Part 12

Catharine afterwards removed to the Bishop of Lincoln’s palace of Bungen. By the king’s orders, she was deprived of most of her servants, because she would be waited on by no one who did not address her as queen. She was next removed to Kimbolton Castle, though Henry’s first orders had been to take her to Fotheringay Castle, a place notorious for its bad air. But Catharine had declared that she would not go there “unless drawn with ropes,” and so she had been sent to Kimbolton.

King Henry also withheld her income, due from her jointure as Arthur’s widow; and notwithstanding the noble portion which she had brought as her dower, she was allowed to suffer for the very necessaries of life, and even a new gown was obtained on trust, as her will shows. When one of her servants, in a rage at her inhuman treatment, execrated the perfidious Anne, Catharine gently chided her, saying: “Hold, hold! curse her not, for in a short time you will have good reason to pity her!”

As death rapidly approached the heart-broken Catharine, she welcomed the summons as a joyful release from her earthly unutterable woe. A few days before she expired, she dictated the following touching words to the base husband who had so atrociously wronged her.

“My Lord and Dear Husband: I commend me unto you. The hour of my death draweth fast on, and my case being such, the tender love I owe you forceth me with a few words, to put you in remembrance of the health and safeguard of your soul, which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and tendering of your own body, for which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many cares. For my part I do pardon you all, yea, I do wish and devoutly pray God that He will also pardon you. For the rest I commend unto you Mary, our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I heretofore desired. I entreat you also on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit a year’s pay more than their due, lest they should be unprovided for. Lastly do I vow that mine eyes desire you above all things.”

Catharine of Aragon breathed her last Jan. 7, 1536. Although it was said that King Henry shed tears over her last pathetic letter, which he received a short time before her death, yet it is also stated that he sent his lawyer to endeavor to seize upon her little property and try to escape paying her trifling legacies and debts.

On the day of her burial, King Henry wore mourning, but Anne Boleyn clothed herself and all her ladies in yellow, exclaiming, “Now am I queen! I am grieved, not that she is dead, but for the vaunting of the good end she made.”

Neither King Henry’s arrogant power nor Anne Boleyn’s pernicious influence could prevent the widespread and lasting effect of the Christian death-bed of Catharine. At length some dared to suggest to King Henry, “that it would become his greatness to rear a stately monument to her memory,” whereupon the beautiful abbey-church of Peterborough, where her remains were placed, was spared from destruction at the period of the suppression of the monasteries, and was endowed and established as the see of Peterborough.

The life of the woman who had supplanted her was short and full of sorrow. Three years only elapsed after Henry had married Anne Boleyn, and only four months after Catharine had sent him her dying forgiveness, when her exulting rival met her awful doom.

Already had King Henry cast his eyes upon Jane Seymour, and on the 15th of May, 1536, the sentence upon the queen was pronounced. Wolsey, who had suggested and aided the divorce of Catharine, had fallen under the disfavor of Anne, and through her influence he was overthrown and died in disgrace. And now Anne herself was to suffer the penalty of her wicked ambition. On the 19th of May, 1536, Anne Boleyn was led out upon Tower Green, and a blow from the executioner ended her eventful, but brief life.

“It is done!” cried the inhuman Henry, as he heard the cannon which was the signal that the tragedy was over; “that is an end of the matter. Unleash the dogs, and let us follow the stag.”

Thus ended the life of Anne Boleyn, and on the next day King Henry VIII. was married to his third wife, Jane Seymour.

QUEEN ELIZABETH, AND MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS.

A.D. 1533-1603.

“A crown Golden in show, is but a wreath of thorns, Brings dangers, troubles, cares, and sleepless nights To him who wears the regal diadem.”—MILTON.

“One speaks the glory of the British Queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At every word a reputation dies.”—POPE.

THE lives of Queen Elizabeth, and Mary, Queen of Scots, are so intimately associated, that a sketch of one includes that of the other; and in order to give the history of that epoch with greater conciseness and clearness without unnecessary repetition, a brief outline of each of their lives is here sketched.

