d sinners, and he had Protestants and Roman Catholics alike
executed, however near they stood to his own person, and however closely
he was otherwise bound to them.

Whoever, therefore, could avoid it, kept himself far from the dreaded
person of the king; and whoever was constrained by duty to be near him,
trembled for his life, and commended his soul to God.

There were only four persons who did not fear the king, and who seemed
to be safe from his destroying wrath. There was the queen, who nursed
him with devoted attention, and John Heywood, who with untiring zeal
sustained Catharine in her difficult task, and who still sometimes
succeeded in winning a smile from the king. There were, furthermore,
Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, and Earl Douglas.

Lady Jane Douglas was dead. The king had therefore forgiven her father,
and again shown himself gracious and friendly to the deeply-bowed
earl. Besides, it was such an agreeable and refreshing feeling to the
suffering king to have some one about him who suffered yet more than he
himself! It comforted him to know that there could be agonies yet more
horrible than those pains of the body under which he languished. Earl
Douglas suffered these agonies; and the king saw with a kind of delight
how his hair turned daily more gray, and his features became more
relaxed and feeble. Douglas was younger than the king, and yet how
old and gray his face was beside the king's well-fed and blooming
countenance!

Could the king have seen the bottom of his soul, he would have had less
sympathy with Earl Douglas's sorrow.

He considered him only as a tender father mourning the death of his
only child. He did not suspect that it was less the father that Jane's
painful death had smitten, than the ambitious man, the fanatical Roman
Catholic, the enthusiastic disciple of Loyola, who with dismay saw
all his plans frustrated, and the moment drawing nigh when he would be
divested of that power and consideration which he enjoyed in the secret
league of the disciples of Jesus. With him, therefore, it was less the
daughter, for whom he mourned, than the king's seventh wife. And that
Catharine wore the crown, and not his daughter--not Jane Douglas--his it
was that he could never forgive the queen.

He wanted to take vengeance on the queen for Jane's death; he wanted to
punish Catharine for his frustrated hopes, for his desires that she
had trampled upon. But Earl Douglas durst not himself venture t