Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/559

1555.] true that he had left her with a promise to return; and the weeks went, and he did not come, and no longer spoke of coming. The abdication of the Emperor would keep him from her, at least, till the end of the winter. And news came soon which was harder still to Lear; news, that he, whom she had been taught to regard as made in the image of our Saviour, was unfaithful to his marriage vows. Bradford had spoken generally of the King's vulgar amours; other accounts convinced her too surely that he was consoling himself for his long purgatory in England, by miscellaneous licentiousness. Philip was gross alike in all his appetites; bacon fat was the favourite food with which he gorged himself to illness; his intrigues were on the same level of indelicacy, and his unhappy wife was forced to know that he preferred the society of abandoned women of the lowest class to hers.

The French ambassador describes her as distracted with wretchedness, speaking to no one except the legate. The legate was her only comfort; the legate and the thing which she called religion.

Deep in the hearts of both Queen and Cardinal lay the conviction that if she would please God, she must avoid the sin of Saul. Saul had spared the Amalekites, and God had turned his face from him. God had greater enemies in England than the Amalekites. Historians have affected to exonerate Pole from the