Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (210 page)

‘Why, this is a monstrous sensible gentleman,’ Henry said. ‘Let us see this yokel.’ He had indeed a certain satisfaction at the interrupting, for with Katharine in her begging moods he was never certain that he must not grant her his shirt and go a penance to St Thomas’ shrine.

Katharine stayed with her hand upon her heart, but when her cousin came his green figure in the doorway was stiff; he trembled to pass the sill, and looking never at her but at the King’s shoes, he knelt him down in the centre of the floor. The words coming to her in the midst of anguishes and hot emotions, she said:

‘Sire, this is my much-loved cousin, who hath bought me food and dress in my days of poverty, selling his very farms.’

Culpepper grunted over his shoulder:

‘Hold thy tongue, cousin Kat. Ye know not that ye shall observe silence in the awful presence of kings.’

Henry threw his head back and laughed, whilst the chair creaked for a minute’s space.

‘Silence!’ he said. ‘Before God, silence! Have ye ever heard this lady’s tongue?’ He grew still and dreadful at the end of his mirth.

‘Ye have done well,’ he said. ‘Give me your sword. I will knight you. I hear you are a poor man. I give you a knight’s fee farm of a hundred pounds by the year. I hear you are a rough honest man. I had rather ye were about my nephew’s courts than mine. Get you to Edinbro’.’ He waved his hand to Throckmorton. ‘See him disposed,’ he said.

Culpepper uttered a sound of remonstrance. The King leaned forward in his seat and thundered:

‘Get you gone. Be you this night thirty miles towards the Northland. I ha’ heard ye ha’ made brawls and broils here. See you be gone. By God, I am Harry of Windsor!’

He laid the heavy flat of the sword like a blow upon the green shoulders below him.

‘Rise up, Sir Thomas Culpepper,’ he said. ‘Get you gone!’

Dazed and trembling still a little, Culpepper stuttered his way to the door. When he came by her Katharine cast her arms about his shoulder.

‘Poor Tom,’ she cried. ‘Best it is for thee and me that thou goest. Here thou hast no place.’ He shook his head like a man in a daze and was gone.

‘Art too patient with the springald,’ the King said.

He thundered ‘Body of God!’ again when he saw Throckmorton once more fall to his knees.

‘Sire,’ he said — and for the first time he faltered in his level tones—’a very great treason has come to my ken this day!’

‘Holy altar fires!’ the King growled, ‘let your treasons wait. Here hath this lady been talking to me very reasonably of a golden age.’

‘Sire,’ Throckmorton said, and he leant one hand on the floor to support him. ‘This is a very great treason of men arming to sustain Privy Seal against thee! I have seen it; with mine own eyes I have seen it in thy town of London.’

Katharine cried out, ‘Ah!’

The King leapt to his feet.

‘Ho, I will arm,’ he said, and grew pale. For, with a sword in his hand or where fighting was, this King had middling little fear. But, even as the lion dreads a little mouse, so he feared secret rebellions.

‘Sire,’ Throckmorton said, and his face was towards Katharine as if he challenged her:

‘This is the very truth of the very truth, I call upon what man will to gainsay me. This day I heard in the city of London, at the house of the printer, John Badge — —’ and he repeated the speech of the saturnine man—’that “
he would raise a thousand prentices and a thousand journeymen to shield Privy Seal from peril; that he could raise ten thousand citizens and ten thousand tenned again from the shires!
”’

Katharine kept her eyes upon Throckmorton who, knowing her power to sway the King, nodded gravely and looked into her eyes to assure her that these words were true.

But the King, upon his feet, marched towards the door.

‘Let us arm my guard,’ he said. ‘I will play Nero to London town.’

Nevertheless Throckmorton kept his knees.

‘Majesty,’ he said, ‘I have this man in my keeping.’ And indeed, at his passing London Bridge he had sent men to take the printer and bring him to Hampton. ‘I pray your pardon that I took him lacking your warrant, and Privy Seal’s I dare not ask.’

The King stayed in his pacing.

‘Thou art a jewel of a man,’ he said. ‘By Cock, I would I had many like thee.’ And at the news that the head of this confederacy was taken his sudden fear fell. ‘I will see this man. Bring him to me.’

‘Sire,’ Katharine said, ‘we spoke even now of Cinna. Remember him!’

‘Madam,’ Throckmorton dared to speak. ‘This is the man that hath printed broadsides against you. No man more hateth you in land or hath uttered more lewdnesses of your chastity.’

‘The more I will have him pardoned,’ Katharine said, ‘that his Highness and all people may see how little I fear his lyings.’

Throckmorton shrugged his shoulders right up to his ears to signify that this was a very madness of Roman pardoning.

‘God send you never rue it,’ he said. ‘Majesty,’ he continued to the King, ‘give me some safe conduct that for half-an-hour I may go about this palace unletted by men of Privy Seal’s. For Privy Seal hath a mighty army of men to do his bidding and I am one man unaided. Give me half-an-hour’s space and I will bring to you this captain of rebellion to your cabinet. And I will bring to you them that shall mightily and to the hilt against all countervail and denial prove that Privy Seal is a false and damnable traitor to thee and this goodly realm. So I swear: Throckmorton who am a trusty knight.’

He was not minded to utter before Katharine Howard the names of his other witnesses. For one of them was the Chancellor of the Augmentations, who was ready to swear that Cromwell, upon the barge when they went in the night from Rochester to Greenwich, had said that he would have the King down if he would not wed with Anne of Cleves. And he had Viridus to swear that Cromwell had said, before his armoury, to the Ambassador of the Schmalkaldners, that ne King, ne Emperor had such another armoury, yet were there twenty score great houses in England that had better, all ready to arm to defend the Protestant faith and Privy Seal. These things he was minded to lay before the King; but before Kat Howard he would not speak them. For, with her mad fury for truth and the letter of Truth that she had gained from reading Seneca till, he thought, her brains were turned, she would begin a wrangle with him. And he had no time to lose; for his ears were pricked up, even as he spoke, to catch any breaking of the silence from the next room where Viridus held Lascelles at the point of his dagger.

