In the Shadow of the Crown - By Jean Plaidy Page 0,208

burned and at Hadleigh Rowland Taylor, a wellknown adherent to the Protestant cause, met the same fate. He was the parish priest and much loved, a man of great virtue, apart from his stubbornness in religious matters. He had protested violently when a priest had been sent to perform Mass in his church. His arrest and sentence to the stake had followed. But the most prominent victim was John Hooper, the Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester.

I was very distressed. Why could they not accept the truth? All were given the chance to. All they had to do was deny their faith and accept the true one, and they would be saved.

I did remember how I had clung to my faith and how I had put myself in danger by my firm adherence to it. But that was the true faith. I laughed at myself. These poor people deluded themselves that their was the true one.

Because Hooper was so well known, there was more talk about him than the others. He had been such a good man, people were saying: he had a wife who had borne nine children. I knew this. But he had been remonstrated with and given every chance. He had been arrested some time before on some petty charge, because Gardiner had intimated to me that he was a dangerous man. He believed so fervently in his style of religion, and people were moved by his eloquence and inclined to follow him.

Hooper had been in the Fleet Prison for some time, and he had made it known that there he had been treated worse than if he had been a slave.

Gardiner saw how distressed I was that this man had suffered death by burning, and he insisted that he had done much harm with his preaching and writing, and would have done more if he had been allowed to live. He had been offered every chance.

The day before his death, Sir Anthony Kingston had gone to him and begged him to recant, for to do so would save his life. But he would not. He said he would rather face the flames.

“He was a foolish man,” said Gardiner.

“Aye,” I replied, “but a brave one.”

I was deeply disturbed that there should be this religious persecution in my reign. I had wanted to be good to all my people. I almost wished that I was back in the past, when I was without responsibilities, even wondering who was seeking to destroy me.

Now the power was mine to destroy others, I could not rest. My nights were haunted by memories of my stepmother Katharine Parr. She came to me in dreams, side by side with Anne Askew.

“All these heretics have to do is recant,” I continually reminded myself. If they did, they would be received with joy. Is there not greater joy in the sinner who repents? They should have instruction. They should have time to learn. I would insist on that.

I was pleased when one of the Franciscans preached at Court, pointing out that burning at the stake was not the way.

I said to Philip, “He is right.”

But Philip did not think so. In his native country the Inquisition flourished. It had a beneficial effect, he insisted. People lived in fear of it. Only the reckless and foolhardy wanted to pit themselves against it.

After that sermon, there was a lull for a while, and then the arrests began again and the burning continued.

What was happening threw a cloud over my happiness.

It was April, and I believed that the birth of my child was imminent. I was to go to Hampton Court, where arrangements were being made for my confinement. Soon, I told myself, I should forget my troubles. In a few weeks from now I should have my child.

I then embarked on the most extraordinary and heartbreaking time of my whole life.

The first weeks at Hampton were peaceful. I was glad of the custom which decreed that a queen should retire and live quietly with her women, awaiting the great event.

Here Jane Seymour had come before me. She had given birth to a boy, and that had killed her—yet she had been young and healthy and ripe for childbearing, it had seemed.

Susan said I must not think of Jane. She had not been taken care of after the birth. She would see that I had every care.

And so we waited. I had the cradle placed in my room so that I could see it all the time. It was