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When Knighthood Was in Flower

<hr /> <h3>CHAPTER XIToC</h3> <h3>Louis XII a Suitor</h3> As soon as I could leave Brandon, I had intended to go down to Windsor and give vent to my indignation toward the girls, but the more I thought about it, the surer I felt there had, somehow, been a mistake. I could not bring myself to believe that Mary had deliberately permitted matters to go to such an extreme when it was in her power to prevent it. She might have neglected her duty for a day or two, but, sooner or later, her good impulses always came to her rescue, and, with Jane by her side to urge her on, I was almost sure she would have liberated Brandon long ago—barring a blunder of some sort. So I did not go to Windsor until a week after Brandon's release, when the king asked me to go down with him, Wolsey and de Longueville, the French ambassador-special, for the purpose of officially offering to Mary the hand of Louis XII, and the honor of becoming queen of France. The princess had known of the projected arrangement for many weeks, but had no thought of the present forward condition of affairs, or she would have brought her energies to bear upon Henry long before. She could not bring herself to believe that her brother would really force her into such wretchedness, and possibly he would never have done so, much as he desired it from the standpoint of personal ambition, had it not been for the petty excuse of that fatal trip to Grouche's. All the circumstances of the case were such as to make Mary's marriage a veritable virgin sacrifice. Louis was an old man, and an old Frenchman at that; full of French notions of morality and immorality; and besides, there were objections that cannot be written, but of which Henry and Mary had been fully informed. She might as well marry a leper. Do you wonder she was full of dread and fear, and resisted with the desperation of death? So Mary, the person most interested, was about the last to learn that the treaty had been signed. Windsor was nearly eight leagues from London, and at that time was occupied only by the girls and a few old ladies and servants, so that news did not travel fast in that direction from the city. It is also probable that, even if the report of the treaty and Brandon's release had reached Windsor, the persons hearing it would have hesitated to repeat it to Mary. However that may be, she had no knowledge of either until she was informed of the fact that the king and the French ambassador would be at Windsor on a certain day to make the formal request for her hand and to offer the gifts of King Louis. I had no doubt Mary was in trouble, and felt sure she had been making affairs lively about her. I knew her suffering was keen, but was glad of it in view of her treatment of Brandon. A day or two after Brandon's liberation I had begun to speak to him of the girls, but he interrupted me with a frightful oath: "Caskoden, you are my friend, but if you ever mention their names again in my hearing you are my friend no longer. I will curse you." I was frightened, so much stronger did his nature show than mine, and I took good care to remain silent on that subject until—but I am going too fast again; I will tell you of that hereafter. Upon the morning appointed, the king, Wolsey, de Longueville and myself, with a small retinue, rode over to Windsor, where we found that Mary, anticipating us, had barricaded herself in her bedroom and refused to receive the announcement. The king went up stairs to coax the fair young besieged through two inches of oak door, and to induce her, if possible, to come down. We below could plainly hear the king pleading in the voice of a Bashan bull, and it afforded us some amusement behind our hands. Then his majesty grew angry and threatened to break down the door, but the fair besieged maintained a most persistent and provoking silence throughout it all, and allowed him to carry out his threat without so much as a whimper. He was thoroughly angry, and called to us to come up to see him "compel obedience from the self-willed hussy,"—a task the magnitude of which he underrated. The door was soon broken down, and the king walked in first, with de Longueville and Wolsey next, and the rest of us following in close procession. But we marched over broken walls to the most laughable defeat ever suffered by besieging army. Our foe, though small, was altogether too fertile in expedients for us. There seemed no way to conquer this girl; her resources were so inexhaustible that in the moment of your expected victory success was turned into defeat; nay, more, ridiculous disaster. We found Jane crouching on the floor in a corner half dead with fright from the noise and tumult—and where do you think we found her mistress? Frightened? Not at all; she was lying in bed with her face to the wall as cool as a January morning; her clothing in a little heap in the middle of the room. Without turning her head, she exclaimed: "Come in, brother; you are quite welcome. Bring in your friends; I am ready to receive them, though not in court attire, as you see." And she thrust her bare arm straight up from the bed to prove her words. You should have seen the Frenchman's little black eyes gloat on its beauty. Mary went on, still looking toward the wall: "I will arise and receive you all informally, if you