For the sake of perspicuity, a few lines will be given to intervening events.

As we stated in the account of Catharine of Aragon, Henry VIII. married Jane Seymour upon the day following the execution of Anne Boleyn. Fortunately for Jane Seymour, death removed her during the succeeding year, rather than the fatal axe of her royal husband. She left an infant prince, who afterwards reigned a few short years as Edward VI.

In 1540 Henry VIII. married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. She had been represented as a great beauty by Cromwell, whom the king had raised to power. This Cromwell was a former servant of Cardinal Wolsey. But so great was Henry’s disgust upon beholding the awkward, ill-dressed, ill-featured, German princess, whom he had been inveigled into making his fourth bride, that though the marriage was perforce celebrated according to agreement, the unfortunate Cromwell was soon after disgraced and executed, and the sensitive conscience of the royal hypocrite was once again called into requisition to annul this ill-starred union. The beautiful face of Lady Catharine Howard no doubt quickened the stings of the conveniently tender conscience of this dissembling King of Knaves, who declared with pious cant that, having ascertained that Anne of Cleves had previously been betrothed to the Duke of Lorraine, his punctilious scruples would not allow him to retain her as his wife; whereupon King Henry, who waited not now for pope or bishop to annul his marriage vows and break his conjugal fetters, bestowed upon his divorced wife the title of “Adopted Sister,” which honor poor Anne of Cleves consented to receive, doubtless thanking heaven for having preserved her from the more terrible fate of some of the wives of this fickle consort.

By way of celebrating his fifth nuptials, King Henry sent to the stake Dr. Barnes and other heretics, while certain Catholics were quartered for having refused to take the oath of supremacy. This persecution of both parties occasioned the indignation of both Catholics and Protestants. “How do folks manage to live here?” exclaimed a Frenchman, in surprise at such fickle punishments. “The Papists are hanged, and the anti-Papists are burned,” was the answer.

But Catharine Howard had not been queen of England one year before her terrible doom overshadowed her. The king discovered certain condemnatory circumstances regarding the conduct of the queen previous to her marriage with him, and in a few short months Catharine also expiated her ambition and her supposed guilt upon the scaffold.

King Henry again resorted to his literary pursuits for solace, being for the time disgusted with his experiments in the matrimonial line, as before his hapless wives had also been, and forsooth with graver cause and better reason. “The king had better marry a widow,” said the people; and that idea seeming to have occurred also to the mind of his august majesty, in the year 1543, this “royal Bluebeard of English history” took for his sixth wife, the Lady Catherine Parr, the three months’ widow of Lord Latimer. She was an ardent partisan of the Protestant party, as well as learned and beautiful, but her skill in argument had well-nigh cost her dear.

To amuse her gouty, quarrelsome, would-be-literary and spasmodically-religious royal spouse, Queen Catherine ventured to argue with him upon certain points in theology. Finding himself worsted in the mental contest, the irate king exclaimed: “A good hearing this, when women become such clerks; and a thing much to my comfort to come in my old age to be taught by my wife.” And thereupon the new chancellor received the order to prepare the impeachment of the queen. But Catherine was warned in time of her coming doom and was possessed of self-control and tact sufficient for this emergency. When again the conversation turned upon religious subjects and the king questioned her upon some knotty point, she answered laughing: “I am not so foolish as not to know what I can understand when I possess the favor of having for a master and spouse a prince so learned in holy matters.”

“By St. Mary!” exclaimed the king; “it is not so, Kate; thou hast become a doctor.”

“And surely,” quoth the queen with mirthful looks, “I thought I noticed that such conversation diverted your Grace’s attention from your sufferings, and I ventured to discuss with you in the hope of making you forget your present infirmity.”

“Is it so, sweetheart?” replied the king; “then we are friends again, and it doth me more good than if I had received a hundred thousand pounds.”

