In the Shadow of the Crown - By Jean Plaidy Page 0,116

for meekly presiding at the baptism of Edward. Self-seekers, all. They had no feeling, no heart. They made me despair of human nature.

That December Dereham and Culpepper were condemned to death. The court judged them traitors. The sentence was to be carried out with that barbarous method of execution which had been seen too frequently in these last years.

How did they feel when they—surely for no crime which could have been proved against them—were condemned to die? How did the Queen feel…if she knew? Poor girl. They said she was in such a state that she was hardly aware of what was happening about her.

Culpepper was of noble birth, and therefore the horrendous sentence would be commuted to beheading. So he, poor man, was merely to lose his head for a crime he had not committed. It was different with Dereham, whose birth did not entitle him to such a privilege. He must suffer the dreadful fate of hanging, drawing and quartering.

He petitioned against it, and the petition was taken to my father. He must have been enraged at the thought of someone's enjoying Catharine's charms before him. He should have known that she was not the girl to have come through her early life without some amatory adventures. If he had wanted an entirely chaste woman, he should have stayed with Anne of Cleves. He wanted everything to be perfect, and if it were not, those who denied it to him must pay with their lives.

So at Tyburn the terrible sentence was carried out on Dereham. He died protesting his innocence, as did Culpepper, who was beheaded at the same time.

The heads of both men were placed on London Bridge—a terrible warning to those who offended the King. People might ask how Dereham could possibly have known he was offending the King. Was no man to love a woman or to speak of marriage to her… for fear the King might fancy her?

Perhaps people were asking themselves a good many questions during those terrible times.

IT WAS A MISERABLE Christmas. I was glad I was not at Court. I could not imagine how my father could celebrate it. It would be a mockery. Catharine was still at Sion House. I wondered if she still thought the King would pardon her. The uncertainty must be terrible. I expect she had been fond of Dereham once; I believe she still was of Culpepper; and she would know that these two had died because of her. Doubtless she would have heard how they stood up to torture and had tried to defend her to the end.

February came—a dreary, desolate month. There was mist over the land until the cold, biting winds drove it away. They brought the Queen from Sion House to the Tower. I guessed that meant her death was inevitable.

I heard she was a little calmer now. She seemed to have accepted the fact that she was to die. Lady Rochford was in the Tower, condemned with her. She was accused of contriving meetings between Catharine and Culpepper; she was therefore guilty of treason.

I kept thinking of Catharine's youth. Such a short time she had been on Earth, and she had been such a merry creature, relishing life in the Duchess's household, reveling in that sexuality which pleased the men. And then the King's devotion, which, they said, she believed to the end would save her.

Susan and I talked of her. We could think of nothing else. I supposed the whole nation was talking of her. She would be the second of my father's wives to be beheaded—but that had not yet become commonplace.

It was the thirteenth day of February when she was taken out to die. Young, so pretty, her crime being that she had been too free with her favors before the ill-fated choice had fallen on her.

At Havering we heard that she had died with dignity. When she knew there was no hope and that the King, who had professed his love for her, was going to leave her to her fate, she accepted it meekly.

What seemed to worry her more than anything was that she might not know what she had to do on the scaffold, and she asked for a block, which would be exactly like the one on which she would have to lay her head, to be brought to her so that she might practice on it. She did not want to stumble on the day of her death. This was done. Later she