No More Learning

They are too crush'd, too broken,
They can but weep in silence.

HOWARD. Ay, ay, Paget,
They have brought it in large measure on themselves.
Have I not heard them mock the blessed Host
In songs so lewd, the beast might roar his claim
To being in God's image, more than they?
Have I not seen the gamekeeper, the groom.
Gardener, and huntsman, in the parson's place,
The parson from his own spire swung out dead,
And Ignorance crying in the streets, and all men
Regarding her? I say they have drawn the fire
On their own heads: yet, Paget, I do hold
The Catholic, if he have the greater right,
Hath been the crueller.

PAGET. Action and re-action,
The miserable see-saw of our child-world,
Make us despise it at odd hours, my Lord.
Heaven help that this re-action not re-act
Yet fiercelier under Queen Elizabeth,
So that she come to rule us.

HOWARD. The world's mad.

PAGET. My Lord, the world is like a drunken man,
Who cannot move straight to his end--but reels
Now to the right, then as far to the left,
Push'd by the crowd beside--and underfoot
An earthquake; for since Henry for a doubt--
Which a young lust had clapt upon the back,
Crying, 'Forward! '--set our old church rocking, men
Have hardly known what to believe, or whether
They should believe in anything; the currents
So shift and change, they see not how they are borne,
Nor whither.
I conclude the King a beast;
Verily a lion if you will--the world
A most obedient beast and fool--myself
Half beast and fool as appertaining to it;
Altho' your Lordship hath as little of each
Cleaving to your original Adam-clay,
As may be consonant with mortality.

HOWARD. We talk and Cranmer suffers.
The kindliest man I ever knew; see, see,
I speak of him in the past. Unhappy land!
Hard-natured Queen, half-Spanish in herself,
And grafted on the hard-grain'd stock of Spain--
Her life, since Philip left her, and she lost
Her fierce desire of bearing him a child,
Hath, like a brief and bitter winter's day,
Gone narrowing down and darkening to a close.
There will be more conspiracies, I fear.

PAGET. Ay, ay, beware of France.

HOWARD. O Paget, Paget!
I have seen heretics of the poorer sort,
Expectant of the rack from day to day,
To whom the fire were welcome, lying chain'd
In breathless dungeons over steaming sewers,
Fed with rank bread that crawl'd upon the tongue,
And putrid water, every drop a worm,
Until they died of rotted limbs; and then
Cast on the dunghill naked, and become
Hideously alive again from head to heel,
Made even the carrion-nosing mongrel vomit
With hate and horror.

PAGET. Nay, you sicken _me_
To hear you.

HOWARD. Fancy-sick; these things are done,
Done right against the promise of this Queen
Twice given.