will but wait." This disconcerted the imperturbable Henry, who was about at his wit's end. "Cover that arm, you hussy," he cried in a flaming rage. "Be not impatient, brother mine! I will jump out in just a moment." A little scream from Jane startled everybody, and she quickly ran up to the king, saying: "I beg your majesty to go. She will do as she says so sure as you remain; you don't know her; she is very angry. Please go; I will bring her down stairs somehow." "Ah, indeed! Jane Bolingbroke," came from the bed. "I will receive my guests myself when they are kind enough to come to my room." The cover-lid began to move, and, whether or not she was really going to carry out her threat, I cannot say, but Henry, knowing her too well to risk it, hurried us all out of the room and marched down stairs at the head of his defeated cohorts. He was swearing in a way to make a priest's flesh creep, and protesting by everything holy that Mary should be the wife of Louis or die. He went back to Mary's room at intervals, but there was enough persistence in that one girl to stop the wheels of time, if she but set herself to do it, and the king came away from each visit the victim of another rout. Finally his anger cooled and he became amused. From the last visit he came down laughing: <div class="fig">> <ANTIMG border="0" src="images/imagep186.jpg" alt="image page 186" /></div> "I shall have to give up the fight or else put my armor on with visor down," said he; "it is not safe to go near her without it; she is a very vixen, and but now tried to scratch my eyes out." Wolsey, who had a wonderful knack for finding the easiest means to a difficult end, took Henry off to a window where they held a whispered conversation. It was pathetic to see a mighty king and his great minister of state consulting and planning against one poor girl; and, as angry as I felt toward Mary, I could not help pitying her, and admired, beyond the power of pen to write, the valiant and so far impregnable defense she had put up against an array of strength that would have made a king tremble on his throne. Presently Henry gave one of his loud laughs, and slapped his thigh as if highly satisfied with some proposition of Wolsey's. "Make ready at once," he said. "We will go back to London." In a short time we were all at the main stairway ready to mount for the return trip. The Lady Mary's window was just above, and I saw Jane watching us as we rode away. After we were well out of Mary's sight the king called me to him, and he, together with de Longueville, Wolsey and myself, turned our horses' heads, rode rapidly by a circuitous path back to another door of the castle and re-entered without the knowledge of any of the inmates. We four remained in silence, enjoined by the king, and in the course of an hour, the princess, supposing every one had gone, came down stairs and walked into the room where we were waiting. It was a scurvy trick, and I felt a contempt for the men who had planned it. I could see that Mary's first impulse was to beat a hasty retreat back into her citadel, the bed, but in truth she had in her make-up very little disposition to retreat. She was clear grit. What a man she would have made! But what a crime it would have been in nature to have spoiled so perfect a woman. How beautiful she was! She threw one quick, surprised glance at her brother and his companions, and lifting up her exquisite head carelessly hummed a little tune under her breath as she marched to the other end of the room with a gait that Juno herself could not have improved upon. I saw the king smile, half in pride of her, and half in amusement, and the Frenchman's little eyes feasted upon her beauty with a relish that could not be mistaken. Henry and the ambassador spoke a word in whispers, when the latter took a box from a huge side pocket and started across the room toward Mary with the king at his heels. Her side was toward them when they came up, but she kept her attitude as if she had been of bronze. She had taken up a book that was lying on the table and was examining it as they approached. De Longueville held the box in his hand, and bowing and scraping said in broken English: "Permit to me, most gracious princess, that I may have the honor to offer on behalf of my august master, this little testament of his high admiration and love." With this he bowed again, smiled like a crack in a piece of old parchment, and held his box toward Mary. It was open, probably in the hope of enticing her with a sight of its contents—a beautiful diamond necklace. She turned her face ever so little and took it all in with one contemptuous, sneering glance out of the corners of her eyes. Then quietly reaching out her hand she grasped the necklace and deliberately dashed it in poor old de Longueville's face. "There is my answer, sir! Go home and tell your imbecile old master I scorn his suit and hate him—hate him—hate him!" Then with the tears falling unheeded down her cheeks, "Master Wolsey, you butcher's cur! This trick was of your conception; the others had not brains enough to think of it. Are you not proud to have outwitted one poor heart-broken girl? But beware, sir; I tell you now I will be quits with you yet, or my name is not Mary." There is a limit to the best of feminine nerve, and at that limit should always be found a flood of healthful tears. Mary had reached