the rigid Catholic, who hates heretics as much
as Edward loves them. Oh, friend, when Mary ascends the throne, we shall
rise from our humiliation, and the dominion will be ours. Then will all
England become, as it were, a single great temple, and the fagot-piles
about the stake are the altars on which we will consume the heretics,
and their shrieks of agony are the holy psalms which we will make them
strike up to the honor of God and His holy Church. Hope for this time,
for I tell you it will soon come."

"If you say so, your highness, then it will come to pass," said Douglas,
significantly. "I will then hope and wait. I will save myself from evil
days in Scotland, and wait for the good."

"And I go, as this king by the wrath of God has commanded, to my
episcopal seat. The wrath of God will soon call Henry hence. May his
dying hour be full of torment, and may the Holy Father's curse be
realized and fulfilled in him! Farewell! We go with palms of peace
forced on us; but we will return with the naming sword, and our hands
will be dripping with heretic blood."

They once more shook hands and silently departed, and before evening
came on they had both left London. [Footnote: Gardiner's prophecy was
soon fulfilled. A few days after Gardiner had fallen into disgrace
Henry, the Eighth died, and his son Edward, yet a minor, ascended the
throne. But his rule was of brief duration. After a reign of scarcely
six years, he died a youth of the age of sixteen years, and his sister
Mary, called the Catholic, ascended the throne. Her first act was
to release Gardiner, who under Edward's reign had been confined as a
prisoner in the Tower, and to appoint him her minister, and later, to
the place of lord chancellor. He was one of the most furious persecutors
of the Reformers. Once he said at a council in the presence of the
bigoted queen; "These heretics have a soul so black that it can be
washed clean only in their own blood." He it was, too, who urged the
queen to such severe and odious measures against the Princess Elizabeth,
and caused her to be a second time declared a bastard and unworthy
of succeeding to the throne. When Mary died, Gardiner performed, in
Westminster Abbey, where she was entombed, the service for the dead in
the presence of her successor, Queen Elizabeth. Gardiner's discourse was
an enthusiastic eulogium of the deceased queen, and he set forth, as her
special merit, that she hated the heretics so ardently and had