“Alas! he is lost,” thought Sir John; and he turned away his head.
“Well,” said Cromwell to himself, “the case becomes clear; they cannot draw back.”
While a low murmur of surprise and admiration arose among the jury, their foreman leaned toward Mr. Rich, and whispered to him excitedly.
“Truly! It is so, sir!” said the latter, looking fixedly at him. “It seems to me, Sir Thomas Palmer, that your remarks have much weight. Have you been called here to interpret the wishes of the king, or have you, by chance, a mind to make a short sojourn in the Tower or some part of its environs?” And he made his fingers crack. “With your short-sighted justice,” he replied, “do you believe that there are not some great reasons, which they do not wish you to know, which have led Sir Thomas to the bar of this tribunal? And if I should say to you—” He paused.
“The dogs!” he murmured, looking at the faces of the jurors. “And if I should say to you,” he continued, “that this is an extortioner, and that he has devoured the revenues of the state—sucked—sucked the hearts’ blood of the poor people!”
“It cannot be possible!” said Palmer, awaiting each word of Rich, which seemed to fall drop by drop from his lips. “What! like the other?”
“Exactly, precisely like the other! Wonderful!” said Rich to himself. “They themselves furnish me with the words, the fools! I hope, indeed, that I may be exalted a grade from this; for this herd of jurors make me sweat blood and water. They called them so well chosen! So it appears; one goes to the right, the other to the left, a third to the middle. To the death—that is too hard; no, confiscation, or rather imprisonment. They wish to enter into the spirit of the law, as if they regarded the law! Condemn him, sirs—that is all they ask of you—and then go to your beds! Every one to his trade; theirs is not to inquire what we do, but what we wish them to do!” And Rich, much excited, shaking his great sleeves, leaned forward in order to listen.
“I come, then, to the third article of my accusation,” said Sir Thomas, “by which I am accused of malicious attempts, efforts, and perfidious practices against the statute, because, since being confined in the Tower, I have sent several packages of letters to Bishop Fisher, and in those letters I have exhorted him to violate this same law, and encouraged him in the resistance he has made to it. I have already demanded that those letters should be instantly produced and
read to the court; they could thus have acquitted me or convicted me of falsehood. But as you say the bishop has burned them, I am only able to prove what I advance here by my own words; therefore I will state what they contained. The greater portion of those letters related to my private affairs, especially to our old friendship; in one of them alone I responded to the demand he had made to know how I would reply in my interrogatory upon the oath of supremacy, and I wrote to him thus: that I had examined this question in conscience, and he must be content with knowing that it was decided in my mind. God is my witness, as I hope to save my soul, that I have made no other reply, and I cannot presume that this could be considered an attack upon the laws.”
“Oh! no, by no means,” said several of the jurors. “Nevertheless, it would be necessary to see these documents.”