From that day a change was worked in the girl. She no longer felt that her coronation was a beautiful, impending, inevitable thing, just around the corner of events, which the next change of fortune would sweep towards her: she realized it was the price of battle and she must wage that battle alone. There were frightful odds against her. Frightful. And she had nothing to face them with but Henry's favor, and she knew that there were rivals ready to dispute that favor desperately on the first hint of its slackening.

Anne threw herself heart and soul into the difficult game. Her ambitions obsessed her. Her delight in the dances and masques and hunts, whose gayeties had so absorbed her in the past, became secondary to her appreciation of them as distractions for Henry. She saw how much of the cardinal's success had depended on his keeping the king amused, and she gave herself up to revels, merrymaking, singing, dancing, jesting, with all the exuberant vitality of her three and twenty years. But she could not lose herself in these things at once. She remembered feverishly under all the present hilarity that she was playing for high stakes, and grew a little thin and trifles irritated her as never before.

She

Her anxiety concerning the cardinal increased. felt he was gaining ground. She was sure that he was intriguing with Eustache Chapuis, the Spanish Ambassador who had succeeded Mendoza, against her, and Henry's information from the English agents at Rome reported that he was in incessant correspondence with officials there. It was pretty evident from the pope's speeches that Wolsey had written him strongly against Anne. Norfolk and Wiltshire were harassed with a secret dread of his machinations. Their anxieties came to a head when it was discovered that Wolsey was

attempting now to reach the king directly and intrigue against his ministers; believing that Henry was impatient with the incapabilities of his advisers and was at a loss whither to turn, he sent agents who were secretly to offer the king the services of his archbishop. If these messengers had reached Henry and found him in a capricious mood the anxieties of Anne's relations would have been very well founded.

But the messengers had their own anxieties. They knew that the king was extremely unreliable in all his dealings and it would have been quite in accord with some of his other performances if he had disclosed their secret messages to his council and turned them over to its tender mercies. So they turned informers themselves and revealed their errand to the Duke of Norfolk.

He was immeasurably alarmed. This was proof of all he had dreaded. And nobody knew what other nets that wily and restless man was spinning from his archbishopric! In a panic the party against him set itself to find out, and by arresting Agostino, one of Wolsey's agents, and wringing a confession from him of intrigues with the French and Spanish ambassador and the pope, they secured enough fuel to fire the king's resentment again and orders were hastily given for his arrest on the charge of treason.

It was an astounding evidence to Anne of the irony of existence that it should fall to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, to arrest the cardinal. One of those luckless lovers he had so ruthlessly frustrated was the instrument of his disgrace and the other of his arrest! Life was a very curious thing.

Yet it was only the dramatic quality in the event that made its appeal to her; she felt avenged and avenged

in a climatic fashion, and her blood thrilled again to the spectacular nature of her career. Surely her life was strange!

But though she thought herself at twenty-three very old and experienced in the prodigious fantasies of existence, she appreciated none of the inevitable sadnesses of that fall she had assisted in precipitating; she felt the contrast but not the pathos of the cardinal's condition. When she heard how he had wept with his faithful usher, Cavendish, she listened with incredulous scorn. That was not the way to bear disaster! Weeping with his servants-! Or perhaps he but feigned to weep. She suspected him of any duplicity. He was her enemy; he still menaced her and hers, even though arrested. For Henry had declared that he should be tried for his treason in London, and Heaven, to whom all things were presumably revealed, alone knew what would ensue when the king and the cardinal were brought face to face again. . . . There would be more tears on Wolsey's part, perhaps, eloquent speeches, artfully extolling the king, bringing to mind the long years of their association, their friendship, and then suddenly Henry, fired by his passion for the spectacular, would spring to the side of the weeping man who would sink to his knees. . . . Henry would raise him. ... . Oh, Anne's vivid imagination saw the performance very clearly in the watches of some sleepless hours. And Norfolk and Wiltshire were seeing it, too. They urged her to stiffen Henry against the cardinal. But Anne was already aware of the subtle and disconcerting traits of Henry's capriciousness. He might swallow coarse flattery wholesale and yet he was the shrewdest man in the world to know when he was being delicately approached; he appeared to divine in advance the position that he was to be manipulated to take and would sheer

off absolutely from it. So Anne felt that it was better to wait for the event.

But the event never came. Instead an old man, taken ill on his way to trial at London, was hurried to the monastery gates at Leicester.

"Father Abbott," he said, as weakly he tottered from his mule, "I come to lay my bones among you."

And three days later, on the twenty-ninth of November, he turned his graying face to the wall.

"If I had served my God as I have served my king," the words came gasping from his lips, "He would not thus have given me over in my old age."

He did not speak again.

And the news was borne to Lady Anne Rochford that the man who had crossed her path with such disaster to them both, the man who had frustrated her young love and destined her for a passing toy, the man who had impeded her ambition and concentrated on her ruin, had passed beyond all power of troubling her. He who had imposed his will on England more imperiously than any within its borders, who had been more hated, more feared, and more flattered than any other, was gone forever from the theater of his activities.

To Anne it was a supremest blessing. She knew from the very poignancy of relief how harassing had been that constant edge of uneasiness. Now it was gone. Her old enemy was no more. Dead! . . ." From that inn no guest returneth," ran the old song and the girl sang it in gay relief. The mysterious cessation of the human spirit she accepted with literal incuriosity. He was dead; that was all. He could trouble her no longer.

And that night the Earl of Wiltshire, in the exuberance of his relief, gave an uproarious masque which portrayed the cardinal's progress through hell.

I

CHAPTER XXII

THE MARCHIONESS OF PEMBROKE

'F on that windy March day, when Anne Boleyn, with Henry on the hill, had looked over Epping forest to far away London spires and beheld in ambitious vision the acclaiming city greeting her as queen, she could have seen how tortuous and baffling was the ascent that she must climb towards her dream city, she might have taken a longer moment's thought before she flung Henry her high-confidenced yes. Could she have seen the uneasy hours, the anxious plans, the sharp reversals of hope she was to know! Every corner turned seemed but to reveal a new corner. Fate had always some new, tricksy card to play against her.

Nearly five years and a half had passed since that day in Epping forest, and it was two years since Wolsey had died, and still Anne's position remained practically the same, a strange pinnacle of anomalous triumph and thwarted hope. In her moments of despondency she told herself that she had not advanced one inch. She had scored tremendously, to be sure, she had remained at court in spite of all the European agitation against her and all the pope's fulminations, and Catherine and Mary had been sent away, but after all, that was merely holding her own and the throne seemed as far away as ever. And now as she sat at the king's side one September night in 1532 at a banquet given in honor, not alas! of her coronation, but of her elevation to the title of