The Reign of Mary Tudor | Page 3

in the
reign of Elizabeth, the matter was inquired into, and the account was
found to be absolutely true. No one will be found, however, in these
days to assert that a book, written by an avowed partisan, in an
uncritical age, recording transactions of which from the very nature of
things he could have had no personal knowledge, was not too highly
coloured in parts and in others absolutely untrustworthy. Few books,
nevertheless, have exercised a more abiding influence on the course of
our national life. Its simplicity, its directness, its poignant style, and its
dramatic power combined to make it an English classic. If it loaded
Bonner and Gardiner with shame and hatred, it fixed for three centuries
the popular estimate of Mary Tudor. Froude used it with extraordinary
skill. His relation of the death of a young Protestant martyr, an
apprentice from Essex, taken as it is almost bodily from Foxe, must
thrill even yet the least emotional of his readers. The permanence of
Mary's hideous title and her abiding unpopularity are more due to the
compelling power of a work of genius than to any outstanding demerits,
as judged by contemporary standards, in the Catholic Queen.

Instead of being condemned to eternal infamy, poor Mary Tudor might
well have expected a juster as well as a more charitable verdict from
posterity. From her girlhood to her grave her story was tragic in its
sadness. When she was in the first bloom of maidenhood, she was
taken by her father to hold her Court of the Welsh Marches at Ludlow
in 1525. The title of Princess of Wales was not conferred upon her, but
she was surrounded by all the pomps and emblems of sovereignty. The
Court was the Princess's Court, as it had been Prince Henry's Court in
her father's youth. Three years later she was degraded from her high
estate, and deprived of her Court. Henceforth, throughout her father's
reign, she was known as the Lady, not the Princess, Mary. She was old
{p.xi} enough to feel all the bitterness of her mother's tragedy. She
remembered to her dying day the humiliation of the Boleyn marriage.
She never ceased to resent the birth of her sister Elizabeth. Her brother
Edward was born in lawful wedlock after Queen Catherine's death, and
Mary was always perfectly loyal and obedient to him as she was to her
father. But she looked with cold disfavour, mingled with morbid
jealousy, on the budding promise of Elizabeth. Her very existence was
an insult to Mary's mother and a menace to Mary's religion. If Elizabeth
was legitimate, Catherine of Arragon was rightly divorced, and Mary
herself had no claim to the throne other than by her father's will.
Elizabeth could never be reconciled to Rome without casting an
aspersion on Anne Boleyn's honour.
No woman was ever more lonely or loveless than the ill-starred and
ill-favoured Queen Mary. She had no near relatives in England except
Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, by the irony of fate, was worse than a stranger
to her. The awful solitude of a throne excluded her, even more than her
own ill-health and brooding temper, from the joys of friendship. Philip
of Spain was at once her nearest relation on her mother's side, and the
only man she ever confided in except Cardinal Pole. She lavished all
the pent-up affection of an unloved existence on her husband. She was
repaid by cold neglect, studied indifference, and open and vulgar
infidelity. Philip made no pretence to care for his wife. She was older
in years, she was ungainly in person, she possessed no charm of
manner or grace of speech, her very voice was the deep bass of a man.
In the days of her joyous entrance into London, amid the acclamations

of the populace, her high spirit, her kind heart, and the excitement of
adventure lent a passing glow to her sallow cheeks. But ill-health and
disillusion followed. She became morbid and sullen, sometimes
remaining for days in a dull stupor, at other times giving way to gusts
of hysterical passion. But beneath her forbidding exterior there beat a
warm, tender, womanly heart, which yearned for some one to love and
to cherish. Her mother had died when she was yet young, her father
never encouraged her to display her affection for him, and she was
verging on middle age before she saw Philip. He became her hero, her
master. Wifely obedience became to her the greatest of virtues; she
held herself and England at his service. She longed for a son who
would bind her husband more closely to herself and who {p.xii} would
save England from the hated Elizabeth, and still more from Elizabeth's
hated religion. When old and ill, and on the brink of the grave, she still