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sharp shadows, and the bees hummed loud, or was it the blood throbbing in her ears?
    Then, with a glance to right and left of her, she picked up her skirts and ran, ran into the Palace to her stepmother and gasped out what she had seen.
    Catherine Parr sat stunned; she neither moved nor spoke nor wept. Bess despaired. No silent grief would move the King. At last, through blue lips, Catherine moaned, ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’
    Bess told her.
    ‘You must cry, cry, cry, and loud; so that he’ll hear, so that he can’t hear anything else. Do it in the room next his. Shriek. Be hysterical, mad. Go on for hours and hours and hours.’
    Catherine did. A clamour of weeping and howling next door disturbed the King; he sent to stop it, but it went on; he sent to ask the reason for it, and was told the Queen was distressed because she feared she had displeased him.
    That brought him himself; he told her he could not bear her to cry, which was true, especially after three hours. But he spoke kindly; he got her to stop; then, after a little more comforting, he went on with their last theological argument. But the mouse avoided the cat’s paw this time; his wife would not discuss religion; she referred it and all other questions to his omnipotent wisdom; if she had ever seemed to do otherwise, it had only been to pass the time and take his mind off his bad leg.
    ‘Then, sweetheart, we are perfect friends again!’ said Henry; and the Chancellor was sent packing with a flood of abuse when he called about the Queen’s arrest. There was no arrest. The crisis had passed, and Henry yawned, when he did not swear at his bad leg. Perfect friendship is not as stimulating as discussion.
    Life was growing dull and depressing. Old enemies were dying, and that is often worse than the death of old friends. Martin Luther died, far away in Germany. When Henry was a brilliant young man he had written a theological treatise confuting Luther’s heresies, and the low fellow had replied with his usual bad taste. ‘Squire Harry wishes to be God,’ wrote the miner’s son, ‘and do what he pleases.’
    The Pope, on the other hand, had shown his appreciation by giving Henry his title ‘Defender of the Faith’: ‘F.D.’ He thought of putting it on all the coins of his realm. Now there was no one to confute – except the Pope, whose latest title for him was the ‘Son of Perdition and Satan.’
    Worse even than Luther’s death, they said François I of France was dying. Ever since he could remember, Henry had been an envious rival, a frequent foe, an occasional boon companion of Foxnose François. It was impossible to imagine life without this peppery stimulus.
    Worse still, François was three years younger than Henry, was as tall and strong, had lived as well (though it was doubtful whether he or any other man had ever eaten as much), and yet here he was, petering out, surely long before his appointed span of years, like a feeble old man, a premature death’s-head warning at the feast of life. For if life were not still a feast, what was it? Luther was dead, François might be dying, and he wasn’t feeling very well himself; but thank God there was still good eating and drinking, and not all his doctors could keep him from it, especially when it came to the Christmas and Twelfth Night feasts.
    All the Royal Family were together for these festivals, and most of the cousins too, with one notable and, to Henry,infuriating omission. The Queen of Scots, four years old this December, was still absent from the hospitable board of her great-uncle who had offered his only son in betrothal to this fatherless brat, Queen of such a beggarly kingdom that his Ambassador had nearly burst out laughing at the poverty of the baby’s coronation in Stirling.
    But there was one bit of news from Scotland that had put Henry in high good humour; the new Scots leaders of the Reformed Religion had at last succeeded in murdering the great Cardinal Beton, the