love he bore to his sister's youngest born, the fair son she loved so well. In vain did Françoise d'Amboise, with streaming eyes, embrace his knees and shed torrents of tears, which only seemed the more to anger him, whose jealousy waxed more bitter at every sign of affection for his young brother. His visage waxed more fierce as these pleadings became more urgent, and at last he broke forth in a violent fury, and insulted his victim with savage upbraidings and cruel taunts. The venom a lying tongue had daily distilled into his soul now found vent in a malice which knew no bounds. The lips of a sovereign and a brother poured forth the hatred of the serpent coiled round his heart. For a while (an eye-witness described the scene) Monseigneur Gilles listened in silence on his knees, his gaze fixed on the ground. Then suddenly rising, he exclaimed,

"No more tears, I pray you; no more prayers for me. Messire le Connétable, and you all, my loving and noble kindred, bear witness that I appeal this day to the justice of my country. Let me be tried by the Estates of Brittany. Now I return to custody, and God judge betwixt thee and me, Monseigneur François, and deal with me on His Doomsday as mercilessly as you now do, if in aught I have deserved this treatment at your hands.”

Then he was hurried back to prison, and the Connétable left Nantes broken-hearted. Dame Françoise, in season and out of season, plied the Duke with remonstrances, ever calling to his mind his cruelty, and beseeching him, for his soul's sake, if for no other cause, to be pitiful to his brother. Then he grew weary of her reproaches, and banished her and her husband from the Court; and she took the little Françoise to Guincamp; and one who has been at that place has seen them often in the church. Monseigneur Gilles is soon to be tried by the Estates of Brittany, as he desired. O, God send they acquit him! I asked the same traveller if he had heard aught of Jeanne. He said Madame de Dinant was dead, and Mademoiselle de Kersabiec had disappeared the day of her funeral, after long prayer in the chapel, and naught since hath been seen of her.

The war with France is like to break out again, though the Queen hath laboured hard to prevent it. But the King her uncle is resolved, 'tis said, to reconquer Normandy, and the people here accuse the Queen, because she is French, of desiring ill success to our arms, which is a most false calumny. The friends of the Duke of York spread these reports, and, because the Duke of Somerset is regent in France, foretell all manner of calamities to the realm. The Queen hath procured that the Duke of York should be charged with the government of Ireland. "Now," her grace says, we are rid, for a time at least, of this plotter."

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But some reckon this to be a very dangerous policy; for thus this prince has opportunities to strengthen himself in one part of his majesty's dominions; and my Lord of Salisbury, and his son Lord Warwick, take care his interests shall not suffer at home. Albeit they dare not attack the Queen directly, nothing can exceed their animosity against the Duke of Suffolk; and I hear talk even amongst

such as come to the Court touching the King's incapacity for government, and that he is fitter for a cloister than a crown; and has in a manner deposed himself by leaving the affairs of the kingdom in the hands of a woman, who useth his name to conceal her usurpation, for that, according to the laws of this country, a queen consort hath no power, but title only. Though her majesty hath a firmer hand wherewith to steer the helm of the State than any other person of her sex and her years in Europe, she is nevertheless only nineteen, and her advisers, I fear, not often discreet, and more concerned to advance their fortunes than her interests. Once I told her the speeches I heard touching her ambitious designs in entertaining the King with every thing except the affairs of the State and the cares of government. She rested her face on her hands, leaning her elbows on a table, and fixing her piercing eyes on mine, as if to divine my secret thoughts,

"Say they so?" she asked, with some bitterness of tone. "O, I admire how fools babble of what angels would scarcely dare to speak of."

"Forgive me, madam," I said, in a faltering voice.

"Peace, peace, good Meg," she cried, half impatient, and yet kindly; "I meant not to reprove thy well-meant garrulity. I know thou lovest the King and me, and therefore I will tell thee that this vulgar blame condemns in me what it cannot-and God send it may never-comprehend. There are secret wires in stage-plays which spectators discern not, and in the conduct of men springs of action which none but the actors themselves can fathom."

"Will your majesty play at cards this evening with the King?" I asked; for it is my business to set the table for prime; and I wished to break off a dangerous discourse, in which I had almost angered the Queen, I thought.