The skilful and politic queen, well pleased to find her lovely head still resting on her own shoulders instead of on the executioner’s block, gave thanks to God for her deliverance, and henceforth left theology in peace. The orders given to the chancellor not having been revoked, the next day he arrived with forty men to arrest the queen, but King Henry, feigning surprise and anger, sent him away with much apparent displeasure.

Thus had Queen Catherine’s wit saved her neck, and the strong grip of the increasing gout now came to her rescue, and this Prince of Shams soon found himself held in the clutch of such a sturdy foe that neither qualms of conscience, nor tears, nor threats, could rid him at last of this dread consort of the tomb. Death claimed him, and the royal hypocrite was forced to yield to that relentless conqueror; and Henry VIII. faced the awful tribunal where no pretensions or shams could avail to hide the horrid deformity of his sin-polluted soul.

Upon the death of Henry VIII. in 1547, his son Edward was proclaimed king as Edward VI. But this young king died in 1553, at the age of sixteen years, and the mighty realm of England was left to the conflicting succession of two princesses, both of whom their royal father had stigmatized with the ban of illegitimacy. In this emergency the Protestants, headed by the Duke of Northumberland, determined to set up a new claimant.

The daughter-in-law of the Duke of Northumberland was Lady Jane Grey, who was the granddaughter by her mother’s side of Mary, queen-dowager of France, and sister of Henry VIII. Upon the death of young Edward, the Duke of Northumberland appeared before the gentle Lady Jane,—who was occupied in reading Plato in Greek,—and bowing his haughty knee in the presence of his daughter-in-law, he exclaimed:—

“The king, your cousin and our sovereign lord, has surrendered his soul to God; but before his death, and in order to preserve the kingdom from the infection of Popery, he resolved to set aside his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, declared illegitimate by an act of Parliament, and he has commanded us to proclaim your Grace as queen and sovereign to succeed him.”

Thereupon the poor, unwilling Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed queen, but dearly did she buy her ten days of sovereign power. Mary was speedily brought to London and declared queen, and for this innocent offence the gentle Lady Jane Grey afterwards met death upon the scaffold.

The reign of Mary was made infamously illustrious by the execution of Lady Jane Grey and many others, and the burning at the stake of the bishops Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer, and many other religious martyrs. So sanguinary was the reign of this queen that she is known in history as _Bloody Mary_.

Poor Catharine of Aragon! It were surely sad enough to have borne the many sorrows of her afflicted life, without having her only surviving child stamped with such a name of infamy. Mary was the first queen-regnant of England. The queens of England are classified as queen-regnant, queen-consort, or queen-dowager. The first alone reigns in her own right as sole sovereign of the realm. Of the forty queens of England beginning with Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, who was the first crowned consort, and ending with Victoria, the present queen of England, five were queens-regnant and thirty-five queens-consort.

Elizabeth Tudor, the daughter of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, was born in 1533, on the seventh of September. On the tenth of the same month, the royal babe of three days was christened with great pomp and ceremony.

The walls between Greenwich Palace and the Convent of the Grey Friars were hung with tapestry, and the way strewn with green rushes. The baptismal font was of silver; it was placed in the middle of the church, raised three steps high, the steps being covered with fine cloth, surmounted by a square canopy of crimson satin fringed with gold, enclosed by a rail covered with red ray, and guarded by several gentlemen with aprons and towels about their necks. Between the choir and body of the church a closet was erected with a pan of fire in it, that the child might be dismantled for the ceremony without taking cold. When all these things were ready, the child was brought into the hall of the palace, and the procession proceeded to the Grey Friars’ church. The citizens led the way, two and two; then followed gentlemen, esquires, and chaplains; after them the aldermen, then the mayor by himself, then the privy council in robes, then the gentlemen of the king’s chapel in copes, then barons, earls; then the Earl of Essex, bearing the gilt covered basin; after him the Marquis of Exeter with a taper of virgin wax, followed by the Earl of Dorset bearing the salt, and the Lady Mary of Norfolk, bearing the chrism, which was very rich with pearls and precious stones; lastly, came the Dowager-Duchess of Norfolk, bearing in her arms the royal infant, wrapped in a mantle of purple velvet, having a long train furred with ermine, which was borne by the Countess of Kent, assisted by the Earls of Wiltshire and Derby.

