o agonies of fear and rage lest his
enemies or his subjects should displace him who was excommunicated and
set her, whom all Catholics regarded as undergoing a martyrdom, on
his throne. He feared her sometimes so much that it was only Cromwell
that saved her from death. Cromwell would spend hours of his busy days
in the long window of her work room, urging her to submission,
dilating upon the powers that might be hers, studying her tastes to
devise bribes for her. It was with that aim, because her whole days in
her solitude were given to the learned writers, that he had sought out
for her Magister Udal as a companion and preceptor who might both
please her with his erudition and induce her to look kindly upon the
New Learning and a more lax habit of mind. But she never thanked
Cromwell. Whilst he talked she remained frozen and silent. At times,
under the spur of a cold rage, she said harsh things of himself and
her father, calling upon the memory of her mother and the wrongs her
Church had suffered--and, on his departing, before he had even left
the room she would return, frigidly and without change of face, to the
book upon her desk.

So the Privy Seal talked to her by the window for the fiftieth time.
Katharine Howard saw, before the high reading pulpit, the back of a
man in the long robes of a Master of Arts. He held a pen in his hand
and turned over his shoulder at her a face thin, brown, humorous and
deprecatory, as if he were used to bearing chiding with philosophy.

'Magister Udal!' she uttered.

He motioned with his mouth for her to be silent, but pointed with the
feather of his quill to a line of a little book that lay upon the
pulpit near his elbow. She came closer to read:

'_Circumspectatrix cum oculis emisitiis!_' and written above it in a
minute hand: 'A spie with eyes that peer about and stick out.'

He pointed over his shoulder at the Lord Privy Seal.

'How poor this room is, for a King's daughter!' she said, without much
dropping her voice.

He hissed: 'Hush! hush!' with an appearance of terror, and whispered,
forming the words with his lips rather than uttering them: 'How fared
you and your house in the nonce?'

'I have read in many texts,' she answered, 'to pass the heavy hours.'

He spoke then, aloud and with an admonitory air:

'Never say the heavy hours--for what hours are heavy that can be spent
with the ancient writers for companions?'

She avoided his reproachful eyes with:

'My f