to-morrow,
his Highness would rather it were Reginald Pole.'

Katharine understood very well that he was setting before her the
enormity of her offence: she stood still with her lips parted. He went
on rehearsing the crimes of the cardinal: how he had been educated by
the King's high bounty: how the King had offered him the Archbishopric
of York: how he had the rather fled to the Bishop of Rome: how he had
written a book, accusing the King of such crimes and heresies that all
Christendom had cried out upon his Highness. Even then this Pole was
in Paris with a bull from the Bishop of Rome calling upon the Emperor
and the King of France to fall together upon their lord.

Katharine gasped:

'I would well he were dead. But not by my cousin. They should take my
cousin and slay him.'

Cromwell had arranged this scene very carefully: for his power over
the King fell away daily, and that day he had had to tell Baumbach,
the Saxish ambassador, that there was no longer any hope of the King's
allying himself with the Schmalkaldner league. Therefore he was the
more hot to discover a new Papist treason. The suggestion of Viridus
that Katharine might be made either to discover or to invent one had
filled him with satisfaction. There was no one who could be more
believed if she could be ground down into swearing away the life of
her uncle or any other man of high station. And to grind her down thus
needed only many threats. He infused gradually more terror into his
narrow eyes, and spoke more gravely:

'Neither do I desire the death of this traitor so hotly as doth his
Highness. For there be these foul lies--and have you not heard the
ancient fool's prophecy that was made over thirty years ago: "That one
with a Red Cap brought up from low degree should rule all the land
under the King. (I trow ye know who that was.) And that after much
mixing the land should by another Red Cap be reconciled or else
brought to utter ruin"?'

'I am new to this place,' Katharine said; 'I never heard that saying.
God help me, I wish this man were dead.'

His voice grew the more deep as he saw that she was the more daunted:

'Aye: and whether the land be reconciled to the Bishop of Rome, or be
brought to utter ruin, the one and the other signify the downfall of
his Highness.'

The Chancellor interrupted piously:

'God save us. Whither should we all flee then!'

'It is not,' Viridus commented dryly, 'that his Highness or my lord
here do fear