it when she threw the necklace and shot her bolt at Wolsey, so she broke down and hastily left the room. The king, of course, was beside himself with rage. "By God's soul," he swore, "she shall marry Louis of France, or I will have her whipped to death on the Smithfield pillory." And in his wicked heart—so impervious to a single lasting good impulse—he really meant it. Immediately after this, the king, de Longueville and Wolsey set out for London. I remained behind hoping to see the girls, and after a short time a page plucked me by the sleeve, saying the princess wished to see me. The page conducted me to the same room in which had been fought the battle with Mary in bed. The door had been placed on its hinges again, but the bed was tumbled as Mary had left it, and the room was in great disorder. "Oh, Sir Edwin," began Mary, who was weeping, "was ever woman in such frightful trouble? My brother is killing me. Can he not see that I could not live through a week of this marriage? And I have been deserted by all my friends, too, excepting Jane. She, poor thing, cannot leave." "You know I would not go," said Jane, parenthetically. Mary continued: "You, too, have been home an entire week and have not been near me." I began to soften at the sight of her grief, and concluded, with Brandon, that, after all, her beauty could well cover a multitude of sins; perhaps even this, her great transgression against him. The princess was trying to check her weeping, and in a moment took up the thread of her unfinished sentence: "And Master Brandon, too, left without so much as sending me one little word—not a line nor a syllable. He did not come near me, but went off as if I did not care—or he did not. Of course he did not care, or he would not have behaved so, knowing I was in so much trouble. I did not see him at all after—one afternoon in the king's—about a week before that awful night in London, except that night, when I was so frightened I could not speak one word of all the things I wished to say." This sounded strange enough, and I began more than ever to suspect something wrong. I, however, kept as firm a grasp as possible upon the stock of indignation I had brought with me. "How did you expect to see or hear from him," asked I, "when he was lying in a loathsome dungeon without one ray of light, condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered, because of your selfish neglect to save him who, at the cost of half his blood, and almost his life, had saved so much for you?" Her eyes grew big, and the tears were checked by genuine surprise. I continued: "Lady Mary, no one could have made me believe that you would stand back and let the man, to whom you owed so great a debt, lie so long in such misery, and be condemned to such a death for the act that saved you. I could never have believed it!" "Imp of hell!" screamed Mary; "what tale is this you bring to torture me? Have I not enough already? Tell me it is a lie, or I will have your miserable little tongue torn out by the root." "It is no lie, princess, but an awful truth, and a frightful shame to you." I was determined to tell her all and let her see herself as she was. She gave a hysterical laugh, and throwing up her hands, with her accustomed little gesture, fell upon the bed in utter abandonment, shaking as with a spasm. She did not weep; she could not; she was past that now. Jane went over to the bed and tried to soothe her. In a moment Mary sprang to her feet, exclaiming: "Master Brandon condemned to death and you and I here talking and moaning and weeping? Come, come, we will go to the king at once. We will start to walk, Edwin—I must be doing something—and Jane can follow with the horses and overtake us. No; I will not dress; just as I am; this will do. Bring me a hat, Jane; any one, any one." While putting on hat and gloves she continued: "I will see the king at once and tell him all! all! I will do anything; I will marry that old king of France, or forty kings, or forty devils; it's all one to me; anything! anything! to save him. Oh! to think that he has been in that dungeon all this time." And the tears came unheeded in a deluge. She was under such headway, and spoke and moved so rapidly, that I could not stop her until she was nearly ready to go. Then I held her by the arm while I said: "It is not necessary now; you are too late." A look of horror came into her face, and I continued slowly: "I procured Brandon's release nearly a week ago; I did what you should have done, and he is now at our rooms in Greenwich." Mary looked at me a moment, and, turning pale, pressed her hands to her heart and leaned against the door frame. After a short silence she said: "Edwin Caskoden—fool! Why could you not have told me that at first? I thought my brain would burn and my heart burst." "I should have told you had you given me time. As to the pain it gave you"—this was the last charge of my large magazine of indignation—"I care very little about that. You deserve it. I do not know what explanation you have to offer, but nothing can excuse you. An explanation, however good, would have been little comfort to you had Brandon failed you in Billingsgate that night." She had fallen into a chair by this time and sat in reverie, staring at nothing. Then the tears came again, but more softly. "You are right; nothing can excuse me. I am the most selfish, ungrateful, guilty creature ever born. A whole month in that dungeon!" And she covered her drooping face with her hands. "Go away for awhile, Edwin, and then return; we shall want to see you again," said Jane. Upon my return Mary was more composed. Jane had dressed her hair, and she was sitting on the bed in her riding habit, hat in hand. Her fingers were nervously toying at the ribbons and her eyes cast down. "You are surely right, Sir Edwin. I have no excuse. I can have none; but I will tell you how it was. You remember the day you left me in the waiting-room of the king's council?