Stray Studies from England and ItalyGreene, John Richard
History
Stray Studies from England and Italy
Greene, John Richard
Italy -- Description and travel
The bitter words must have recalled to Ales words of hardly less
bitterness which he had listened to on a visit to Lambeth years before.
If there was one person upon earth whom Cranmer loved it was Anne
Boleyn. When the royal summons had called him to Lambeth to wait till
the time arrived when his part was to be played in the murder of the
Queen his affection found vent in words of a strange pathos. "I loved
her not a little," he wrote to Henry in fruitless intercession, "for the
love which I judged her to bear towards God and His Gospel. I was most
bound to her of all creatures living." So he wrote, knowing there was
wrong to be done towards the woman he loved, wrong which he alone could
do, and knowing too that he would stoop to do it. The large garden
stretched away northward from his house then as now, but then thick, no
doubt, with the elm rows that vanished some thirty years back as the
great city's smoke drifted over them, and herein the early morning (it
was but four o'clock) Ales, who had found sleep impossible and had
crossed the river in a boat to seek calm in the fresh air and stillness
of the place, met Cranmer walking. On the preceding day Anne had gone
through the mockery of her trial, but to the world outside the little
circle of the court nothing was known, and it was in utter
unconsciousness of this that Ales told the Archbishop he had been roused
by a dream of her beheading. Cranmer was startled out of his usual calm.
"Don't you know then," he asked after a moment's silence, "what is to
happen to-day?" Then raising his eyes to heaven he added with a wild
burst of tears, "She who has been Queen of England on earth will this
day become a queen in heaven!" Some hours afterwards the Queen stood
before him as her judge, and passed back to the Tower and the block.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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