“I cannot leave her,” rejoined Nightgall.
“Take her, then, in the devil’s name,” rejoined De Noailles, peevishly; “and if she brings you to the gallows, do not forget my warning.”
“My next visit shall be to tell you your enemy is no more,” returned Nightgall. “Before midnight to-morrow, you may expect me.” And he quitted the chamber.
While his destruction was planned in the manner above-related, Simon Renard was employing all his art to crush by one fell stroke all the heads of the Protestant party. But he met with opposition from quarters where he did not anticipate it. Though the queen was convinced of Elizabeth’s participation in the plot, as well from Wyat’s confession, who owned that he had written to her during his march to London, offering to proclaim her queen, and had received favourable answers from her,—as from the declaration of a son of Lord Russell, to the effect, that he had delivered the despatches into her own hand, and brought back her replies;—notwithstanding this, Mary refused to pass sentence upon her, and affected to believe her innocent. Neither would she deal harshly with Courtenay, though equally satisfied of his guilt; and Renard, unable to penetrate her motives, began to apprehend that she still nourished a secret attachment to him. The truth was, the princess and her lover had a secret friend in Gardiner, who counteracted the sanguinary designs of the ambassador. Baffled in this manner, Renard determined to lose no time with the others. Already, by his agency, the Duke of Suffolk, Lord Thomas Grey, and Wyat, were condemned—Dudley and Jane alone were wanting to the list.
Touched, by a strong feeling of compassion for their youth, and yet more by the devotion Jane had exhibited to her husband, Mary hesitated to sign their death-warrant. She listened to all Renard’s arguments with attention, but they failed to move her. She could not bring herself to put a period to the existence of one whom she knew to be so pure, so lovely, so loving, so blameless, as Jane. But Renard was determined to carry his point.
“I will destroy them all,” he said; “but I will begin with Dudley and Jane, and end with Courtenay and Elizabeth.”
During the examination of the conspirators, the queen, though she had moved her court to Whitehall, passed much of her time at the Tower, occupied in reading the depositions of the prisoners, or in framing interrogatories to put to them. She also wrote frequent despatches to the emperor, whose counsel she asked in her present difficulties; and while thus occupied, she was often closeted for hours with Renard.
Whether by accident, or that the gloomy legend connected with it, harmonising with his own sombre thoughts, gave it an interest in his eyes, Renard had selected for his present lodging in the Tower, as intimated by Nightgall, the chamber in which the two youthful princes were destroyed. It might be that its contiguity to the Hall Tower, where Mary now for the most part held her conferences with her council, and with which it was connected by a secret passage, occasioned this selection—or he might have been influenced by other motives—suffice it to say he there took up his abode; and was frequently visited within it by Mary. Occupying the upper story of the Bloody Tower, this mysterious chamber looks on the north upon the ascent leading to the Green, and on the south upon Saint Thomas’s Tower. It is now divided into two rooms by a screen—that to the south being occupied as a bed-chamber; and tradition asserts, that in this part of the room the “piece of ruthless butchery,” which stamps it with such fearful interest, was perpetrated. On the same side, between the outer wall and the chamber, runs a narrow passage, communicating on the west with the ballium wall, and thence with the lieutenant’s lodgings, by which the murderers are said to have approached; and in the inner partition is a window, through which they gazed upon their sleeping victims. On the east, the passage communicates with a circular staircase, descending to a small vaulted chamber at the right of the gateway, where the bodies were interred. In later times, this mysterious room has been used as a prison-lodging. It was occupied by Lord Ferrers during his confinement in the Tower, and more recently by the conspirators Watson and Thistlewood.
