Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/533

Rh must appear very unaccountable to any one who duly considers the vicinity of St. James's to the place where many of these inhumanities were put in execution. It seems next to impossible, that Smithfieid should be kept in flames almost five years together, and Mary know little or nothing of it; and if she was of so compassionate a nature, it is surprising that she should not relent at it. Can even charity itself excuse her unkind and inhuman treatment of her sister Elizabeth? Or can it be supposed, that a princess, so much inclined to shew mercy to her subjects, could admit of a council for the taking up and burning her father's body? The ungrateful and perfidious breach of her promise to her faithful and loyal subjects the Suffolk men, was a most flagrant instance of the ferocity of her temper! And after judge Hales had so strenuously defended and maintained her right of succession to the crown, she treated him in the most ungenerous and barbarous manner! neither was her usage of archbishop Cranmer less cruel; especially since his great and well known reluctance to the excluding her from the succession, and his preserving her life in the reign of her father, who would have sacrificed her to his fury, for not complying with the regulations he made in religion, had not the archbishop interposed and mollified his resentment, were obligations of such a nature, as would have engaged a temper the least susceptible of gratitude, not only to excuse the part which he acted in the affair of her mother's divorce, but also to afford him, if not her favour and confidence, yet at least her protection.

There are eight of her letters to King Edward and the lords of the council, on her nonconformity, and on the imprisonment of her chaplain, Mr. Mallet, in Fox's Acts and Monuments, In the Sylloge Epistolarum are several