The Duchess was supported on the right side by the Duke of Norfolk, with his marshal’s rod, and on the left by the Duke of Suffolk—the only dukes then existing in the peerage of England—and a rich canopy was borne over the babe by the Lords Rochford, Hussey, and William and Thomas Howard.

At the church door the child was received by the Bishop of London, who performed the ceremony, and a grand cavalcade of bishops and mitred abbots. The sponsors were Archbishop Cranmer, the Dowager-Duchess of Norfolk, and the Marchioness of Dorset.

The future queen was carried to the font, and with the ceremony of the Catholic church christened Elizabeth, after her grandmother, Elizabeth of York; and that done, Garter King-at-Arms cried aloud, “God, of his infinite goodness, send prosperous life and long to the high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth. Then the trumpets sounded, the princess was carried up to the altar, the Gospel read over her, and she was confirmed by Archbishop Cranmer and presented with the following gifts:—A standing cup of gold by Cranmer; a similar cup fretted with pearls, by the Duchess of Norfolk; three gilt bowls, pounced, with covers, by the Marchioness of Dorset; and three standard bowls graven and gilt, with covers, by the Marchioness of Exeter. Then, after wafers and comfits had been served in abundance, the procession returned to the palace in the same order as it had set out, excepting that the Earl of Worcester, Lord Thomas Howard, the Lord Fitzwalter, and Sir John Dudley, preceded by the trumpeters, carried the gifts of the sponsors before the princess. Five hundred staff torches carried by the yeomen of the guard and the king’s servants, lit up the way homeward; and twenty gentlemen, bearing large wax flambeaux, walked on each side of the princess, who was carried to the queen’s chamber-door, when a flourish of trumpets sounded and the procession dispersed.”

The tiny infant, christened with all this ceremony, was created Princess of Wales when three months old; and when in her thirteenth month, an attempt was made to betroth her to the Duke D’Angoulême, the third son of Francis I., of France. Rather a strange proceeding concerning the spinster queen of England.

The tragic death of Anne Boleyn left this babe motherless at three years of age.

The first public ceremony in which Elizabeth participated was the christening of Edward the Sixth. She was then just four years of age, and was borne in the arms of the Earl of Hertford, brother to the queen, Jane Seymour. Elizabeth carried in her tiny hands the chrism for her new-born half-brother; and after the ceremony she walked with infant dignity in the procession, being led by the hand by the Princess Mary.

For some time, Elizabeth was allowed to reside in the same palace with the infant Edward, and she displayed the greatest affection for him. When she was seven years old she made the little prince a birthday gift of “a shyrte of cam’yke of _her owne woorkynge_,” which was quite precocious, considering her tender years.

The Princess Mary evinced great regard for her sister Elizabeth; and when the brutal King Henry deposed both these princesses from their rights of succession, and stigmatized them as illegitimate, and sent word to Mary that she should no longer treat Elizabeth as princess, Mary wrote a letter to her father, the king, in which she kindly mentioned Elizabeth thus: “My sister Elizabeth is in good health, and such a child, too, as I doubt not but your Highness shall have cause to rejoice of in time coming.”

Anne of Cleves was granted permission to see Elizabeth, even after her divorce, providing Elizabeth did not address her as queen; and all of the wives of Henry VIII. evinced great love for the Princess Elizabeth; and through the influence of Catherine Parr, Henry VIII. restored Elizabeth to her right of succession, although the act which pronounced her illegitimate remained forever unrepealed; and after she had become queen of England, she refrained from requiring Parliament to repeal those acts of her father which had declared his marriage with Anne Boleyn null and void; and she contented herself with an act of Parliament which declared in general terms her rights of succession to the throne.

