authority explains that Kyme had turned her out of his house upon her conversion to Protestant doctrines. Whatever might have been the origin of her mode of life, it is certain that she resumed her maiden name, and proceeded to "execute the office of an apostle."

Her success in her new profession made her unfortunately conspicuous, and in 1545 she was committed to Newgate, "for that she was very obstinate and heady in reasoning on matters of religion." The charge, it must be confessed, is corroborated by her demeanour under examination, when the qualities of meekness and humility were markedly absent, and her replies to the interrogatories addressed to her were rather calculated to irritate than to prove conciliatory. On this first occasion, for example, asked to interpret certain passages in the Scriptures, she declined to comply with the request on the score that she would not cast pearls among swine--acorns were good enough; and, urged by Bonner to open her wound, she again refused. Her conscience was clear, she said; to lay a plaster on a whole skin might seem much folly, and the similitude of a wound appeared to her unsavoury.

For the time she escaped; but in the course of the following year her case was again brought forward, and on this occasion she found no mercy. Her examinations, mostly reported by herself, show her as alike keen-witted and sharp-tongued, rarely at a loss for an answer, and profoundly convinced of the justice of her cause. If she was not without the genuine enjoyment of the born controversialist in the opportunity of argument and discussion, she possessed, underlying the self-assertion and confidence natural in a woman holding the position of a religious leader, a fund of indomitable heroism. For she must have been fully conscious of her danger. It is possible that, had she not been brought into prominence by her association with those in high places, she might again have escaped; but, apart from the grudge owed her for her influence over the King's own kin, her attitude was almost such as to court her fate. Refusing "to sing a new song of the Lord in a strange land," she replied to the Bishop of Winchester, when he complained that she spoke in parables, that it was best for him that she should do so. Had she shown him the open truth, he would not accept it.

"Then the Bishop said he would speak with me familiarly. I said, 'So did Judas when he unfriendlily betrayed Christ....' In conclusion," she ended, in her account of the interview, "we could not agree."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet