Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/622

Rh M A 11 Y [OF ENGLAND. Her first acts at the beginning of her reign displayed a character very different from that which she still holds in popular estimation. Her clemency towards those who had taken up arms against her was altogether remarkable. She released from prison Lady Jane s father, Suffolk, and had difficulty even in signing the warrant for the execution of Northumberland. Lady Jane herself she fully meant to spire, and did spare till after Wyatt s formidable insurrec tion. Her conduct, indeed, was in every respect con ciliatory and pacific, and ( so far as they depended on her personal character the prospects of the new reign might have appeared altogether favourable. But un fortunately her position was one of peculiar difficulty, and the policy on which she determined was far from judicious. Inexperienced in the art of governing, she had no trusty councillor but Gardiner ; every other mem ber of the council had been more or less implicated in the conspiracy against her. And though she valued Gardiner s advice she was naturally led to rely even more on that of her cousin, the emperor, who had been her mother s friend in adversity, and had done such material service to herself in the preceding reign. Following the emperor s guidance she determined almost from the first to make his son Philip her husband, though she was eleven years his senior. She was also strongly desirous of restoring the old religion and wiping out the stigma of illegitimacy passed upon her birth, so that she might not seem to reign by virtue of a mere parliamentary settle ment. Each of these different objects was attended by difficulties or objections peculiar to itself ; but the marriage was the most unpopular of all. A restoration of the old religion threatened to deprive the new owners of abbey lands of their easy and comfortable acquisitions ; and it was only with an express reservation of their interests that the thing was actually accomplished. A declaration of her own legitimacy necessarily cast a slur on that of her sister Elizabeth, and cut her off from the succession. But the marriage promised to throw England into the arms of Spain and place the resources of the kingdom at the command of the emperor s son. The Commons sent her a deputation to entreat that she would not marry a foreigner, and when her resolution was known insurrections broke out in different parts of tli3 country. Suffolk, whose first rebellion had been pardoned, proclaimed Lady Jane Grey again in Leicester shire, while young Wyatt raised the county of Kent and actually besieged the queen in her own palace at West minster. In the midst of the danger Mary showed great intrepidity, and the rebellion was presently quelled; after which, unhappily, she got leave to pursue her own course unchecked. She married Philip, restored the old religion, and got Cardinal Pole to come over and absolve the kingdom for its past disobedience to the Holy See. But the misgivings of those who had disliked the Spanish match were more than sufficiently justified by the course of events. Mary yielded a loyal and womanly devotion to a husband who did not too greatly esteem the treasure of her person. Her health, which was feeble before, was bad for the remainder of her days, and she fell under a delusion at first that it was owing to an approach ing confinement. Disappointment and vexation probably added to her helplessness. The resources of the kingdom were at Philip s command, and he even took ships of the English fleet to escort his father the emperor, on his abdication, to Spain. More extraordinary still, he ulti mately succeeded in committing England to a war against France, when France had made an alliance with the pope against him as king of Spain ; so the very marriage which was to confirm England in tlio old religion led to a war agiinst the occupant of the sse of Homo. And it was this war with France which produced the final calamity of the loss of Calais which sank so deeply into Mary s heart some months before she died. The cruel persecution of the Protestants, which has cast so much infamy upon her reign, began about six months after her marriage ; and it is not difficult to see that it was greatly due to the triumph of ideas imported from the laud of the Inquisition. Rogers, the first of the martyrs, was burnt on the 4th February 1555. Hooper, bishop of Gloucester, had been condemned six days before, and suffered the same fate upon the 9th. From this time the persecution went on uninterrupted for more than three years, numbering among its victims Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer. It seems to have been most severe in the eastern and southern parts of England, and the largest number of sufferers was naturally in the diocese of Bonner, bishop of London. From first to last nearly three hundred victims are computed to have perished at the stake ; and their fate certainly created a revulsion against Rome that nothing else was likely to have effected. How far Mary herself who during the most part of this time, if not the whole time, was living in the strictest seclusion, sick in body and mind, hysterical and helpless was personally answer able for these things, it is difficult to say. To her, no doubt, the propagators of heresy were the enemies of man kind, and she had little cause to love them from her own experience. Yet perhaps she hardly realized the full horror of what was done under her sanction. But there can be little doubt what effect it had upon the people ; and when Mary breathed her last, on the 17th November 1558, the event was hailed with joy as a national deliver ance, (j. GA.) MARY II. (1662-1694), queen of England, was the eldest daughter of James, duke of York (afterwards James II. of England), by his first wife Anne Hyde, and was born in London on April 30, 1662. Having been educated in the Protestant faith, she was married to William, prince of Orange, on November 4, 1677. After the events of 1688 she followed her husband to England, and was proclaimed by the convention joint sovereign with him on February 13, 1689. She died of small-pox on December 28, 1G94 (o.s.). See Burnet s Essay upon the Life of Queen Mary, and the article WILLIAM III. MARY (1542-1587), queen of Scots, daughter of King James V. and his wife Mary of Lorraine, was born in December 1542, a few days before the death of her father, heart-broken by the disgrace of his arms at Solway Moss, where the disaffected nobles had declined to encounter an enemy of inferior force in the cause of a king whose systematic policy had been directed against the privileges of their order, and whose representative on the occasion was an unpopular favourite appointed general in defiance of their ill-will. On the 9th of September following the ceremony of coronation was duly performed upon the infant. A scheme for her betrothal to Edward, prince of Wales, was defeated by the grasping greed of his father, whose obvious ambition to annex the crown of Scotland at once to that of England aroused instantly the general suspicion and indignation of Scottish patriotism. In 1548 the queen of six years old was betrothed to the dauphin Francis, and set sail for France, where she arrived on the 15th of August. The society in which the child was thenceforward reared is known to readers of Brantome as well as that of imperial Rome at its worst is known to readers of Suetonius or Petronius, as well as that of papal Rome at its worst is known to readers of the diary kept by the domestic chaplain of Pope Alexander VI. Only in their pages can a parallel be found to the gay and easy record which reveals without sign of shame or suspicion of offence the daily life of a court compared to which the court