Page:Catherine of Bragança, infanta of Portugal, & queen-consort of England.djvu/13

 HE court of the second Charles of England fluttered with dazzling and frivolous beauties. They obscured the softer light of other women who boasted only such trite and gentle virtues as woman- liness, the fear of God, modesty, honesty, and truth. Queen Catherine's contemporaries detested her for her creed and her piety, for her uselessness as a political tool, for her bitter misfortune of childless- ness, for the stumbling-block that she innocently formed to their greed and ambition. They have left her portrait to posterity painted in malignant colours. They drew her a hideous, repulsive fool, too dull to be wicked, too narrow and prudish to have a heart. It is time that the blots should be sponged from the picture. Catherine lived in her husband's court as Lot lived in Sodom. She did justly, and loved mercy, and walked humbly with her God in the midst of a seething corruption and iniquity only equalled, perhaps, in the history of Imperial Rome. She loved righteousness and her fellows, and, above all, the one man who won her heart on the day of her marriage, and kept it till