The Queen sank down moaning where she stood.
JANE SHORE
It was a bitter Sunday in January, 1484. A little dry snow fell from time to time, and, so surely as its chill dust whitened the stones about St. Paul’s Church, a wind, like an officious tipstaff, would come and drive it away right and left, sweeping the pavement for bare footsteps that were to follow.
It was all sad and grey and wintry. The over-gabled houses seemed to totter with cold; the signboards cried with it; only the church itself, half-shrouded in mist, loomed like some mighty mountain-crag, soaring into one solitary pinnacle, spectral, stupendous, in its midst. The Sabbath folk in the streets below, released from Mass, wrung their frosty fingers as they lingered in dull excitement, waiting for the show that was to follow. They gathered in a swarm about the great west door; but mostly they flocked towards the north side, where in an open place stood the cross of St. Paul’s, surmounting the leaden roof of a little timber pavilion. This bothy, or pulpit, was like a dovecot in shape, hexagonal, and with a window in each of its six sides. That facing west was furnished with a lectern for the preacher; and the whole building was reared on a triple platform of stone, hexagonal like the other, and forming steps to it.
Whether from the weather, or the day, or the occasion, the crowd was a curiously quiet one. The weight of the new King’s authority, no doubt, rested upon it heavily. A general air of numbness and stupefaction appeared to prevail. Events of late had come, matured, and yielded to others so rapidly. Edward’s death in April; the disappearance of the young princes, his sons, in June; the new coronation in July; Buckingham’s short abortive conspiracy and execution in October; finally, in this very first month of the new year, the passing of the Titulus Regius, or Act which bastardised the late King’s issue and confirmed the crown to his usurper—such was the astonishing tale. Nothing was evident for the moment but that this crooked fellow could see clearly and strike quickly; that he was bold, unscrupulous, and strong. He was not unpopular for that, or for certain manly attributes which the crowd admire. The difficulty was, as in all sudden coups d’état, to adapt oneself politicly to the fresh conditions, while awaiting security from retaliation by the old. The twisted King was not so firm in his seat as a Pope of Rome. There was a certain risk in subscribing even to his pleasantries, among which the present show might be counted.
No one had properly believed in the worser guilt of poor Mistress Shore, the late Prince’s naughty, good-hearted mistress. The indictment which charged her with complicity in the asserted attempt of Lord Hastings, her second protector, to destroy the present King’s life by witchcraft, had succeeded in proving nothing but her lovable qualities of mind and heart; whereby the Court was obliged to fall back upon her frailty, which was notorious and undeniable. It made no point, indeed, of the real tragedy of her sinning, which lay in her desertion of a young husband—a good, honest, uncorrupt fellow, a prosperous goldsmith of Lombard Street—whose happiness she had done her best to wreck, and whose name she had not had the grace to exchange for another. It was really only concerned, at bottom, with proving what an obnoxious libertine had been the fourth Edward, and how sweetly the crooked one shone by contrast. And so, to make all this clear, it washed, Pilate-like, its hands of the beautiful frailty, and handed her over to the Churchmen for chastisement. They were prompt to deliver it, and not altogether inhumanly. The concubine was sentenced to make public confession of her fault, in the prescriptive deshabille of sheet and candle, and thereafter depart in peace and mend her ways. The penalty, in fact, was in process at the moment.
There was not much gossip. The crowd, penned within the multitude of low buildings which surrounded the old Cathedral, showed more curiosity, even sympathy, than hostility towards the delinquent. Its constituents were much the same as when it had listened six months before to Dr. Shaw’s famous sermon at the Cross, and that truckling divine had first broached the question of the last two Edwards’ illegitimacy. It had acquiesced then, in the insensibility following exhaustion; it had not yet recovered from that condition. This present matter, or the sin which had procured it, was not of a nature wont to excite much comment or reproof; but the undoubted popularity of the usurper was confusing all issues. It supposed he had a reason for humiliating pretty Mrs. Shore, who had been as notable for her kindness as her beauty; and so it accepted his ruling as part of the perplexity of things, which some day must be going to lighten.
She came out in a minute, a half-dozen of acolytes preceding, a group of priests following her. As she appeared on the steps, a waft of wind took the hem of the white sheet, which was her sole drapery, and blew it aside from her knees. Her face, which had been deadly pale, flushed to an instant pink, which never thereafter deserted it. She clapped down her hand in a haste which extinguished the taper she held; whereat a cold voice halted the procession, and she must stand in her shame while the light was being rekindled. And as they came on again she hung her head and her lip trembled.
“Her stature,” says an eye-witness, “was meane [signifying short]; her haire of a dark yellow; her face round and full; her eye grey, delicate harmony between each part’s proportion, and each proportion’s colour; her body white and smooth ... she went in countenance and pase demure, so womanlie, that albeit she were out of all araie save her kirtle onlie, yet went she so faire and lovelie, namelie, while the woondering of the people cast a comelier rud in her cheeks (of which she before had most misse), that hir great shame was hir much praise among those that were more amorous of hir bodie than curious of hir soule. And manie good folks that hated hir living (and glad were to see sin corrected), yet pitied they more hir penance than rejoised therein, when they considered that the King procured it more of a corrupt intent, than anie virtuous affection.”
“Proper she was and fair; nothing in her body that you would have changed, but if you would, have wished her somewhat higher”—no romancer can better that description, and so it shall stand.