Now the door flew open; there was seen John Heywood’s pale face: there were the maids of honor and the court officials. And all shrieked and all wailed: “The king is dying! He is struck with apoplexy! The king is at the point of death!”
“The king calls you! The king desires to die in the arms of his wife!” said John Heywood, and, as he quietly pushed Elizabeth aside and away from the door as she was pressing violently forward, he added: “The king will see nobody but his wife and the priest; and he has authorized me to call the queen!”
He opened the door; and through the lines of weeping and wailing court officials and servants, Catharine moved on, to go to the death-bed of her royal husband.
CHAPTER XXXVII. “LE ROI EST MORT—VIVE LA REINE!”
King Henry lay a-dying. That life full of sin, full of blood and crime, full of treachery and cunning, full of hypocrisy and sanctimonious cruelty—that life was at last lived out. That hand, which had signed so many death-warrants, was now clutched in the throes of death. It had stiffened at the very moment when the king was going to sign the Duke of Norfolk’s death-warrant. [Footnote: historical. The king’s own words.—Leti, vol. I, p. 16.] And the king was dying with the gnawing consciousness that he had no longer the power to throttle that enemy whom he hated. The mighty king was now nothing more than a feeble, dying old man, who was no longer able to hold the pen and sign this death-warrant for which he had so long hankered and hoped. Now it lay before him, and he no longer had the power to use it. God, in His wisdom and His justice, had decreed against him the most grievous and horrible of punishments; He had left him his consciousness; He had not crippled him in mind, but in body only. And that motionless and rigid mass which, growing chill in death, lay there on the couch of purple trimmed with gold—that was the king—a king whom agony of conscience did not permit to die, and who now shuddered and was horrified in view of death, to which he had, with relentless cruelty, hunted so many of his subjects.
Catharine and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the noble Cranmer, stood at his bedside: and whilst in convulsive agony he grasped Catharine’s hands, he listened to the devout prayers which Cranmer was saying over him.
Once he asked with mumbling tongue: “My lord, what kind of a world then is that where those who condemn others to die, are condemned to die themselves?”
And as the pious Cranmer, touched by the agonies and tortures of conscience which he read in the king’s looks, and full of pity for the dying tyrant, sought to comfort him, and spoke to him of the mercy of God which has compassion on every sinner, the king groaned out: “No, no! No mercy for him who knew no mercy!”
At length this awful struggle of death with life was ended; and death had vanquished life. The king had closed his eyes to earth, to open them again there above, as a guilt-laden sinner in the presence of God.