Johnnie drew his sword, held it point downwards, and stood erect, guarding the door. He could feel the tapestry which covered it moving behind him, bellying out and pressing gently upon his back.
He could see the faces of the people at the table very distinctly.
The King of Spain and his chaplain were in profile to him. The Queen and the Bishop of London he saw full-face. He had not met the Bishop before, though he had heard much about him, and it was on the prelate's countenance that his glance of curiosity first fell.
Young as he was, Johnnie had already begun to cultivate that cool scrutiny and estimation of character which was to stand him in such stead during the years that were to come. He watched the face of Edmund Bonner, or Boner, as the Bishop was more generally called at that time, with intense interest. Boner was to the Queen what the Dominican Deza was to her husband. The two priests ruled two monarchs.
In the yellow candle-light, an oasis of radiance in the murk and gloom of the storm, the faces of the people round the table hid nothing. The Bishop was bullet-headed, had protruding eyes, a bright colour, and his moustache and beard only partially hid lips that were red and full. The lips were red and full, there was a coarseness, and even sensuality, about them, which was, nevertheless, oddly at war with their determination and inflexibility. The young man, pure and fastidious himself, immediately realised that Boner was not vicious in the ordinary meaning of the word. One hears a good deal about "thin, cruel lips"—the Queen had them, indeed—but there are full and blood-charged lips which are cruel too. And these were the lips of the Bishop of London.
There was a huge force about the man. He was plebeian, common, but strong.
Don Diego, Commendone himself, the Queen and her husband, were all aristocrats in their different degree, bred from a line—pedigree people.
That was the bond between them.
The Bishop was outside all this, impatient of it, indeed; but even while the groom of the body twirled his moustache with an almost mechanical gesture of disgust and misliking, he felt the power of the man.
And no historian has ever ventured to deny that. The natural son of the hedge-priest, George Savage—himself a bastard—walked life with a shield of brutal power as his armour. The blood-stained man from whom—a few years after—Queen Elizabeth turned away with a shudder of irrepressible horror, was the man who had dared to browbeat and bully Pope Clement VII himself. He took a personal and undignified delight in the details of physical and mental torture of his victims. In 1546 he had watched with his own eyes the convulsions of Dame Anne Askew upon the rack. He was sincere, inflexible, and remarkable for obstinacy in everything except principle. As Ambassador to Paris in Henry's reign he had smuggled over printed sheets of Coverdale's and Grafton's translation of the Bible in his baggage—the personal effects of an ambassador being then, as now, immune from prying eyes. During the Protectorate he had lain in prison, and now the strenuous opposer of papal claims in olden days was a bishop in full communion with Rome.