Henry at the time, jealous person as he was, yet on such paltry grounds was it necessary to build the charge of criminal conduct in the queen.
In the midst of the proceedings against the queen, an extraordinary circumstance took place. The Duke of Cleves, thinking Catherine certain to be executed, made haste to propose the restoration of his sister Anne. He sent over an ambassador, giving him letters from Oslynger, his vice-chancellor, to Cranmer and the Earl of Southampton, entreating them to lay the matter before the king. But this was a hopeless business; Henry had never liked Anne from the first, and would never consent to take a woman who was disagreeable to him a second time. Cranmer, with his timid nature, fought shy of the affair, telling the ambassador curtly, that it was a matter of great importance, and that he must pardon him, but he would have nothing further to do with it but to lay it before the king, and give him his answer. Of course the answer came to nothing.
The condemnation of Catherine now made rapid progress. No man was more her enemy than her own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. This nobleman displayed an especially mean and dastardly nature on this as on other occasions. He had assisted in dethroning and destroying his other niece, Anne Boleyn, insulting her in the midst of her misery, and presiding at her trial with a callous and revolting arrogance. He now turned with the same vile readiness against the whole of his immediate family who were involved in the queen's disgrace. His step-mother, the old duchess, his brother, Lord William, his sister, the Lady Bridgewater, and the queen, his niece, were all given up to destruction by him with a trembling anxiety to flatter the bloody and rapacious king, and save himself, which no honest mind can read without indignation and the profoundest contempt.
The day after his immediate blood relations were committed to the Tower, he wrote to the king, telling him that he had learned that "his ungracious mother-in-law, his unhappy brother and wife, and his kind sister of Bridgewater," were in the Tower; which, he said, from his long experience of his Majesty's equity and justice, made him certain that it was not done but for false and traitorous proceedings. He expresses his deep grief and shame at "the most abominable deeds done by his two nieces against his highness;" and he went on to say that his Majesty, having so often, and by so many of his kin, been thus falsely and traitorously handled, he feared that his heart would be turned against the whole Howard family, so that he should abhor to hear any member of it spoken of; and he then crawls in the dust before the despot in this language, demonstrating that he had himself been the very means of doing much of the mischief against the queen: "Wherefore, my most gracious sovereign lord, prostrate at your feet, most humbly I beseech your majesty to call to your remembrance that a great part of this matter is come to light by my declaration to your majesty, according to my bounden duty, of the words spoken to me by my mother-in-law, when your highness sent me to Lambeth to search Derham's coffers, without the which, I think, she had not been further examined, nor consequently her ungracious children." It is impossible to read the proceedings of these times without an awful sense of the deplorable degradation of character which the sovereign's tyranny had produced all around him. And still the councils went on endeavouring to find evidence against the queen from the prisoners in the Tower. It must be understood that there were now two councils—one that sat in London, and one that went with the king wherever he went. We have seen how they wheedled and menaced the sick old duchess-dowager till they discovered her money, and brought her to say that it was very sinful of her not to have told his Majesty before his marriage of the connection of Catherine with Derham. The treatment of Lord William Howard and his fellow-prisoners was equally infamous. They tried him, his wife, Malin Tilney, Elizabeth Tilney, and three other women, his servants, amongst whom was Margaret Burnet, a butter-woman, separately, as they did Bulmer, Ashby, and Damport, men-servants of the duchess, on a charge of misprision of treason, before juries submissive out of terror. In these trials all forms of law were set at defiance, and instead of real witnesses, the master of the rolls, the attorney-general, and solicitor-general, with three of the king's council, presented against them the forced matter they had obtained in the examinations. The result of it was that the prisoners were all condemned to perpetual imprisonment, forfeiture of their goods, and sequestration of their estates during life. All that was proved, or pretended to be proved against them was, that they had been cognisant of the love affairs of Catherine Howard and Derham, previous to her marriage. Of course Lord William and his family were quite overwhelmed by this severe sentence for no real crime whatever, so that the council reported to the king their opinion that, unless they were allowed some liberty within the Tower, and some intercourse with their friends, they could not live long; to which "this royal savage," as he has justly been styled, replied by a letter under the hands of Lord John Russell and Ralph Sadler, that "he thinketh it not meet that they should so hastily put the prisoners to any such comfort, or so soon restore them to any liberty within the Tower, for sundry great respects and considerations."
On the 21st of January, 1542, a bill of attainder of Catherine Howard, late Queen of England, and of Jane, Lady Rochford, for high treason; of Agnes, Duchess of Norfolk, Lord William Howard, the Lady Bridgewater, and four men and five women, including Derham and Culpepper, already executed, was read in the Lords. On the 28th, the Lord Chancellor, impressed with a laudable sense of justice, proposed that a deputation of Lords and Commons should be allowed to wait on the queen to hear what she had to say for herself. He said it was but just that a queen, who was no mean or private person, but a public and illustrious one, should be tried by equal laws like themselves, and thought it would be acceptable to the king himself, if his consort could thus clear herself. But that did not suit Henry: he was resolved to be rid of his lately beloved model queen; and as there was no evidence whatever of any crime on her part against him, he did not mean that she should have any opportunity of being heard in her defence. The bill was, therefore, passed through Parliament, passing the Lords in three, and the Commons in two days. On the 10th of February the queen was conveyed by water to the Tower, and the next day Henry gave his assent to the bill of attainder.
