under which she lived, had
especially hardened in her the self-will which is recognisable in all
the Tudors. A peculiarity found elsewhere also in gifted women, that
they are weary of all which surrounds them at home, and give to what
is foreign a sympathy above its worth, had become to her a second
nature. She rejected with aversion the idea of marrying Courtenay, for
this reason among others that he was an Englishman. She, the Queen of
England, had no sympathy for the life, the interests, the struggles of
her people: she hated them from her childhood. All her sympathies were
for the nation from which her mother came, for its views and manners:
her husband was her ideal of a man: we are assured that she even
overlooked his infidelities to her because he did not enter into
permanent relations with any other woman. Besides this he was the only
man who could support her in the great project for which she thought
herself marked out by God, the restoration of Catholicism.[172] This
is the meaning of her pledging herself in her bedchamber before a
crucifix, when she had not yet seen him, to give her hand to him and
to no other. For with him and his fortunes were linked the hopes of a
restoration of Catholicism. Mary was absolutely determined to do all
she could to strengthen it in England. Gardiner assures us, and we may
believe him in this, that it was not he who prompted the revival of
the old laws against the Lollards; the chief impulse to it came on the
contrary from the Queen. And as those laws ordered the punishment of
heretics by fire, and Parliament had consented, and the orthodox
bishops offered their aid, it would have seemed to her a blameable
weakness, if out of feelings of compassion she had stood in the way of
the execution of those laws, to the suspension of which the bishops
ascribed the spread of heretical opinions. Many of the horrors which
accompanied their execution may have remained concealed from her;
still it cannot be doubted, that the persecutions would never have
begun without her. No excuse can free her memory from the dark shade
which rests on it. For that which is done in a sovereign's name, with
his will and consent, determines his character in history.

The conduct of the Queen and her government, without whose help
ecclesiastical authority would have been null and void, had a result
that extended far beyond her time: men began to inquire into the
claims of the temporal power. John Knox, who h