Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/553

 subjects, the Queen herself firmly believed that nothing would more effectually contribute to the desired end than the prospect of a Catholic heir to the throne; and, although in her thirty-seventh year and in infirm health, she consequently regarded her own marriage as a duty to the State. But even if personal predilection was to be sacrificed on the altar of duty, her choice of a husband was a matter involving anxious consideration amid the conflicting claims of the national welfare and of the Catholic faith. In its broadest phase, the question lay between a native of her own country and a foreigner. The nation undoubtedly wished to see her married to one of her own nobles; it is equally certain that Mary's devout attachment to the interests of the Roman Church inclined her to look abroad. In the course of the year following upon her accession report singled out three supposed claimants for her hand, of whom one was sixteen years her senior, the other two each about ten years her junior.

There is no evidence that Reginald Pole ever aspired to marry Mary, or that she, in turn, ever regarded him in any other light than that of a much valued friend and counsellor. The personal graces and touching experiences of Edward Courtenay might well recommend him to a woman's sympathies. He was the son of Edward Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, who had been executed in 1539 for his share in the conspiracy in favour of Reginald Pole, and was thus the great-grandson of Edward IV. Mary herself had just freed him from an imprisonment of nearly fifteen years and had created him Earl of Devonshire, while at her coronation he was selected to bear the sword before her. His mother, the Marchioness of Exeter, one of Mary's dearest friends, was now one of her ladies in waiting. His long isolation from society and neglected education had however ill qualified him to play a part in politics, while the fascinations which surrounded him in his newly acquired freedom proved too potent for his self-control, and his wild debaucheries became the scandal of the capital. Whatever influence Pole might have been able to exert would probably have favoured Courtenay's claims. As a boy, both he and his brother Geoffrey had received much kindness from the Marquis of Exeter, the young Earl's father-favours which Geoffrey had ill repaid by bearing evidence which brought the Marquis to the scaffold-and Pole's own mother, the Countess of Salisbury, prior to her tragic execution, had shared the captivity of the Marchioness. But Courtenay's indiscretions soon rendered the efforts of his best friends nugatory. It now became known that his conduct had completely lost him Mary's favour, and he was next heard of as conspiring against his would-be benefactress.

To a fairly impartial observer it might well have seemed that the arguments for and against the Spanish marriage were of nearly equal force. Certain political advantages were obvious, and as Renard pointed out to the Queen herself it would afford the necessary counterbalance