Page:The Queens of England.djvu/353

 JANE SEYMOUR. 313 utterly obsequious to the king, and the fear of that ax which had fallen on her predecessor. No word or sentence of hers was of sufficient merit to be recorded ; the only official act to which her signature is appended is the order for the delivery of two bucks to the keeper of the chapel royal ; and one of the most re- markable facts of her short reign was riding on horseback, with the king and court, across the Thames at Greenwich in the severe frost of January, 1537. She is said to have behaved with great kindness to the Princess Mary, and to have won Henry to tolerate her. Of the helpless infant Elizabeth, then in her fourth year, historians give us no reason to believe that she took any notice, although the position of the poor child might well excite commiseration and sympathy, stripped of the title of Princess of Wales, which she had borne since her birth, and deprived of a mother by a violent death. Jane could not have been deterred from showing kindness to the child by any dread of offending her stern husband, for Henry had Elizabeth brought up under his own eye, and invariably evinced great af- fection for her, while toward her elder half-sister he behaved with coldness, if not dislike, angered by her long resistance to sign the acknowledgment of his supremacy, the renunciation of the power of the pope, the invalidity of the marriage of her mother with Henry, and consequently the illegitimacy of her own birth. It cannot be wondered at that the Princess Mary, then of an age to comprehend her own position, objected to sign articles alike contrary to her conscience and interest, until finding that nothing else would conciliate her hard-hearted and stubborn father, she was compelled to yield. Perhaps it was to this obedience to Henry's wishes, rather than to the queen's interference in her favor that she owed her toleration by him, even though Jane Seymour gave proofs of kindness toward her, for which Mary expressed her sense of gratitude not only by applying the endearing epithet of mother to her, but by pray- ing God to grant her a prince — a prayer the sincerity of which we cannot help doubting, as its fulfillment must shut out herself from her chance of the throne. Unlike her two predecessors, Jane Seymour was never crowned. This ceremony had been postponed owing to the plague, then prevalent in London, and most of all in West- minster, where it greatly raged ; and when its violence had abated, the queen was in a state that promised to give Henry the longed-for heir, and rendered him fearful of exposing her to the fatigue of a coronation. On the 12th of October, 1537*