ry.

Like the lily,
That was mistress of the field, and flourish'd,
I'll hang my head and perish.

But these, I believe, are the only instances of imagery throughout; for,
in general, her language is plain and energetic. It has the strength and
simplicity of her character, with very little metaphor and less wit.

In approaching the last scene of Katherine's life, I feel as if about to
tread within a sanctuary, where nothing befits us but silence and tears;
veneration so strives with compassion, tenderness with awe.[108]

We must suppose a long interval to have elapsed since Katherine's
interview with the two cardinals. Wolsey was disgraced, and poor Anna
Bullen at the height of her short-lived prosperity. It was Wolsey's fate
to be detested by both queens. In the pursuance of his own selfish and
ambitious designs, he had treated both with perfidy; and one was the
remote, the other the immediate, cause of his ruin.[109]

The ruffian king, of whom one hates to think, was bent on forcing
Katherine to concede her rights, and illegitimize her daughter, in favor
of the offspring of Anna Bullen: she steadily refused, was declared
contumacious, and the sentence of divorce pronounced in 1533. Such of
her attendants as persisted in paying her the honors due to a queen were
driven from her household; those who consented to serve her as
princess-dowager, she refused to admit into her presence; so that she
remained unattended, except by a few women, and her gentleman usher,
Griffith. During the last eighteen months of her life, she resided at
Kimbolton. Her nephew, Charles V., had offered her an asylum and
princely treatment; but Katherine, broken in heart, and declining in
health, was unwilling to drag the spectacle of her misery and
degradation into a strange country: she pined in her loneliness,
deprived of her daughter, receiving no consolation from the pope, and no
redress from the emperor. Wounded pride, wronged affection, and a
cankering jealousy of the woman preferred to her, (which though it never
broke out into unseemly words, is enumerated as one of the causes of her
death,) at length wore out a feeble frame. "Thus," says the chronicle,
"Queen Katherine fell into her last sickness; and though the king sent
to comfort her through Chapuys, the emperor's ambassador, she grew worse
and worse; and finding death now coming, she caused a maid attending on
her to write to the king to thi