• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Bill covered more than just the Queen’s high treason. It gave Parliamentary sanction to the trial and condemnation of Culpepper and Dereham and the sentence of misprision passed against the Howards. It also made it a crime, in the future, for any unchaste woman to conceal her state from the King, once he showed an interest in marrying her.

This latter made me a laughingstock. Jokes were circulated to the effect that no woman in the kingdom would be eligible; that only a widow could pass the test; that the competition for my hand would be negligible, and so on. If I had cared any longer about such things, I would have been offended. But I did not intend to marry again. Women disgusted me, and I counted myself fortunate to be at last beyond the need of them.

As I had grown older, my needs grew fewer and fewer. At one time it had been important to me that I have a powerful body and a pretty wife. Both these things were now taken away, and their possibilities were gone. I had wanted riches and beautiful palace furnishings, but now I had them and they delighted me not. Building Nonsuch Palace was a chore, not a pleasure, and I decided on the instant not even to bother to finish it.

All I wanted now was the respect and love of my subjects, and a modicum of health. Dwindling needs, but fiercely coveted nonetheless.

On February twelfth, Catherine was transported by water from Syon House to the Tower.

I saw them when they made their way upstream, past my windows at Whitehall. A doleful little flotilla, the Queen’s boat being guarded between a galley full of Privy Councillors in the fore, and a barge with the Duke of Suffolk and his soldiers to the rear. Catherine’s vessel was curtained and closed and—Jesu be thanked—I was unable to glimpse her, although I tried. Darkness was closing in, as I had forbidden them to start until I was certain that in the short winter afternoon London Bridge would not be reached before total darkness enveloped it. I would not have Catherine see Dereham’s and Culpepper’s heads impaled above the bridge, and I knew she would look for them, even as I had looked for her as she passed.

The barge stopped at Traitor’s Gate, and Catherine, dressed all in black, was taken from the water-stairs to her prison chamber. Her short cold journey was over.

There were curiosity-seekers on the landing, all gaping at her.One of them wrote this ballad:

Thus as I sat, the tears within my eyen

Of her the wreck, whilst I did debate,

Before my face me thought I saw this Queen,

No whit, as I her left, Got wot, of late,

But all bewept in black and poor estate.

“To be a Queen fortune did me prefer,

Flourishing in youth with beauty fresh and pure,

Whom nature made shine equal with the stars,

And to reign in felicity with joy and pleasure,

Wanting no thing that love might me procure,

So much beloved far, far beyond the rest,

With my Sovereign Lordhe pay of my decay

That I shall get no pompous funeral,

Nor of my black, no man the charge shall pay;

Save that some one perchance may hap to say,

‘Such a one there was, alas! and that was pity

That she herself disdained with such untruth.’ ”

She appealed to poets. All bewept in black and poor estate.... Seeing her mounting those stairs had snared yet another man’s heart, got her another partisan.

That was her last outside appearance. Within the Tower there was none to be swayed by her beauty and wistfulness.

That evening she made a startling request: that a block be brought to her cell so she could practise laying her head upon it. She was determined to make a pretty showing before the assembled witnesses on the morrow. I was told she practised daintily upon the thing for upwards of an hour, approaching it from many different angles and laying her head sideways, left and right, and hanging straight down, enquiring of her unhappy attendants which made the better composition.

And how did I pass that night? I lay awake all through it, and in February, the nights are long. It had been night already when Catherine reached the Tower, and it would be