une an opportunity to round and perfect his character as
a domestic despot. Only one of his legitimate sons lived even to
boyhood, Edward VI., and Henry died when the heir-apparent was in his
tenth year. Of his illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, Henry
was extravagantly fond, and at one time thought of making him
heir-apparent, which might have been done, for the English dread of
a succession war was then at its height. Richmond died in his
seventeenth year. Having no sons of a tormentable age, Henry made his
daughters as unhappy as he could make them by the harsh exercise of
paternal authority, and bastardized them both, in order to clear the
way to the throne for his son. Edward VI. died a bachelor, in his
sixteenth year, so that we can say nothing of him as a parent; but he
treated his sister Mary with much harshness, and exhibited on various
occasions a disposition to have things his own way that would have
delighted his father, provided it had been directed against anybody
but that severe old gentleman himself. Mary I. was the best sovereign
of her line, domestically considered; but then she had neither son nor
daughter with whom to quarrel, and the difficulties she had with her
half-sister, Elizabeth, like the differences between the Archangel
Michael and the Fallen Angel, were purely political in their
character. We do not think that she would have done much injustice,
if she had made Elizabeth's Tower-dungeon the half-way house to the
scaffold. But though political, the half-sisterly dissensions between
these ladies serve to keep Mary I. within the rules of the royal
houses to which she belonged. Mary, dying of the loss of Calais and
the want of children, was succeeded by Elizabeth, who, being a
maiden queen, had no issue with whom to make issue concerning
things political or personal. But observe how basely she treated her
relatives, those poor girls, the Greys, Catharine and Mary, sisters of
poor Lady Jane, whose fair and clever head Mary I. had taken off. The
barren Queen, too jealous to share her power with a husband, hated
marriage with all "the sour malevolence of antiquated virginity," and
was down upon the Lady Catharine and the Lady Mary because they chose
to become wives. Then she imprisoned her cousin, Mary Stuart, for
nineteen years, and finally had her butchered under an approach to
the forms of law, and in total violation of its spirit. She, too, kept
within the royal rules, and made herself as