Page:The Queens of England.djvu/371

 KATHARINE PARR. 331 reputation for virtue, prudence, and moderation, had acquired her general esteem and respect. Her elevation served not to detract from her noble qualities. Undazzled by the splendor that surrounded her, she, from the commencement of her marriage, performed towards her husband and his children the duties of an. attentive wife arid a kind mother, soothing the irascibility of a temper never good, but now rendered more intolerable by the infirmities entailed by his increasing age, and the result of his gross habits of self-indulgence. No longer able to enjoy those sports for which his obesity and shattered health unfitted him, Henry pined for his wonted amusements, and brooded over the change in himself with gloomy fore- bodings of the final issue. If the choice he had made in his advanced age could not bring him all the pleasure he might have anticipated in the possession of a wife still youthful and handsome enough to excite love, it at least secured him a tender and assiduous nurse, and an intelligent and sweet-tempered companion. Without her, deplorable must have been the declin- ing years of this relentless tyrant. To Katharine, how light in the balance in which human happiness is weighed, must have appeared the dignity and grandeur to which she had been raised, in comparison with the price with which she had purchased it ! A more pleasant, although scarcely a less difficult task for the queen, was that of the discharge of her maternal duties. The unfeeling and capricious conduct of Henrv to his offspring had created in their breasts sentiments of dislike, if not hatred, towards each other. The Princess Mary was too old when she lost her royal mother not to comprehend and bitterly feel the insults and injustice heaped on the head of that virtuous queen — insults which must have abridged her life — and had been too long accustomed to be considered and treated as heiress to the throne, not to feel the injustice of being robbed of her birthright, to make room for the daughter of Anne Boleyn, the handmaid of her mother. She, the scion of a regal race, with the proud sangre asula of Spain flowing in her veins, must have looked disdainfully on the child of Anne Boleyn and the son of Jane Seymour, even had she not been stig- matized as illegitimate — a wound inflicted no less deeply on her loved mother's fame than on her own pride. How difficult, then, it must have been for Katharine Parr to have reconciled the jarring elements of dislike natural to the position in which the offspring of Henry had been placed, and to weave even