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 368 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. brother, some years after, might have been spared, for the influence of a mind like his must have tempered the natural ferocity of Henry. The part taken by Cromwell, in the dis- grace of Mary, redounds little to his credit. He had an interest in degrading both Mary and Elizabeth, as his son had married the sister of Jane Seymour, and therefore all the endeavors of this base and vulgar upstart were bent to aggrandize the off- spring of Queen Jane. The undissembled insolence with which he dictates to, rather than advises her, in his letters, betrays a very ungenerous spirit and a very unfeeling mind ; nor did he cease to menace her until she signed a submission to the articles which were made the conditions of Henry's pardon. How must it have galled her pride and lacerated her heart, to admit that the marriage of her parents was incestuous, that her own birth was illegitimate ; and how must her conscience have been wounded by subscribing to the supremacy of Henry over the Church, and the denial of the pope's authority, which authority had been exercised to pronounce the marriage of her mother valid and her own birth legitimate However pos- terity may censure Mary for so absolute a submission, the terms of which must have so deeply humiliated her, it should be re- membered that she did not consent, however great her suffer- ings, to make it, until her mother had been long laid in her peaceful grave, and that her feelings could no longer suffer from this enforced submission of her daughter. Who can say how this enforced violence offered to her conscience may have actuated Mary in after-life to mistaken and indefensible acts to atone for it? Mary having now drained the bitter cup of humiliation to its dregs by the renunciation of ail her claims and conscien- tious scruples, reaped the inadequate reward of such painful sacrifices by having an establishment assigned her at Hunsdon with her sister, the little Elizabeth ; and though it was formed on a scale of the strictest economy, she was less unhappy in this humble seclusion than when the contrast of the splendor allotted to Elizabeth made her daily feel the sorrowful change in her own position. In the tranquil solitude of Hunsdon, Mary continued with unabated perseverance those studies for which she had so early evinced a peculiar taste. She read much, studied not only Latin, in which she made a great pro- ficiency, but made herself mistress of the French, Spanish, and Italian languages. She paid great attention to geography,