'But the King! The King! What shall it boot if all these be against her so the King be but for her?'
'Why,' Lascelles said, 'this King is not a very stable man. Still, man he is, a man very jealous and afraid of fleers and flouts. If we can show him—I do accede to it that after what he hath done to-night it shall not be easy, but we may accomplish it—if before this letter is sent we may show him that all his land cries out at him and mocks him with a great laughter because of his wife's evil ways—why then, though in his heart he may believe her as innocent as you or I do now, it shall not be long before he shall put her away from him. Maybe he shall send her to the block.'
'God help me,' Cranmer said. 'What a hellish scheme is this.'
He pondered for a while, standing upright and frailly thrusting his hand into his bosom.
'You shall never get the King so to believe,' he said; 'this is an idle invention. I will none of it.'
'Why, it may be done, I do believe,' Lascelles said, 'and greatly it shall help us.'
'No, I will none of it,' the Archbishop said. 'It is a foul scheme. Besides, you must have many witnesses.'
'I have some already,' Lascelles said, 'and when we come to London Town I shall have many more. It was not for nothing that the Great Privy Seal commended me.'
'But to make the King,' Cranmer uttered, as if he were aghast and amazed, 'to make the King—this King who knoweth that his wife hath done no wrong—who knoweth it so well as to-night he hath proven—to make him, him, to put her away ... why, the tiger is not so fell, nor the Egyptian worm preyeth not on its kind. This is an imagination so horrible——'
'Please it your Grace,' Lascelles said softly, 'what beast or brute hath your Grace ever seen to betray its kind as man will betray brother, son, father, or consort?'