Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/358

 the meantime. I am not sure that the marriage was a very happy one. A priori, there was no reason why it should, although I believe it is certain that husband and wife were faithful. But Elizabeth was a silly woman, and Henry was not a sympathetic man. It was said she would have married her uncle, and certainly her marriage with Henry was a marriage of convenience. Their family politics must have been very much opposed; that is if we suppose them to have had any family affections at all, which is rather a strong effort to suppose in the case of kings and queens in the fifteenth century. But it is still more certain that they both had mothers alive, and there would be, according to all analogies, no love lost. Henry was an affectionate and obedient son to a pious and noble mother: Elizabeth had a mother who had not much sense or discretion, and was constantly in disgrace. The lady Margaret was strict and stately, and a woman of great experience, of many husbands and good advisers: the queen dowager may have learned, in the romantic seclusion to which her son-in-law consigned her, some lessons that would counteract the influences of the court in which she had reigned during her false, fair husband's lifetime, and she may have profited by the sweet uses of adversity; but she inherited the characteristic features of her mother Jacquetta, and her own early career was one of vanity and foolish ambition. Any how, the lady Margaret had the upper hand; she kept her son straight and the court fairly pure, both during his wife's life and after her death, when the discipline was so close that poor Katharine of Aragon had to write home to her father that she could not get a mouthful of meat in Lent.

The history of the first half of the reign is the story of the struggle with which this trebly attested title to the throne was maintained; a bloody story, it is true, but, take it all in all, scarcely to be compared with what goes before and follows. The struggle is not altogether dynastic; it is not in all its details a contest of competitors; and, in fact, each of the incidents in it has a shade of its own, common as the colouring seems at a distance. There were dynastic rivalries, there were personal intrigues and party blood feuds that made use of the