the other Jesuit
historians. On the 23rd October the Queen fell gravely ill again, and in
the night was thought to be dying. Henry had intended to ride to Esher
that day, but "could not find it in his heart" to go; and the next night,
the 24th October, Jane Seymour died, a sacrifice to improper treatment and
heartlessly exacted ceremonial. Henry had not been married long enough to
her to have become tired of her, and her somewhat lethargic placidity had
suited him. She had, moreover, borne him the long-looked-for son; and his
grief for her loss was profound, and no doubt sincere. Much as he hated
signs of mortality, he wore black mourning for her for three months, and
shut himself up at Windsor away from the world, and above all away from
the corpse of his dead wife, for a fortnight. Jane's body, embalmed, lay
in the presence chamber at Hampton Court for a week. Blazing tapers
surrounded the great hearse, and masses went on from dawn to midday in the
chamber. All night long the Queen's ladies, with Princess Mary, watched
before the bier, until the end of the month, when the catafalque had been
erected in the chapel for the formal lying in state. On the 12th November,
with the greatest possible pomp, the funeral procession bore the dead
Queen to Windsor for burial in a grave in St. George's Chapel, destined to
receive the remains of Henry as well as that of his third wife, the mother
of his son.[182] The writers of the time, following the lead of Henry and
his courtiers, never mentioned their grief for the Queen without promptly
suggesting that it was more than counterbalanced by their joy at the birth
of her son, who from his first appearance in the world was hailed as a
paragon of beauty and perfection. Thanksgivings for the boon of a male
heir to the King blended their sounds of jubilation with the droning of
the masses for the mother's soul, and the flare of the bonfires died down
into the flickering tapers that dimly lit the funerals. Even Henry
himself, in writing to give the news of his son's birth, confessed that
his joy at the event had far exceeded his grief for Jane's death.

So far as the Catholic party that had promoted it was concerned, the
marriage with Jane had been a failure. The Pilgrimage of Grace had been
drowned in the blood of ruthless slaughter: and partly because of Mary's
scruples and fears, partly because they themselves had been gorged with
the plunder of the Church, nearly all the great nobles