She turned round with a fierceness which amazed me. quivered.

Her lip

"You are too bold-or else stupid," she added; and verily I looked bewildered. Then she seized my arm, and said in a hurried manner, "Know you not when and where cards were invented?"

"No, madam, no," I answered with unfeigned surprise, her behaviour was so strange.

"O, then, go and set the table for prime," she said, with a halfrelieved, half-dejected countenance.

CHAPTER XVI.

A KING'S PROPHECY.

As I was one day with some other persons of the Queen's household in the antechamber which leadeth to her apartments, we listened to the speeches of various persons as they went in and came out. Lord Shrewsbury's visage was most sad, I thought, and he looked older by a great deal than when I had last seen him at court. This

carl's affection for the Queen hath never altered; and in it is united a meet reverence for his sovereign and a paternal tenderness for one so young and lovely. "Tis pretty to see him study her likings, and minister to her delights, in all honourable and pleasant ways; and she, with a winsome respect, regard his aged years with a cherishing affection. He is more pleased than any man alive in this country with her majesty's wit and learning, and he loveth to speak French with her, wherein he thinks he excels; but her grace sometimes cannot refrain from smiling at the mistakes of the good lord, and says she talketh in English with less faults than he in French, which he disallows, and thereupon they have friendly disputes. Not further than yesterday, her majesty had writ a letter for the recommendation of one dame in the Convent of Barking to be prioress, and used these words therein: "Wherefore we desire and pray you that in accomplissement of my lord's request and ours in this partie, ye will have the said dame in your next election right tenderly recommended, and choose her to be your prioress and governor, by consideration of her many virtues, religious governance, and good fame that she is renomed of." So when my Lord Shrewsbury, for whose contentment this letter was writ-for that dame was a kinswoman of his-read these sentences, he grimly smiled, and said, "Madame, I misdoubt if accomplissement and renomed should be English words." Upon which her majesty laughed, and answered they should be English if she pleased; "for," quoth she, "if a man speaketh amiss, 'tis the custom to say he doth clip the King's English. By that same token, I may do what I please with my lord's possessions; for what is his is mine." One only quarrel the Queen has had in these four years with Lord Shrewsbury. This was touching Joan of Arc, which he holds to have been a witch; and the Queen conceives she was a saint.

When he returned from the presence-chamber on the morn I speak of, Lady Elisabeth de Say met him with these words:

"My lord, it is bruited that the Duke of Suffolk is in the Tower. I pray you what is laid to his charge?"

Madame," the old lord replied, "his father and three of his brethren have been slain in France. He has himself served in the wars thirty-and-four years. He has been of the Order of the Garter thirty years, and a councillor of the King fifteen years, and has once been seventeen years in the wars without once returning home. I pray God his enemies may serve the King one-half as well as this strange traitor hath done."

"Marry, my Lord Shrewsbury," cried that bird of evil omen Lady Isabel Butler, "he intended to wed his son John with little Margaret Beaufort, and, after murthering the King, to declare her to be heiress of the crown."

"Murther the King!" I exclaimed, amazed. Upon which she rejoined, with one of her malicious smiles:

"Mark, I said not the Queen."

If frowns could kill, then methinks the lady would then have died, if I judge by the scowl which darkened my Lord Shrewsbury's

countenance.

"Madame," he cried, "you have to thank God that you are a woman. No man should have gone unscathed after he had uttered that speech in my hearing."

