in
their appearance, were gone to sit in the scaffold to see the burning
of the friar that had denied the King's supremacy of the Church and
the burnings of the six Protestants that had denied the presence of
Christ's body in the Sacrament. Only Privy Seal, who had ordered these
things, was still walking in his gallery where he so often had walked
of late.

He had with him Wriothesley, whose face was utterly downcast and
abashed; he walked turning more swiftly than had been his wont ever
before. Wriothesley hung down his great bearded, honest head and
sighed three times.

'Sir,' he said at last, 'I see before us nothing but that ye make to
divorce the Queen Anne.' And the words seemed to come from him as if
they cost him his heart's blood.

Cromwell paused before him, his hands behind his back, his feet apart.

'The weighty question,' he said, 'is this: Who hath betrayed me: of
Udal; of the alewife that he should have had the papers of; or
Throckmorton?'

He had that morning received from Cleves, in the letter of his agent
there, the certain proof that the Duke had written to the Emperor
Charles making an utter submission to save his land from ruin, and as
utterly abjuring his alliance with the King his brother-in-law and
with the Schmalkaldner league and its Protestant princes. Cromwell had
immediately called to him Wriothesley that was that day ordering the
horses to take him back to Paris town. He had given him this news,
which, if it were secret then, must in a month be made known to all
the world. To Wriothesley the Protestant this blow was the falling in
of the world; here was Protestantism at an end and dead. There
remained nothing but to save the necks of some to carry on the faith
to distant days. Therefore he had brought out his reluctant words to
urge Privy Seal to the divorce of Anne of Cleves. There was no other
way; there was no other issue. Privy Seal must abjure Cleves' Queen,
and the very savour of a desire for a Protestant league.

But for Privy Seal the problem was not what to do, a thing he might
settle in a minute's swift thought, but the discovery of who had
betrayed him--for his whole life had been given to bringing together
his machine of service. You might determine an alliance or a divorce
between breath and breath; but the training of your instruments, the
weeding out of them that had flaws in their fidelities; the exhibiting
of a swift and awful vengeance upon mutineers--these were th