“What of the Religious houses?”
Ralph hesitated.
“My brother Christopher has just gone to Lewes,” he said. “So I heard more of the favourable side, but I heard a good deal against them, too. There was a secular priest talking against them one day, with our chaplain, who is a defender of them.”
“Who was he?” asked Cromwell, with the same sharp, oblique glance.
“A man of no importance, sir; the parson of Great Keynes.”
“The Holy Maid is in trouble,” went on the other after a minute’s silence. “She is in my Lord of Canterbury’s hands, and we can leave her there. I suppose she will be hanged.”
Ralph waited. He knew it was no good asking too much.
“What she said of the King’s death and the pestilence is enough to cast her,” went on Cromwell presently. “And Bocking and Hadleigh will be in his hands soon, too. They do not know their peril yet.”
They went on to talk of the friars, and of the disfavour that they were in with the King after the unfortunate occurrences of the previous spring, when Father Peto had preached at Greenwich before Henry on the subject of Naboth’s vineyard and the end of Ahab the oppressor. There had been a dramatic scene, Cromwell said, when on the following Sunday a canon of Hereford, Dr. Curwin, had preached against Peto from the same pulpit, and had been rebuked from the rood-loft by another of the brethren, Father Elstow, who had continued declaiming until the King himself had fiercely intervened from the royal pew and bade him be silent.
“The two are banished,” said Cromwell, “but that is not the end of it. Their brethren will hear of it again. I have never seen the King so wrathful. I suppose it was partly because the Lady Katharine so cossetted them. She was always in the church at the night-office when the Court was at Greenwich, and Friar Forrest, you know, was her confessor. There is a rod in pickle.”