d the "Golden Hind." From
the painting by Frank Brangwyn.]

When we remember that there coursed in the veins of Mary Tudor the
blood of cruel Spanish kings, mingled with that of Henry VIII., can we
wonder that she was cruel and remorseless? Her marriage with Philip
II. of Spain quickly overthrew the work of her father. Unlike Henry
VIII., Mary was impelled by deep convictions; and like her grandmother,
Isabella I. of Spain, she persecuted to save from what she believed was
death eternal; and her cruelty, although {81} untempered by one humane
impulse, was still prompted by a sincere fanaticism, with which was
mingled an intense desire to please the Catholic Philip. But Philip
remained obdurately in Spain; and while she was lighting up all England
with a blaze of martyrs, Calais,--over which the English standard
planted by Edward III. had waved for more than 200 years,--Calais, the
last English possession in France, was lost. Amid these crushing
disappointments, public and personal, Mary died (1558), after a reign
of only five years.

Elizabeth with her legitimacy questioned was still under the shadow of
the scaffold upon which her mother had perished. There is reason to
believe that Philip II. turned the delicately balanced scale. It
better suited him to have Elizabeth occupy the throne of England, than
that Mary Stuart, the next nearest heir, should do so. Mary had
married the Dauphin of France; and France was Philip's enemy and rival.
Better far that England should become Protestant, than that France
should hold the balance of power in Europe!

{82}

CHAPTER VII

Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, a disgraced and
decapitated Queen, wore the crown of England. If heredity had been as
much talked of then as now, England might have feared the child of a
faithless wife, and a remorseless, bloodthirsty King. But while Mary,
daughter of Katharine, the most pious and best of mothers, had left
only a great blood-spot upon the page of History, Elizabeth's reign was
to be the most wise, prosperous and great, the Kingdom had ever known.
In her complex character there was the imperiousness, audacity and
unscrupulousness of her father, the voluptuous pleasure-loving nature
of her mother, and mingled with both, qualities which came from
neither. She was a tyrant, held in check by a singular caution, with
an instinctive perception of the {83} presence of danger, to which her
purposes always in