While the youthful Edward VI. was king, the Princess Elizabeth was involved in certain questionable relations with the Lord High Admiral Seymour, who had married the Queen-Dowager Catherine, a few weeks after the death of Henry VIII.

Upon the death of Catherine, a year afterwards, Lord High Admiral Seymour aspired to the hand of the Princess Elizabeth. There is no doubt that Elizabeth loved Seymour; and, as she acknowledged, would have married him if the consent of the royal executors could have been obtained; but as such an alliance was considered beneath her, Elizabeth was shut up for a time in a sort of imprisonment, and the lord high admiral was conveniently disposed of by being led to the scaffold.

It is amusing to note that the hand of this much-courted and confirmed-spinster queen was once offered by Henry VIII. to a Scottish earl of equivocal birth and indifferent reputation, who actually declined the honor. But Elizabeth, when queen of England, proudly refused earls, dukes, and even kings, though it must be confessed she served the king of Sweden, who was one of her most constant suitors, rather meanly; for this royal lover sent her a magnificent present consisting of eighteen large piebald horses, and two ships’ loads of the most precious articles his country could produce, which princely gift Elizabeth most graciously received, but wrote to this ardent lover, that she anxiously hoped he would spare himself the fatigues of a fruitless voyage,—rather strange royal etiquette, to receive the suitor’s gift and then reject the giver.

Regarding Elizabeth’s mental acquirements, her learned preceptor, Roger Ascham, thus wrote:—

“The Lady Elizabeth hath accomplished her sixteenth year; and so much solidity of understanding, such courtesy united with dignity, have never been observed at so early an age. She has the most ardent love of true religion and of the best kind of literature. The constitution of her mind is exempt from female weakness, and she is endued with a masculine power of application. No apprehension can be quicker than hers, no memory more retentive. French and Italian she speaks like English; Latin with fluency, propriety, and judgment; she also speaks Greek with me frequently, willingly, and moderately well. Nothing can be more elegant than her handwriting, whether in Greek or Roman characters. In music she is very skilful, but does not greatly delight. With respect to personal decoration, she greatly prefers a simple elegance to show and splendor, so despising the outward adorning of plaiting the hair and of wearing gold, that in the whole manner of her life she rather resembles Hippolita than Phœdra.

“She read with me almost the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy; from these two authors, indeed, her knowledge of the Latin language has been almost exclusively derived. The beginning of the day was always devoted by her to the New Testament in Greek, after which she read select portions of Isocrates, and the tragedies of Sophocles, which I judged best adapted to supply her tongue with the purest diction, her mind with the most excellent precepts, and her exalted station with a defence against the utmost power of fortune. For her religious instruction she drew first from the fountains of Scripture, and afterwards from St. Cyprian, Melancthon, and similar works. In every kind of writing she easily detected any ill-adapted or far-fetched expression. By a diligent attention to these particulars, her ears became so practised and so nice that there was nothing in Greek, Latin, or English, prose or verse, which, according to its merits or defects, she did not either reject with disgust or receive with the highest delight.”

After the accession of Mary to the throne, the Wyatt rebellion took place: and as it was reported that the Princess Elizabeth was implicated, she was confined for three months in the Tower. Elizabeth was then conveyed to Woodstock, where she endured a less rigorous imprisonment. Her correspondence was carefully watched, and it was with great difficulty that she succeeded at length in appealing to the queen. It was at this time that she wrote upon her window with a diamond the following lines:—

“Much suspected, of me Nothing proved can be, Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.”

As her Protestant proclivities were well known, when by the marriage of Mary to Philip of Spain, Popedom was re-established in England, Elizabeth thought it policy to attend the confessional; and upon one occasion being asked what was her belief regarding the “blessed sacrament,” she gave this famous and ambiguous answer:—

“Christ was the word that spake it; He blessed the bread and brake it. And what the word did make it, That I revere and take it.”