The King said:

‘Go thou. If any man stay thee in going whithersoever thou wilt, say that thou beest upon my business; and woe betide them that stay thee if thou be not in my cabinet in the half of an hour with them ye speak of.’

Throckmorton rose stiffly to his feet; at the door he staggered for a moment, and closed his eyes. His cause was won; but he leant against the door-post and gazed at Katharine with a piteous and passionate glance, moving his fingers in his beard, as if he appealed to her in silence as with the eyes of a faithful hound, neither to judge him harshly nor to plead against him. This was the day of the most strain that ever was in his life.

And gazing back at him, Katharine’s eyes were filled with pity, so sick he appeared to be.

‘Body of God!’ the King said in the silence that fell upon them. ‘Now I hold Cromwell.’

Katharine cried out, ‘Let me go; let me go; this is no world for me!’

He caught her masterfully in his arms.

‘This is a golden world, and thou a golden Queen,’ he said.

She held her head back from his lips, and struggled from him.

‘I may not find any straightness here. I can see no clear way. Let me go.’

He took her again to him, and again she tore herself free.

‘Listen to me,’ she cried, ‘listen to me! There have been broadsides printed against the truth of my body; there have been witnesses prepared against me. I will have you swear that you will read of these broadsides, and consider of these witnesses.’

‘Before God,’ he said, ‘I will hang the printers, and slay the witnesses with my fist. I know how these things be made.’ He shook his fist. ‘I love thee so that were they true, and wert thou the woman of Sodom, I would have thee to my Queen!’

She cried out ‘Ah!’

‘Child,’ he calmed himself, ‘I will keep my hands from thee. But I would fain have the kisses of thy mouth.’

She went to lean upon her table, for her knees trembled.

‘Let me speak,’ she said.

‘Why, none hinders,’ he answered her kindly.

‘I swear I do love thee, so that thy voice is as the blows of hammers upon iron to me,’ she said. ‘I may have little rest, save when I speak with thee, for that sustaineth thy servant. But I fear these days and ways. This is a very crooked riddle. So much I desire thee that I am tremulous to take thee. If it be a madness call it a madness, but grant me this!’

She looked at him distractedly, brushing her hands across her eyes.

‘It feels within my heart that I must do a penance,’ she said. ‘I have been wishful to feel upon my brow the pressure of the great crown. Therefore, grant me this: that I may not feel it. And be this the penance!’

‘Child,’ he said, ‘how may you be a Queen, and not crowned with pomp and state?’

‘Majesty,’ she faltered, ‘to prepare myself against that high office I have been reading in chronicles of the lives of them that have been Queens of England. It was his Grace of Canterbury that sent me these books for another purpose. But there ye shall read — in Asser and the Saxon Chronicles — how that the old Queens of Saxondom, when that they were humble or were wives coming after the first, sat not upon the throne to be crowned and sacred, but — so it was with Judith that was stepmother to King Alfred, and with some others whose names in this hurry I may not discover nor remember in my mind — they were, upon some holidays, shewn to the people as being the King’s wife.’

She hung her head.

‘For that I am humble in truth before the world and before my mother Mary in Heaven, and for that I am not thy first Queen, but even thy fifth; so I would be shewn and never crowned.’

She leaned back against the table, supporting herself with her hands against its edges; her eyes piteously devoured his face.

‘Why, child,’ he said, ‘so thou wilt be that fifth Queen; whether thou wilt be a Queen crowned or a Queen shewn, what care I?’

She no longer refused herself to his arms, for she had no more strength.

‘Mary be judge between me and them that speak against me,’ she said, ‘I can no more hold out against my joy or longings.’

‘Sha’t wear a hair shirt,’ he said tenderly. ‘Sha’t go in sackcloth. Sha’t have enow to do praying for me and thee. But hast no need of prayers.’ He lulled her in his arms, swaying on his feet. ‘Hast a great tongue. Speakest many words. But art a very child. God send thee all the joy I purpose thee. And, an thou hast sins, weight me further down in hell therewith.’

The light of the candles threw their locked shadows along the wall and up the ceilings. Her head fell back, her eyes closed, so that she seemed to be dead and her listless hands were open in her skirts.

An English Girl
first appeared in 1907, following Ford’s successful non-fiction studies of England
The Soul of London
(1905)
and
The Spirit of the People
(1907). According to Ford,
An English Girl
was written, “as a variation on a book of essays to give the effect of a tour in the United States,” hoping to repeat his previous success in a fictional format. The novel was greatly inspired by American novelist Henry James’ “international” novels, concerning the representation of an American character through contrast with the English and the Continental.

The novel opens in England with the news that Don Collar Kelleg, an expatriate American, has become the richest citizen in the world. Sickened by the means in which his late father had acquired his immense fortune, the young and idealistic Don journeys across the Atlantic with his fiancée Eleanor Greville, the “English Girl” of the title, to atone for his father’s wrongs.
 
In New York, Kelleg is repelled and disillusioned by the materialism of the United States; whilst his fiancée learns to overlook the brashness of Americans and enjoys spending her time there. Eventually, Kelleg returns with the Eleanor to England where he finds himself uneasy due to his failure.
 

As a novel,
An English Girl
was not successful, earning little critical attention, though it does present successful impressionistic accounts, including a particularly celebrated portrayal of a ship’s arrival in New York harbour, as well as vibrant depictions of the atmosphere of midtown Manhattan and a steamer trip to Coney Island.