Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/275

] Derham, was also put to the torture, and had his teeth forced out by the brakes, an instrument supposed to be the same as "the Duke of Exeter's daughter." All that they could force from him was that a lady in the queen's chamber once, pointing to Derham, had said, "That is he who fled away to Ireland for the queen's sake." On such pretence of evidence these two gentlemen were executed at Tyburn, on the 10th of December; Culpepper being beheaded, and Derham hanged and quartered. Their heads were placed on London Bridge.

But Henry and his ministers were not satisfied with the death and confiscation of the property of the principals in this affair; they carried their intentions of confiscation and crimination as far as possible amongst the queen's relations. Not only the aged Duchess of Norfolk, but her son, the Lord William Howard, his wife, and Lady Bridgewater, Lord William's sister, were arrested on the charge of being aware of the amours of Derham and the queen. The Howard family had cause, indeed, to rue their too near proximity to this modern Nero of a king; for, besides all these arrested and imprisoned members of it, whose property was seized upon with infamous avidity. Lord Thomas Howard, another brother of Lord William, and uncle of the queen, was thrown into the Tower, and punished for the grievous offence of having dared to make love to Margaret Douglas, the king's niece, daughter of Margaret of Scotland; and before the king's death, he completed the tragedy by dipping his hands in the blood of the Earl of Surrey, the eldest brother of this nobleman, and a man whose poetic talents have made him one of the great names of England.

It is most revolting to contemplate the eager greed with which Henry and his bloodhounds, Wriothesley and Rich—whom a modern historian truly describes as "the two most unprincipled and sanguinary of the whole swarm of parvenus of whom Henry's cabinet was composed"—fell on the property of these noble victims; for Henry always had an eye to making his butchery profitable. The king's council expressed their fears, in a letter to the king, that, "as the Duchess of Norfolk is old and testy, she may die out of perversity, to defraud the king's highness of the confiscation of her goods; therefore, it will be most advisable that she, and all the other parties named in a former letter, may be indicted forthwith of misprision of treason, whereby the Parliament should have better grounds to confiscate their goods, than if any of them chanced to die before the bill of attainder passed."

Southampton, Wriothesley, and Sadler were sent to search the house of the old duchess; and, on the 11th of December, they wrote triumphantly to say that they had discovered 2,000 marks in money, and plate of the value of 600 or 700 marks. On the 21st they wrote again, to announce that the old duchess, who was very ill, had voluntarily confessed where she had hidden 800 marks more. Thinking now that they had discovered all they could, they told the old lady that the king had graciously consented to spare her life; for all this money these inquisitors had squeezed out of her under the fear of death. The poor tortured invalid, on hearing that, fell on her knees with uplifted hands, and fell into such a paroxysm of hysterical woepingweeping [sic], that these tender-hearted commissioners were "sorely troubled to raise her up again."

Meantime, Sir John Gorstwick and John Skinner were sent off to Ryegate, to the house of Lord William Howard, to make an inventory of all the money, jewels, goods, and chattels they could find there, and bring the same to the Council. Wriothesley, Mr. Pollard, and Mr. Attorney were dispatched to the Duchess of Norfolk's and Lord William's house in Lambeth, for the like purpose; Sir Richard Long and Sir Thomas Pope to the Lady Bridgewater's houses in Kent and Southwark, and the Countess of Rochford's house at Blickling, in Norfolk: the Duchess of Norfolk's house at Horsham had been already ransacked.

But how had it fared with the queen herself, whilst so many were undergoing imprisonment, torture, and loss of property on her account? When first informed of the change, Catherine, who had the fate of Anne Boleyn before her eyes, like Anne, endeavoured to get to the presence of the king and plead her own cause; but care was taken to prevent this. She was as effectually a prisoner in her own rooms at Hampton Court, as if she were already in the Tower. She is said to have called frantically and incessantly on Henry, and demanded to be allowed to go to him; and she made two desperate attempts to break away and reach him. The first time was at the hour when she knew that he was in the royal closet in the chapel. She rushed from her bedroom into the queen's entrance to the royal closet in the chapel, and was but just seized in time, and prevented bursting in and throwing herself at her husband's feet. She was forced, and even carried back, struggling violently, and screaming so wildly that her cries were heard all over the chapel. Another time she escaped through a low door in an alcove at the bed's head, and reached the foot of the private stairs, called "the maid of honour's stairs," before she was overtaken and secured. Though these demonstrations of excitement almost to madness did not move the king to see her, they probably occasioned him to make his precipitate retreat to Oatlands.

No sooner was he gone, than the council waited upon her in a body, and laid the charge against her specifically before her. She denied the truth of it with such vehemence, that no sooner were they gone than she fell into fits so terrible that her reason and her life were deemed to be in jeopardy. On hearing this, the king sent Cranmer to her in the morning, promising her that if she would confess her guilt he would spare her life, though it was forfeited by law. This was a favourite mode of proceeding with Henry—to promise his victims pardon if they would criminate themselves; the certain consequence of which, the unhappy parties must have felt, would, on the contrary, at once send them to death. He who did not spare the innocent, though they protested their innocence, was not likely to do it if they admitted that they were guilty. We have Cranmer's letter to the king in the "State Papers," detailing the mode which he pursued with the wretched queen on this occasion, and verily his management was that of a wily inquisitor. He states that he found her "in such lamentation and heaviness that he never saw no creature, so that it would have pitied any man's heart in the world to have looked upon her." On his second visit, the rage of her grief had been such, that he found her, "as he supposed, far entered towards a franzy" that is, she was on the verge of