“Then I will draw up that order.”
“Sire, in that cabinet yonder may be found the necessary writing-materials, if it please your majesty.”
The king leaned in silence on the earl’s arm, and allowed himself to be led again into the cabinet.
With officious haste Earl Douglas made the necessary arrangements. He rolled the writing-table up to the king; he placed the large sheet of white paper in order, and slipped the pen into the king’s hand.
“What shall I write?” asked the king, who, by the exertion of his night’s excursion, and of his anger and vexation, began at length to be exhausted.
“An order for the queen’s imprisonment, sire.”
The king wrote. Earl Douglas stood behind him, with eager attention, in breathless expectation, his look steadily fixed on the paper over which the king’s hand, white, fleshy, and sparkling with diamonds, glided along in hasty characters.
He had at length reached his goal. When at last he should hold in his hand the paper which the king was then writing—when he had induced Henry to return to his apartments before the imprisonment of the queen had taken place—then was he victorious. Not that woman there would he then imprison; but, with the warrant in his hand, he would go to the real queen, and take her to the Tower.
Once in the Tower, the queen could no longer defend herself; for the king would see her no more; and if before the Parliament she protested her innocence in ever so sacred oaths, still the king’s testimony must convict her; for he had himself surprised her with her paramour.
No, there was no escape for the queen. She had once succeeded in clearing herself of an accusation, and proving her innocence, by a rebutting alibi. But this time she was irretrievably lost, and no alibi could deliver her.