“Do so, Earl Douglas.”
“Be very cautious in the choice of your means. Do not waste them all at once, so that if your first thrust does not hit, you may not be afterward without weapons. It is better, and far less dangerous, to surely kill the enemy that you hate with a slow, creeping poison, gradually and day by day, than to murder him at once with a dagger, which may, however, break on a rib and become ineffective. Tell, then, what you know, not at once, but little by little. Administer your drug which is to make the king furious, gradually; and if you do not hit your enemy to-day, think that you will do it so much the more surely to-morrow. Nor do you forget that we have to punish, not merely the heretic Henry Howard, but above all things the heretical queen, whose unbelief will call down the wrath of the Most High upon this land.”
“Come to the king,” said she, hastily. “On the way you can tell me what I ought to make known and what conceal. I will do implicitly what you say. Now, Henry Howard,” said she softly to herself, “hold yourself ready; the contest begins! In your pride and selfishness you have destroyed the happiness of my life—my eternal felicity. I loved Thomas Seymour; I hoped by his side to find the happiness that I have so long and so vainly sought in the crooked paths of life. By this love my soul would have been saved and restored to virtue. My brother has willed otherwise. He has, therefore, condemned me to be a demon, instead of an angel. I will fulfil my destiny. I will be an evil spirit to him.” [Footnote: The Earl of Surrey, by his refusal to marry Margaret Seymour, gave occasion to the rupture of the proposed alliance between Thomas Seymour and the Duchess of Richmond, his sister. After that the duchess mortally hated him and combined with his enemies against him. The Duchess of Richmond is designated by all the historians of her time as “the most beautiful woman of her century, but also a shameless Messalina.”—See Tytler, p. 890. Also Burnet, vol. i, p. 134; Leti, vol. i, p. 83; and Nott’s Life of Henry Howard.]
CHAPTER XXIV. THE QUEEN’S TOILET.
The festivities of the day are concluded, and the gallant knights and champions, who have to-day broken a lance for the honor of their ladies, may rest from their victories upon their laurels. The tournament of arms was over, and the tournament of mind was about to begin. The knights, therefore, retired to exchange the coat-of-mail for gold-embroidered velvet apparel; the ladies to put on their lighter evening dresses; and the queen, likewise with this design, had withdrawn to her dressing-room, while the ladies and lords of her court were in attendance in the large anteroom to escort her to the throne.
Without, it was beginning to grow dusky, and the twilight cast its long shadows across this hall, in which the cavaliers of the court were walking up and down with the ladies, and discussing the particularly important events of the day’s tourney.
The Earl of Sudley, Thomas Seymour, had borne off the prize of the day, and conquered his opponent, Henry Howard. The king had been in raptures on this account. For Thomas Seymour had been for some time his favorite; perhaps because he was the declared enemy of the Howards. He had, therefore, added to the golden laurel crown which the queen had presented to the earl as the award, a diamond pin, and commanded the queen to fasten it in the earl’s ruff with her own hand. Catharine had done so with sullen countenance and averted looks; and even Thomas Seymour had shown himself only a very little delighted with the proud honor with which the queen, at her husband’s command, was to grace him.
The rigid popish party at court formed new hopes from this, and dreamed of the queen’s conversion and return to the true, pure faith; while the Protestant, “the heretical” party, looked to the future with gloomy despondency, and were afraid of being robbed of their most powerful support and their most influential patronage.
Nobody had seen that, as the queen arose to crown the victor, Thomas Seymour, her handkerchief, embroidered with gold, fell from her hands, and that the earl, after he had taken it up and presented it to the queen, had thrust his hand for a moment, with a motion wholly accidental and undesigned, into his ruff, which was just as white as the small neatly-folded paper which he concealed in it, and which he had found in the queen’s handkerchief.