How they met at last the reader has learned.
Sir John, hardened as he was, could not for a time shake off the remembrance of his brother’s last words; often in sleep that brother seemed to stand by him. “I bade thee guard my poor wife and child, how hast thou kept thy trust?” He remembered the mournful way in which Geoffrey, when they were little children, had reproached him for the death of a pet which he had maliciously caused, and the boy and man were mingled in his dreams.
Should he ever have to bear the reproach in another world!
He shook the thought off—parried it with the shield of unbelief.
How like the poor ostrich, who hides his head in the sand, and thinks, because it cannot see its pursuers, it is itself unseen!
But still he frequented Church, went regularly each Sunday to Mass, and each year to Confession; indeed it would have been dangerous to do otherwise, or to confess his unbelief, as he avowed to Madge on her death-bed.
By-and-bye Cromwell began to organize that terrible system of espionage, which filled the scaffolds with victims. Dorset was unrepresented in the prying brotherhood; he thought of his old friend, Sir John, in whom he had discovered a kindred spirit when both served Wolsey, and offered him the post. Sir John eagerly accepted the confidence, and began at once to exercise his office, to watch his neighbours, to entrap them in unguarded conversations, and so to denounce them if he found the opportunity, and all the time he was unsuspected, or even Cromwell could hardly have saved him from the just fury of his countrymen.
And in this capacity he had no small share in the tragedy at Glastonbury; he hated the Abbot as we have seen, and willingly employed all his craft in bringing his old tutor to the gibbet and quartering block, and when the victim suffered he was there, on the Tor Hill, and revelled in the ghastly butchery of the man who had once striven to check his opening vices.
When the fall of his patron, Cromwell, took place, Sir John was for the time in imminent danger, but he extricated himself by a master stroke: he attended in his place, as knight of the shire, and voted for cutting off his friend’s head without a trial, by process of Bill of Attainder; thus by this skilful trimming of his sails he escaped the storm; but the idea was not original, Archbishop Cranmer did the same.[44]
He had for a near neighbour Squire Grabber, and had often admired the evil qualities of young Nicholas, from whom, in the exercise of his vocation, he had gained many valuable pieces of information, which he had duly conveyed to Cromwell.