Upon a massive chair of state within the private audience chamber, which adjoined the throne room in the venerable castle of Kenilworth, sat King Henry VII, gloomily brooding. An ermine trimmed robe of softest velvet fell from his shoulders, rippling over the steps of the raised dais to the floor below; a golden, jeweled crown sat awry upon his head.
Five years as reigning monarch of a discontented and rebellious people had borne their weight more heavily upon him than had the whole of the twenty-nine preceding them. Though yet young, as time relatively to the man is commonly measured, his hair and carefully pointed beard were shot with premature gray. His countenance, deeply lined, was overspread with a sickly pallor. His hands, clutching upon the arms of the damask-covered chair into which he had thrown himself, and in which he was now half-sitting, half-reclining, trembled as though palsied with an enfeebled age.
His royal marriage with Elizabeth of York, daughter of Henry VI, had marked the consummation of his loftiest ambition. The omen of the white rose mingling with the red had been pleasantly fulfilled. Outwardly his position seemed sufficiently secure. But beneath the surface there were incessant ebullitions of seditious sentiment threatening momentarily to seethe to the top and engulf him. Always, must dissembling be met with keen and smooth diplomacy; plot, with adroit and clever counter-plot.
Because of his open aversion to war, his appreciation of the advantages of negotiation and arbitration, he was stigmatized by his secret enemies as being greedy and avaricious. Yet, on the other hand, had he amassed great armies and plunged them headlong into foreign conflict, thereby burdening his subjects with increased taxation, he would doubtless have been regarded by these same malcontents as being extravagant and needlessly cruel.
During the space of the greater part of an hour the King remained seated in the precise attitude in which the opening of the present chapter discovered him. His chin lowered upon his breast; his gaze fixed straight before him; his fingers tapping ceaselessly upon the arms of his chair.
Then, after the manner of a draped lay-figure imbued with sudden life, he sprang to his feet, threw aside the purple robes enveloping him and paced with nervous footfalls across the floor. Occasionally he would pause, incline his head, and pass his hand fretfully across his brow. Once he stopped, leaning heavily against a marble image of Kenelph, Saxon king of Mercia, from whom the castle had its name. The sun of a September afternoon shining brilliantly through one of the western windows bathed them, the marble effigy and the man, in squares of vari-colored light; affording thus a sharp contrast between the old and the new. In the chiseled head of stone the stamp of an iron will was predominant in every feature. Those of the living bespoke no less the possession of a will; but a will that would seek ever to achieve its purposes through the exercise of crafty cunning. The one had been grimly determined, brave, and openly cruel and tyrannical. The other was a secret coward, masking his cruelties beneath the guise of virtue.
Suddenly, looking up into the stone face of the dead king, the living king smiled.
"Yea," said he. "We will—rather we must—yea, we must command it to be done. And by doing it in that way, 'twill be transfixing two bullocks with a single dart."
Thereupon, mounting the steps of the dais and reseating himself in his chair, he carefully donned his robes of state, composed his features, and gently pulled a golden tassel depending from a silken cord at his elbow.
"Command my lord of Stanley instantly to attend me," was Henry's stern behest to the court attendant, who bowed himself within one of the curtained entrances.