Tower, he took an opportunity of praising them to Chapuys; lauding not only their brave spirit, but their good sense and their loyal hearts. If Elizabeth should save Anne, as Mary had saved Catharine, these words might help to shield him from the axe.

6. "Try me, good King!" Henry replied to her appeal by further offers of a pardon, if the Queen would but admit some fault, so as "to deserve his grace." A prettier woman and more lenient critic sat beside him as he supped, and diced, and paddled on the stream by night. He wanted a divorce to marry Jane; and if his consort in the Tower were willing to undo the matrimonial bond, her life might well be spared. But Anne was not a woman to confess a lie, and take away her daughter's birthright in the crown. She pressed him for an open trial. She desired him not to let her enemies be at once her accusers and her judges. She had

nothing more to add. She told him, in reply to these fresh offers, she had nothing to confess, and nothing to conceal. She added, with a spirit. that excited Bacon's admiration, and induced him to record her words in his collection of the best sayings of all time, that the King, her lord, seemed constant in his habit of heaping honours on her head. From a simple gentlewoman he had made her a marchioness; from the state of marchioness he had raised her to that of Queen; and since he had no higher grade of earthly honour to confer, he was now vouchsafing to crown her innocence with martyrdom!

CHAPTER IV.

The Charge.

1536.

1. AUDLEY at last got leave to move, and there was little time for such a business as he had to do. Less than four weeks remained before the peers and burgesses would meet. Before that day arrived one Queen must be in her grave, another on her throne.

2. At first, Audley seemed disposed to give each pretender an opening to attack his enemy in the general charge. Of course, the Queen must be the head of his "conspiracy," but any number of persons might be netted in the toils, if Henry only gave him leave. The chancellor was in no position to be nice. He wished to charge a number of men with having made the King a cuckold! To the great astonishment of Chapuys, Henry seemed inclined to let him do it; for the King was going up and down complaining of his wrongs, and naming various gentlemen as the favourites of his wife. "The King," wrote Chapuys, in his bitterest mood of scorn, "declares that he fancies more than a hundred men have had to do with her. Never has Prince, or any other husband, shown his horns so openly, and seemed so proud of them!" Yet when the moment came for Audley to begin, some sense of the intolerable shame attending such a charge

prevented Henry from permitting Audley from extending his "conspiracy" beyond the men who were already named as her accomplices. No more arrests were made. Wyat was suffered to go free. Bryan was discharged from custody, and Audley's labours were restricted to the prisoners in the Tower.

3. The form into which Audley threw his indictment was that of a conspiracy "to compass and imagine the King's death." His first clause stood: "That the Lady Anne, Queen of England, having been the wife of the King for the space of three years and more, she, the said Lady Anne, contemning the marriage so solemnized between her and the King, and bearing malice in her heart against the King, and following her frail and carnal lust, did falsely and traitorously procure, by means of indecent language, gifts, and other acts therein stated, divers of the King's daily and familiar servants to be her adulterers and concubines, so that several of the King's servants, by the said Queen's most vile provocation and invitation, became given and inclined to the said Queen." Five clauses followed in which Anne was to be accused of adultery with Norreys, Rochford, Brereton, Weston, and Smeaton. Clause number seven was to accuse the five traitors of being jealous of each other, and of receiving gifts and rewards from the Queen.

4. The clauses numbered eight and nine stood thus: "Furthermore, that the Queen, and other the said traitors, jointly and severally, 31st October, 27 Hen. VIII., and at various times before and after, compassed and imagined the King's death; and that

the Queen had frequently promised to marry some one of the traitors, whenever the King should depart this life, affirming she never would love the King in her heart. Furthermore, that the King, having within a short time before become acquainted with the before-mentioned crimes, vices, and treasons, had been so grieved that certain harms and dangers had happened to his royal body."

5. Such were the charges to be brought against the six prisoners in the Tower, and no amount of legal ingenuity could give them an air of truth. Audley had meant to charge the Queen with poisoning Catharine, and intending to poison Mary. Chapuys assured so many people of these facts being true, that the pretenders and their partizans were expecting to see them proved; but Audley, though he clung to these theories of poisoning with a desperate energy, was obliged to let them go at last. Poisoning was a crime for which a culprit might be boiled to death; for which a culprit had been lately boiled to death; and the malignant passions of Lady Exeter and Lady Willoughby would have found a fearful joy in boiling Anne. But Hales, the AttorneyGeneral, though a tool of Audley, was a thorough lawyer, and the lawyers had to deny these ladies. the excitement of this fearful joy. A charge of conspiring with Rochford, Norreys, and the other prisoners, to "compass and imagine the King's death," was an issue that might be tried. Beyond this issue nothing could be dared. A dose of deadly nightshade given to "Lady Catharine, dowager Princess of Wales," was not an act of compassing and

imagining the King's death; nor could the alleged fact in one case, and the alleged intention in another, be connected in the way of "conspiracy" with Rochford, Norreys, or the other prisoners in the Tower. This poisoning theory was therefore dropt.

6. Taking a lower line, Audley elected to stand by his "conspiracy" to compass the King's death. Norreys was to be the chief offender, since the King expected him to yield in love if not in fear; and his imaginary intrigue with Anne was dated so far back as to support the plea that Elizabeth was his child! This method suited Chapuys, Norfolk, Suffolk, Exeter, and Montagu. If Elizabeth were degraded from her rank, the field would be thrown open to the families of all pretenders. Chapuys thought of Mary, Norfolk of Richmond. Suffolk saw an opening for his daughter Frances. Exeter and Montagu were males, and therefore might come in before these females. Exeter was a grandson of Edward the Fourth, Montagu a grandson of Clarence. Sweep out Elizabeth, the only legal heir, and each of these pretenders would have a chance; Mary the best of all, as Chapuys easily foresaw. Chapuys was assured that Norreys would be charged in such a way as to touch the birthright of Elizabeth, and one day he was told that things had gone so far that Cranmer had already given his sentence against Elizabeth as that prisoner's child! But this idea was abandoned also. If he tossed his horns about in private, Henry shrank from the unspeakable odium of proclaiming in a court of justice that "his entirely beloved wife"