ailing years is more
prone to women than before.'

'Then he may go a-wenching.' He began to speak with a weary passion.
To cast away the Lady Anne now were a madness. It would be to stand
without a friend before all nations armed to their downfall. This King
would do no jot to lose a patch upon his sovereignty.

Cranmer sought to speak.

'His Highness is always hot o'nights,' Cromwell kept on. 'It is in his
nature so to be. But by morning the German princes shall make him
afraid again and the Lutherans of this goodly realm. Those mad swine
our friends!'

'He will burn seven of them on to-morrow sennight,' Cranmer said.

'Nay! I shall enlarge them on Wednesday.'

Cranmer shivered. 'They grow very insolent. I am afraid.'

Cromwell answered with a studied nonchalance:

'My bones tell me it shall be an eastward wind. It shall not rain on
the new Queen's bridals.' He drank up his warm wine and brushed the
crumbs from the furs round his neck.

'You are a very certain man,' the Archbishop said.

Going along the now dark corridors he was afraid that some ruffling
boy might spring upon him from the shadows. Norfolk, as the Earl
Marshal, had placed his lodgings in a very distant part of the palace
to give him long journeys that, telling upon his asthma, made him
arrive breathless and convulsed at the King's rooms when he was sent
for.

III

The shadow of the King kept hands from throats in the palace, but
grooms were breaking each others' heads in the stables till towards
morning. They fought about whether it were lawful to eat fish on a
Friday, and just after daybreak a gentleman's oarsman from
Sittingbourne had all his teeth to swallow for asserting that the
sacrament should be administered in the two kinds. The horses were
watered by ostlers who hummed the opprobrious song about Privy Seal,
called 'Crummock.'

In the hillocks and lawns of the park round the palace Lutherans
waited all night to welcome their Queen. They lit small fires on the
turf and, standing round them, sang triumphal hymns. A Princess was
coming from Cleves, a Lutheran; the day-spring from on high was
visiting them; soon, soon now, the axe and the flail should be given
into their hands.

In the dawn their boats could be seen pulling like water-beetles all
across the pallid river from the Essex shores. They clustered in grey
masses round the common steps.

A German horse merchant from the City pulled a putrid cat out of the
river mud