“The Queen’s Majesty is a merciful Princess,” she observed. “I beseech God she may long continue, and send His merciful grace upon her.”
Religious matters were discussed, Lady Jane inquiring as to who had been the preacher at St. Paul’s the preceding Sunday.
“I pray you,” she asked next, “have they Mass in London?”
“Yea, forsooth,” was the answer, “in some places.”
“It may be so,” she said. “It is not so strange as the sudden conversion of the late Duke. For who would have thought he would have so done?” negativing at once and decidedly the suggestion made by some one present that a hope of escaping his imminent doom and winning pardon from the Queen might supply an explanation of his change of front.
“‘Pardon?’ repeated the dead man’s daughter-in-law. ‘Woe worth him! He hath brought me and our stock into most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition. But for the answering that he hoped for life by his turning, though other men be of that opinion, I utterly am not. For what man is there living, I pray you, although he had been innocent, that would hope of life in that case; being in the field against the Queen in person as general, and, after his taking, so hated and evil spoken of by the commons? and at his coming into prison so wondered at as the like was never heard by any man’s time? Who was judge that he should hope for pardon, whose life was odious to all men? But what will ye more? Like as his life was wicked and full of dissimulation, so was his end thereafter. I pray God I, nor no friend of mine, die so. Should I who [am] young and in my fewers [few years?] forsake my faith for the love of life? Nay, God forbid, much more he should not, whose fatal course, although he had lived his just number of years, could not have long continued. But life was sweet, it appeared; so he might have lived, you will say, he did [not] care how. Indeed the reason is good, he that would have lived in chains, to have had his life, by like would leave no other means attempted. But God be merciful to us, for He saith, whoso denyeth Him before men, He will not know in His Father’s Kingdom.’”
The conviction of Northumberland’s daughter-in-law that his recantation had not been a mere device designed to lengthen his days may be allowed in some sort to weigh in favour of the man she hated; and it is also fair to remember that if his first abjuration may be accounted for by a lingering hope that it might purchase life, any such expectation must have been abandoned before the final repetition of it upon the scaffold. In Lady Jane’s eyes, however, there seems to have been little to choose between a sham apostacy and a genuine reversion to his older creed.
“With this and much like talk the dinner passed away,” and with exchange of courtesies the little company separated. The brief shaft of light throwing Lady Jane’s figure into relief fades and leaves her once more in the shadow—a shadow that was to deepen above her till the end. It was early days of captivity still. Yet one discerns something of the passionate longing of the prisoner for freedom in her wonder that life in chains could be accounted worth any sacrifice.