—when they were discussing my marriage without one thought of me, as if I were but a slave or a dumb brute that could not feel." She began to weep a little, but soon recovered herself. "While waiting for you to return, the Duke of Buckingham came in. I knew Henry was trying to sell me to the French king, and my heart was full of trouble—from more causes than you can know. All the council, especially that butcher's son, were urging him on, and Henry himself was anxious that the marriage should be brought about. He thought it would strengthen him for the imperial crown. He wants everything, and is ambitious to be emperor. Emperor! He would cut a pretty figure! I hoped, though, I should be able to induce him not to sacrifice me to his selfish interests, as I have done before, but I knew only too well it would tax my powers to the utmost this time. I knew that if I did anything to anger or to antagonize him, it would be all at an end with me. You know he is so exacting with other people's conduct, for one who is so careless of his own—so virtuous by proxy. You remember how cruelly he disgraced and crushed poor Lady Chesterfield, who was in such trouble about her husband, and who went to Grouche's only to learn if he were true to her. Henry seems to be particularly sensitive in that direction. One would think it was in the commandments: 'Thou shalt not go to Grouche's.' It may be that some have gone there for other purposes than to have their fortunes told—to meet, to—but I need not say that I—" and she stopped short, blushing to her hair. "Well, I knew I could do nothing with Henry if he once learned of that visit, especially as it resulted so fatally. Oh! why did I go? Why did I go? That was why I hesitated to tell Henry at once. I was hoping some other way would open whereby I might save Charles—Master Brandon. While I was waiting, along came the Duke of Buckingham, and as I knew he was popular in London, and had almost as much influence there as the king, a thought came to me that he might help us. "I knew that he and Master Brandon had passed a few angry words at one time in my ball-room—you remember—but I also knew that the duke was in—in love with me, you know, or pretended to be—he always said he was—and I felt sure I could, by a little flattery, induce him to do anything. He was always protesting that he would give half his blood to serve me. As if anybody wanted a drop of his wretched blood. Poor Master Brandon! his blood ..." and the tears came, choking her words for the moment. "So I told the duke I had promised you and Jane to procure Master Brandon's liberty, and asked him to do it for me. He gladly consented, and gave me his knightly word that it should be attended to without an hour's delay. He said it might have to be done secretly in the way of an escape—not officially—as the Londoners were very jealous of their rights and much aroused on account of the killing. Especially, he said that at that time great caution must be used, as the king was anxious to conciliate the city in order to procure a loan for some purpose—my dower, I suppose. "The duke said it should be as I wished; that Master Brandon should escape, and remain away from London for a few weeks until the king procured his loan, and then be freed by royal proclamation. "I saw Buckingham the next day, for I was very anxious, you may be sure, and he said the keeper of Newgate had told him it had been arranged the night before as desired. I had come to Windsor because it was more quiet, and my heart was full. It is quite a distance from London, and I thought it might afford a better opportunity to—to see—I thought, perhaps Master Brandon might come—might want to—to—see Jane and me; in fact I wrote him before I left Greenwich that I should be here. Then I heard he had gone to New Spain. Now you see how all my troubles have come upon me at once; and this the greatest of them, because it is my fault. I can ask no forgiveness from any one, for I cannot forgive myself." She then inquired about Brandon's health and spirits, and I left out no distressing detail you may be sure. During my recital she sat with downcast eyes and tear-stained face, playing with the ribbons of her hat. When I was ready to go she said: "Please say to Master Brandon I should like—to—see—him, if he cares to come, if only that I may tell him how it happened." "I greatly fear, in fact, I know he will not come," said I. "The cruelest blow of all, worse even than the dungeon, or the sentence of death, was your failure to save him. He trusted you so implicitly. At the time of his arrest he refused to allow me to tell the king, saying he knew you would see to it—that you were pure gold." "Ah, did he say that?" she asked, as a sad little smile lighted her face. "His faith was so entirely without