The lady turned away, feigning not to hear; and then talk was ministered concerning the bad news from France; and some persons said that the Duke of Somerset was losing all which the Dukes of Bedford and of York had preserved; and one Thomas Crawford, the Queen's herbman, reported that tidings had arrived. from Portsmouth, where there had been very mischievous riots, and the Bishop of Chichester, who had gone there to pay the troops for the French expedition, had been killed by the mob. And presently Ralph Osborne brought news that William Taylboys, the outlaw, had been discovered with armed men near the council-chamber, and at the instance of Lord Cromwell committed to the Tower. Mary Beaumont came afterwards to my chamber; and when I said, “Ah, Moll, these new haps will cause further grief to the Queen," she answered, "In truth, she hath enough of it and to spare. I warrant thee, Meg, there are not many women with so brave a heart in their bosoms as this lady. I have heard here and there a word fall from her lips which betokeneth sore inward disturbance. Sometimes when she is at Windsor she cometh to see Dame Alice Botler, my kinswoman, which was the King's governess, and now lives in a house in the Park. She questions her touching his majesty's childhood, and likes to hear her relate how he looked and behaved when she had him in her charge. Once when I was there she exclaimed, “ Ah me, Mistress Alice, I love this Windsor, because my liege lord and dear husband was born here." Dame Alice replied: "Well, his mother, Queen Katherine, shed many tears because of that birth at Windsor." "And why so, I pray you?" the Queen asked in great amazement. Then Dame Alice related that when the late King departed for France, after the death of the Duke of Clarence at Beaugy, he charged her with many urgent enforcements not to lie in at Windsor, for that if he had a son born at that place, he should be misfortunate all the days of his life. The Queen (she said) smiled, and would have it that to be born at the birthplace of Edward the Third must needs prove a good omen for an English prince, and Windsor the most comfortable palace for her to be delivered in. But the King would in noways alter his thinking, and left her with this strenuous injunction. "And durst she disobey it?" the Queen asked. Dame Alice replied, "She was wont to say the King was too superstitious, and she should lie in where she pleased, and no evil should come of it to her child or herself. She had a playful and daring spirit in those her young years, and would not be ruled even by her lord. At the last she resolved to remove to Sheen, but was taken ill before her departure; and so my lord the king was born at Windsor. I remember the bright smile on her pale fair face when she held him in her arms, who was the most beautiful infant that could be seen, and the glee with which she said, 'Nothing in this babe, methinks, doth betoken that misfortune should be his lot.' Yet when some time afterwards Lord Fitzhugh related to her how, when

the King heard at Meaux of his son's birth, he had eagerly inquired where the child was born, and being told at Windsor, had exclaimed,

'I, Henry, born at Monmouth,

Shall small time reign and much get:

But Henry of Windsor shall long reign and lose all ;
But as God will, so be it.'

She shed some tears; and as years went on and disasters occurred, she thought more and more of those words, and sorrowed very much for her youthful stubbornness, and humbly confessed her fault when she was dying, and begged the King to forgive her."

"What said my lord?"

"He bade her be of good comfort, for that misfortunes are no evils to a Christian soul; and if he should lose all on earth, he should hope to get the more in heaven.”

"That is like his majesty," the Queen exclaimed.

"Goodness

is never lacking in his grace; and was he in childhood grave and débonnaire ?"

"He had always a sweet gravity in his countenance," my kinswoman replied, "and I have not seen the child which could be compared to his highness for towardness of disposition. Mrs. Joan Astley says that even in his infancy graciousness was noticeable in his looks and actions. When he passed through the streets of London, sitting on his mother's lap, he saluted the people, and conducted himself with much sadness; and those pretty hands, which could not yet feed himself, were made to wield a little sceptre. I mind the day when the Earl of Warwick showed him to the peers in Parliament, and one of the lords presented him with the orb. He put one little hand upon it and then the other, and seemed to doubt, if it should be a thing to be afraid of or to play with."

"Ah, Dame Alice," the Queen said smiling, "you must needs have been in great renown for a very wise and expert person, since the King's council appointed you to teach him courtesy and nurture. No doubt you learnt him early to say his prayers."

"I promise your majesty the King could say his beads as soon as he could speak. And I warrant your grace, when he was only eighteen months of age he would not travel on the Sunday."

"Nay, nay, Dame Alice, this is not to be believed," the Queen exclaimed.

But my good kinswoman would not be gainsayed therein, and declared that it was written in the Chronicle of London.

"It happened upon the 13th of November," quoth she, "when the King and his mother were coming from Windsor to London. At night, on the Saturday, they lodged at Staines; and on the morrow, when the King was carried to his mother's car, he shrieked, and sprang, and cried in so lusty a fashion, the like of which had never been seen in him before, that they must needs carry him back to the inn; and there he abode all the day. But on the morrow, when he was borne to the car, he was glad and merry of cheer."

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Come, Dame Alice," cried the Queen, "I am a misbeliever touching this early sanctity which showed itself by kicks and screams.