Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, had builded him a new tennis court in where his stables had been before poverty had caused him to sell the major part of his horseflesh. He called to him the Duke of Norfolk, who was of the Papist cause, and Sir Henry Wriothesley who was always betwixt and between, according as the cat jumped, to see this new building of his that was made of a roofed-in quadrangle where the stable doors were bricked up or barred to make the grille.
But though Norfolk and Wriothesley came very early in the afternoon, while it was yet light, to his house, they wasted most of the daylight hours in talking of things indifferent before they went to their inspection of this court. They stood talking in a long gallery beneath very high windows, and there were several chaplains and young priests and young gentlemen with them, and most of the talk was of a bear-baiting that there should be in Smithfield come Saturday. Sir Henry Wriothesley matched seven of his dogs against the seven best of the Duke's, that they should the longer hold to the bear once they were on him, and most of the young gentlemen wagered for Sir Henry's dogs that he had bred from a mastiff out of Portugal.
But when this talk had mostly died down, and when already twilight had long fallen, the Bishop said--
'Come, let us visit this new tennis place of mine. I think I shall show you somewhat that you have not before seen.'
He bade, however, his gentlemen and priests to stay where they were, for they had all many times seen the court or building. When he led the way, prelatical and black, for the Duke and Wriothesley, into the lower corridors of his house, the priests and young gentlemen bowed behind his back, one at the other.
In the courtyard there were four hounds of a heavy and stocky breed that came bounding and baying all round them, so that it was only by vigilance that Gardiner could save Wriothesley's shins, for he was a man that all dogs and children hated.
'Sirs,' the Bishop said, 'these dogs that ye see and hear will let no man but me--not even my grooms or stablemen--pass this yard. I have bred them to that so I may be secret when I will.'
He set the key in the door that was in the bottom wall of the court.
'There is no other door here save that which goes into the stable where the grille is. There I have a door to enter and fetch out the balls that pass there.'
In the court itself it was absolute blackness.
'I trow we may talk very well without lights,' he said. 'Come into this far corner.'
Yet, though there was no fear of being overheard, each of these three stole almost on tiptoe and held his breath, and in the dark and shadowy place they made a more dark and more shadowy patch with their heads all close together.
Suddenly it was as if the Bishop dropped the veil that covered his passions.
'I may well build tennis courts,' he said, and his voice had a ring of wild and malignant passion. 'I may well build courts for tennis play. Nothing else is left for me to do.'
In the blackness no word came from his listeners.
'You too may do the like,' the Bishop said. 'But I would you do it quickly, for soon neither the one nor the other of you but will be stripped so bare that you shall not have enough to buy balls with.'
The Duke made an impatient sound like a drawing in of his breath, but still he spoke no word.
'I tell you, both of you,' the Bishop's voice came, 'that all of us have been fooled. Who was it that helped to set on high this one that now presses us down? I did! I!...
'It was I that called the masque at my house where first the King did see her. It was I that advised her how to bear herself. And what gratitude has been shown me? I have been sent to sequester myself in my see; I have been set to gnaw my fingers as they had been old bones thrown to a dog. Truly, no juicy meats have been my share. Yet it was I set this woman where she sits....'
'I too have my griefs,' the Duke of Norfolk's voice came.
'And I, God wot,' came Wriothesley's.
'Why, you have been fooled,' Gardiner's voice; 'and well you know it. For who was it that sent you both, one after the other, into France thinking that you might make a match between the Lady Royal and the Duke of Orleans?--Who but the Queen?--For well she knew that ye loved the French and their King as they had been your brothers. And well we know now that never in the mind of her, nor in that of the King whom she bewitches and enslaves, was there any thought save that the Lady Royal should be wedded to Spain. So ye are fooled.'
He let his voice sink low; then he raised it again--
'Fooled! Fooled! Fooled! You two and I. For who of your friends the French shall ever believe again word that you utter. And all your goods and lands this Queen will have for the Church, so that she may have utter power with a parcel of new shavelings, that will not withstand her. So all the land will come in to her leash.... We are fooled and ruined, ye and I alike.'
'Well, we know this,' the Duke's voice said distastefully. 'You have no need to rehearse griefs that too well we feel. There is no lord, either of our part or of the other, that would not have her down.'
'But what will ye do?' Gardiner said.
'Nothing may we do!' the voice of Wriothesley with its dismal terror came to their ears. 'The King is too firmly her Highness's man.'
'Her "Highness,"' the Bishop mocked him with a bitter scorn. 'I believe you would yet curry favour with this Queen of straw.'
'It is a man's province to be favourable in the eyes of his Prince,' the buried voice came again. 'If I could win her favour I would. But well ye know there is no way.'
'Ye ha' mingled too much with Lutheran swine,' the Bishop said. 'Now it is too late for you.'
'So it is,' Wriothesley said. 'I think you, Bishop, would have done it too had you been able to make your account of it.'
The Bishop snarled invisibly.
