Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/487

1541.] Cranmer, unable to summon nerve to speak on so frightful a subject, waited till the close of the progress, and wrote to Henry at Hampton Court.

The letter was received at first with utter incredulity. The King had seen nothing in his wife's character to lend credibility to so odious a charge. He laid the account which the Archbishop had sent, before such of his ministers as were in attendance; but he declared emphatically his conviction that the Queen was the object of a calumny. The story should be investigated, but with scrupulous secrecy, to protect her character from scandal. Lord Southampton was sent to London to see and examine the Archbishop's informant.

Finding Lascelles adhere to his story, the Earl cautioned him to be silent; and went down into Sussex, under pretence of joining a hunting party, in order to question the sister; while Mannock and Derham were in the mean time arrested, on the charge of having been concerned in an act of piracy in the Irish seas, and were privately examined by Sir Thomas Wriothesley. Wriothesley, of all the ministers next to Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk, was most interested in finding the Queen to be innocent; he had attached himself decidedly to the Anglican interest, and had taken a prominent part in promoting the divorce of Anne of Cleves. But the case admitted of no self-deception; the inquiry resulted on both sides in the confirmation of the worst which Lascelles had stated. The two gentlemen confessed; and Southampton returned with the miserable burden of his discoveries to the Court. The King was