t that after what he hath done to-night it
shall not be easy, but we may accomplish it--if before this letter is
sent we may show him that all his land cries out at him and mocks him
with a great laughter because of his wife's evil ways--why then, though
in his heart he may believe her as innocent as you or I do now, it shall
not be long before he shall put her away from him. Maybe he shall send
her to the block.'

'God help me,' Cranmer said. 'What a hellish scheme is this.'

He pondered for a while, standing upright and frailly thrusting his hand
into his bosom.

'You shall never get the King so to believe,' he said; 'this is an idle
invention. I will none of it.'

'Why, it may be done, I do believe,' Lascelles said, 'and greatly it
shall help us.'

'No, I will none of it,' the Archbishop said. 'It is a foul scheme.
Besides, you must have many witnesses.'

'I have some already,' Lascelles said, 'and when we come to London Town
I shall have many more. It was not for nothing that the Great Privy Seal
commended me.'

'But to make the King,' Cranmer uttered, as if he were aghast and
amazed, 'to make the King--this King who knoweth that his wife hath done
no wrong--who knoweth it so well as to-night he hath proven--to make
_him_, him, to put her away ... why, the tiger is not so fell, nor the
Egyptian worm preyeth not on its kind. This is an imagination so
horrible----'

'Please it your Grace,' Lascelles said softly, 'what beast or brute hath
your Grace ever seen to betray its kind as man will betray brother, son,
father, or consort?'

The Archbishop raised his hands above his head.

'What lesser bull of the herd, or lesser ram, ever so played traitor to
his leader as Brutus played to Caesar Julius? And these be times less
noble.'

PART FOUR

THE END OF THE SONG

I

The Queen was at Hampton, and it was the late autumn. She had been sad
since they came from Pontefract, for it had seemed more than ever
apparent that the King's letter to Rome must be ever delayed in the
sending. Daily, at night, the King swore with great oaths that the
letter must be sent and his soul saved. He trembled to think that if
then he died in his bed he must be eternally damned, and she added her
persuasions, such as that each soul that died in his realms before that
letter was sent went before the Throne of Mercy unshriven and
unhouselled, so that their burden of souls grew very great. And in the
midnights, the King wou