But the voice of Norfolk came malignantly upon them.
'This is all of a piece with your silly schemings. Did I come here to hear ye wrangle? It is peril enow to come here. What will ye do?'
'I will make a pact with him of the other side?' the Bishop said.
'Misery!' the Duke said; 'did I come here to hear this madness? You and Cranmer have sought each other's heads this ten years. Will you seek his aid now? What may he do? He is as rotten a reed as thou or Wriothesley.'
The Bishop cried suddenly with a loud voice--
'Ho, there! Come you out!'
Norfolk set his hand to his sword and so did Wriothesley. It was in both their minds, as it were one thought, that if this was a treason of the Bishop's he should there die.
From the blackness of the wall sides where the grille was there came the sound of a terroring lock and a creaking door.
'God!' Norfolk said; 'who is this?'
There came the sound of breathing of one man who walked with noiseless shoes.
'Have you heard enow to make you believe that these lords' hearts are true to the endeavour of casting the Queen down?'
'I have heard enow,' a smooth voice said. 'I never thought it had been otherwise.'
'Who is this?' Wriothesley said. 'I will know who this is that has heard us.'
'You fool,' Gardiner said; 'this man is of the other side.'
'They have come to you!' Norfolk said.
'To whom else should we come,' the voice answered.
A subtler silence of agitation and thought was between these two men. At last Gardiner said--
'Tell these lords what you would have of us?'
'We would have these promises,' the voice said; 'first, of you, my Lord Duke, that if by our endeavours your brother's child be brought to a trial for unchastity you will in no wise aid her at that trial with your voice or your encouragement.'
'A trial!' and 'Unchastity!' the Duke said. 'This is a winter madness. Ye know that my niece--St Kevin curse her for it--is as chaste as the snow.'
'So was your other niece, Anne Boleyn, for all you knew, yet you dogged her to death,' Gardiner said. 'Then you plotted with Papists; now it is the turn of the Lutherans. It is all one, so we are rid of this pest.'
'Well, I will promise it,' the Duke said. 'Ye knew I would. It was not worth while to ask me.'
'Secondly,' the voice said, 'of you, my Lord Duke, we would have this service: that you should swear your niece is a much older woman than she looks. Say, for instance, that she was in truth not the eleventh but the second child of your brother Edmund. Say that, out of vanity, to make herself seem more forward with the learned tongues when she was a child, she would call herself her younger sister that died in childbed.'
'But wherefore?' the Duke said.
'Why,' Gardiner answered, 'this is a very subtle scheme of this gentleman's devising. He will prove against her certain lewdnesses when she was a child in your mother's house. If then she was a child of ten or so, knowing not evil from good, this might not undo her. But if you can make her seem then eighteen or twenty it will be enough to hang her.'
Norfolk reflected.
'Well, I will say I heard that of her age,' he said; 'but ye had best get nurses and women to swear to these things.'
'We have them now,' the voice said. 'And it will suffice if your Grace will say that you heard these things of old of your brother. For your Grace will judge this woman.'
'Very willingly I will,' Norfolk said; 'for if I do not soon, she will utterly undo both me and all my friends.'
He reflected again.
'Those things will I do and more yet, if you will.'
'Why, that will suffice,' the voice said. It took a new tone in the darkness.
'Now for you, Sir Henry Wriothesley,' it said. 'These simple things you shall promise. Firstly, since you have the ear of the Mayor of London you shall advise him in no way to hinder certain meetings of Lutherans that I shall tell you of later. And, though it is your province so to do, you shall in no wise hinder a certain master printer from printing what broadsides and libels he will against the Queen. For it is essential, if this project is to grow and flourish, that it shall be spread abroad that the Queen did bewitch the King to her will on that night at Pontefract that you remember, when she had her cousin in her bedroom. So broadsides shall be made alleging that by sorcery she induced the King to countenance his own shame. And we have witnesses to swear that it was by appointment, not by chance, that she met with Culpepper upon the moorside. But all that we will have of you is that you will promise these two things--that the Lutherans may hold certain meetings and the broadsides be printed.'
'Those I will promise,' came in Wriothesley's buried voice.
'Then I will no more of you,' the other's words came. They heard his hands feeling along the wall till he came to the door by which he had entered. The Bishop followed him, to let him out by a little door he had had opened for that one night, into the street.
When he came back to the other two and unfolded to them what was the scheme of the Archbishop's man, they agreed that it was a very good plan. Then they fell to considering whether it should not serve their turn to betray this plan at once to the Queen. But they agreed that, if they preserved the Queen, they would be utterly ruined, as they were like to be now, whereas, if it succeeded, they would be much the better off. And, even if it failed, they lost nothing, for it would not readily be believed that they had aided Lutherans, and there were no letters or writings.
So they agreed to abide honourably by their promises--and very certain they were that if clamour enough could be raised against the Queen, the King would be bound into putting her away, though it were against his will.