doubt, that his recoil from you is correspondingly great. He goes to New Spain as soon as his health is recovered sufficiently for him to travel." This sent the last fleck of color from her face, and with the words almost choking her throat: "Then tell him what I have said to you and perhaps he will not feel so—" "I cannot do that either, Lady Mary. When I mentioned your name the other day he said he would curse me if I ever spoke it again in his hearing." "Is it so bad as that?" Then, meditatively: "And at his trial he did not tell the reason for the killing? Would not compromise me, who had served him so ill, even to save his own life? Noble, noble!" And her lips went together as she rose to her feet. No tears now; nothing but glowing, determined womanhood. "Then I will go to him wherever he may be. He shall forgive me, no matter what my fault." Soon after this we were on our way to London at a brisk gallop. We were all very silent, but at one time Mary spoke up from the midst of a reverie: "During the moment when I thought Master Brandon had been executed—when you said it was too late—it seemed that I was born again and all made over; that I was changed in the very texture of my nature by the shock, as they say the grain of the iron cannon is sometimes changed by too violent an explosion." And this proved to be true in some respects. We rode on rapidly and did not stop in London except to give the horses drink. After crossing the bridge, Mary said, half to Jane and half to herself: "I will never marry the French king—never." Mary was but a girl pitted against a body of brutal men, two of them rulers of the two greatest nations on earth—rather heavy odds, for one woman. We rode down to Greenwich and entered the palace without exciting comment, as the princess was in the habit of coming and going at will. The king and queen and most of the courtiers were in London—at Bridewell House and Baynard's Castle—where Henry was vigorously pushing the loan of five hundred thousand crowns for Mary's dower, the only business of state in which, at that time, he took any active interest. Subsequently, as you know, he became interested in the divorce laws, and the various methods whereby a man, especially a king, might rid himself of a distasteful wife; and after he saw the truth in Anne Boleyn's eyes, he adopted a combined policy of church and state craft that has brought us a deal of senseless trouble ever since—and is like to keep it up. As to Mary's dower, Henry was to pay Louis only four hundred thousand crowns, but he made the marriage an excuse for an extra hundred thousand, to be devoted to his own private use. When we arrived at the palace, the girls went to their apartments and I to mine, where I found Brandon reading. There was only one window to our common room—a dormer-window, set into the roof, and reached by a little passage as broad as the window itself, and perhaps a yard and a half long. In the alcove thus formed was a bench along the wall, cushioned by Brandon's great campaign cloak. In this window we often sat and read, and here was Brandon with his book. I had intended to tell him the girls were coming, for when Mary asked me if I thought he would come to her at the palace, and when I had again said no, she reiterated her intention of going to him at once; but my courage failed me and I did not speak of it. I knew that Mary ought not to come to our room, and that if news of it should reach the king's ears there would be more and worse trouble than ever, and, as usual, Brandon would pay the penalty for all. Then again, if it were discovered it might seriously compromise both Mary and Jane, as the world is full of people who would rather say and believe an evil thing of another than to say their prayers or to believe the holy creed. I had said as much to the Lady Mary when she expressed her determination to go to Brandon. She had been in the wrong so much of late that she was humbled; and I was brave enough to say whatever I felt; but she said she had thought it all over, and as every one was away from Greenwich it would not be found out if done secretly. She told Jane she need not go; that she, Mary, did not want to take any risk of compromising her. You see, trouble was doing a good work in the princess, and had made it possible for a generous thought for another to find spontaneous lodgment in her heart. What a great thing it is, this human suffering, which so sensitizes our sympathy, and makes us tender to another's pain. Nothing else so fits us for earth or prepares us for heaven. Jane would have gone, though, had she known that all her fair name would go with her. She was right, you see, when she told me, while riding over to Windsor, that should Mary's love blossom into a full-blown passion she would wreck everything and everybody, including herself perhaps, to attain the object of so great a desire. It looked now as if she were on the high road to that end. Nothing short of chains and fetters could have kept her from going to Brandon that evening. There was an inherent force about her that was irresistible and swept everything before it. In our garret she was to meet another will, stronger and infinitely better controlled than her own, and I did not know how it would all turn out. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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