Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/50

30 But she was not without a lady's accomplishments. She embroidered well, played on the lute well; she could speak English, Latin, French, and Spanish, and she could read Italian; as we have seen, she could be her own housekeeper; and if she had masculine energy, she had with it a woman's power of braving and enduring suffering.

By instinct, by temperament, by hereditary affection, she was an earnest Catholic; and whatever Mary believed she believed thoroughly, without mental reservation, without allowing her personal interests either to tint her convictions or to tempt her to disguise them. As long as Queen Catherine lived, she had braved Henry's anger, and clung to her and to her cause. On her mother's death she had agreed to the separation from the Papacy as a question of policy touching no point of faith or conscience. She had accepted the alterations introduced by her father; and, had nothing else intervened, she might have maintained as a sovereign what she had honestly admitted as a subject. Her own persecution only, and the violent changes enforced by the doctrinal Reformers, taught her to believe that, apart from Rome, there was no security for orthodoxy.

In her interview with the messengers, she had shown herself determined, downright, and unaffected, cutting through official insincerities, and fearless of consequences, standing out for the right as she understood it. The moral relations of good and evil were inverted; and between Mary, the defender of a dying superstition, and the Lords of the Council, the patrons of liberty and