be powerless!"

"Those are very cruel words, your highness!" exclaimed Catharine,
who allowed herself to be carried away by her magnanimous heart, and
suspected that Gardiner had come to move the king to some harsh and
bloody decision.

She wanted to anticipate his design; she wanted to move the king to
mildness. But the moment was unpropitious for her.

The king, whom she had just before irritated by her victory over him,
felt his vexation heightened by the opposition which she offered to
the bishop; for this opposition was at the same time directed against
himself. The king was not at all inclined to exercise mercy; it was,
therefore, a very wicked notion of the queen's to praise mercy as the
highest privilege of princes.

With a silent nod of the head, he took the papers from Gardiner's hands,
and opened them.

"Ah," said he, running over the pages, "your highness is right; men do
not deserve to be treated with mercy, for they are always ready to abuse
it. Because we have for a few weeks lighted no fagot-piles and erected
no scaffolds, they imagine that we are asleep; and they begin their
treasonable and mischievous doings with redoubled violence, and raise
their sinful fists against us, in order to mock us. I see here an
accusation against one who has presumed to say that there is no king by
the grace of God; and that the king is a miserable and sinful mortal,
just as well as the lowest beggar. Well, we will concede this man his
point--we will not be to him a king by the grace of God, but a king by
the wrath of God! We will show him that we are not yet quite like the
lowest beggar, for we still possess at least wood enough to build a pile
of fagots for him."

And as the king thus spoke, he broke out into a loud laugh, in which
Gardiner heartily chimed.

"Here I behold the indictment of two others who deny the king's
supremacy," continued Henry, still turning over the leaves of the
papers. "They revile me as a blasphemer, because I dare call myself
God's representative--the visible head of His holy Church; they say that
God alone is Lord of His Church, and that Luther and Calvin are more
exalted representatives of God than the king himself. Verily we must
hold our royalty and our God-granted dignity very cheap, if we should
not punish these transgressors, who blaspheme in our sacred person God
Himself."

He continued turning over the leaves. Suddenly a deep flush of anger
suffused his countenance, and a fi