'So was your other niece, Anne Boleyn, for all you knew, yet you dogged her to death,' Gardiner said. 'Then you plotted with Papists; now it is the turn of the Lutherans. It is all one, so we are rid of this pest.'
'Well, I will promise it,' the Duke said. 'Ye knew I would. It was not worth while to ask me.'
'Secondly,' the voice said, 'of you, my Lord Duke, we would have this service: that you should swear your niece is a much older woman than she looks. Say, for instance, that she was in truth not the eleventh but the second child of your brother Edmund. Say that, out of vanity, to make herself seem more forward with the learned tongues when she was a child, she would call herself her younger sister that died in childbed.'
'But wherefore?' the Duke said.
'Why,' Gardiner answered, 'this is a very subtle scheme of this gentleman's devising. He will prove against her certain lewdnesses when she was a child in your mother's house. If then she was a child of ten or so, knowing not evil from good, this might not undo her. But if you can make her seem then eighteen or twenty it will be enough to hang her.'
Norfolk reflected.
'Well, I will say I heard that of her age,' he said; 'but ye had best get nurses and women to swear to these things.'
'We have them now,' the voice said. 'And it will suffice if your Grace will say that you heard these things of old of your brother. For your Grace will judge this woman.'
'Very willingly I will,' Norfolk said; 'for if I do not soon, she will utterly undo both me and all my friends.'
He reflected again.