] After pleading not guilty, the two men,
in face of the evidence and their own admissions, changed their plea to
guilty, and were promptly condemned to be drawn through London to Tyburn,
"and there hanged, cut down alive, disembowelled, and, they still living,
their bowels burnt, the bodies then to be beheaded and quartered:" a
brutal sentence that was carried out to the letter in Derham's case only,
on the 10th December, Culpeper being beheaded.

[Illustration: _KATHARINE HOWARD_

_From a portrait by an unknown artist in the National Portrait Gallery_]

Although the procedure had saved the King as much humiliation as possible,
the affair was a terrible blow to his self-esteem as well as to his
affections; for he seems to have been really fond of his young wife.
Chapuys, writing on the 3rd December, says that he shows greater sorrow at
her loss than at any of his previous matrimonial misfortunes. "It is like
the case of the woman who cried more bitterly at the loss of her tenth
husband than for all the rest put together, though they had all been good
men; but it was because she had never buried one before without being sure
of the next. As yet, it does not seem that he has any one else in
view."[223] The French ambassador, a few days later, wrote that "the grief
of the King was so great that it was believed that it had sent him mad;
for he had called suddenly for a sword with which to kill the Queen whom
he had loved so much. Sometimes sitting in Council he suddenly calls for
horses, without saying whither he would go. Sometimes he will say
irrelevantly that that wicked woman had never had such delight in her
incontinency as she should have torture in her death; and then, finally,
he bursts into tears, bewailing his misfortune in meeting such
ill-conditioned wives, and blaming his Council for this last
mischief."[224]

In the meanwhile Henry sought such distraction as he might at Oatlands and
other country places, solaced by music and mummers, whilst Norfolk, in
grief and apprehension, lurked on his own lands, and Gardiner kept a firm
hand upon affairs. The discomfiture of the Howards, who had brought about
the Catholic reaction, gave new hope to the Protestants that the wheel of
fate was turning in their favour. Anne of Cleves, they began to whisper,
had been confined of a "fair boy"; "and whose should it be but the King's
Majesty's, begotten when she was at Hampton Court?" This rumour, which the
King, apparent