eople wondered to see his head so high, for already it was
known that the King had turned sick at the sight of his bedfellow that
should be. And indeed the palace was only awake at that late hour
because of that astounding news, dignitaries lingering in each other's
quarters to talk of it, whilst in the passages their waiting men
supplied gross commentaries.

He entered his door. In the ante-room two men in his livery removed
his outer furs deftly so as not to hinder his walk. Before the fire of
his large room a fair boy knelt to pull off his jewelled gloves, and
Hanson, one of his secretaries, unclasped from his girdle the corded
bag that held the Privy Seal. He laid it on a high stand between two
tall candles of wax upon the long table.

The boy went with the gloves and Hanson disappeared silently behind
the dark tapestry in the further corner. Cromwell was meditating above
a fragment of flaming wood that the fire had spat out far into the
tiled fore-hearth. He pressed it with his foot gently towards the
blaze of wood in the chimney.

His plump hands were behind his back, his long upper lip ceaselessly
caressed its fellow, moving as one line of a snake's coil glides above
another. The January wind crept round the shadowy room behind the
tapestry, and as it quivered stags seemed to leap over bushes, hounds
to spring in pursuit, and a crowned Diana to move her arms, taking an
arrow from a quiver behind her shoulder. The tall candles guarded the
bag of the Privy Seal, they fluttered and made the gilded heads on the
rafters have sudden grins on their faces that represented kings with
flowered crowns, queens with their hair combed back on to pillows, and
pages with scolloped hats. Cromwell stepped to an aumbry, where there
were a glass of wine, a manchet of bread, and a little salt. He began
to eat, dipping pieces of bread into the golden salt-cellar. The face
of a queen looked down just above his head with her eyes wide open as
if she were amazed, thrusting her head from a cloud.

'Why, I have outlived three queens,' he said to himself, and his round
face resignedly despised his world and his times. He had forgotten
what anxiety felt like because the world was so peopled with
blunderers and timid fools full of hatred.

The marriage with Cleves was the deathblow to the power of the Empire.
With the Protestant Princes armed behind his back, the imbecile called
Charles would never dare to set his troops on board ship in