rived of her Court. Henceforth, throughout her father's
reign, she was known as the Lady, not the Princess, Mary. She was old
{p.xi} enough to feel all the bitterness of her mother's tragedy.
She remembered to her dying day the humiliation of the Boleyn
marriage. She never ceased to resent the birth of her sister
Elizabeth. Her brother Edward was born in lawful wedlock after Queen
Catherine's death, and Mary was always perfectly loyal and obedient to
him as she was to her father. But she looked with cold disfavour,
mingled with morbid jealousy, on the budding promise of Elizabeth. Her
very existence was an insult to Mary's mother and a menace to Mary's
religion. If Elizabeth was legitimate, Catherine of Arragon was
rightly divorced, and Mary herself had no claim to the throne other
than by her father's will. Elizabeth could never be reconciled to Rome
without casting an aspersion on Anne Boleyn's honour.

No woman was ever more lonely or loveless than the ill-starred and
ill-favoured Queen Mary. She had no near relatives in England except
Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, by the irony of fate, was worse than a
stranger to her. The awful solitude of a throne excluded her, even
more than her own ill-health and brooding temper, from the joys of
friendship. Philip of Spain was at once her nearest relation on her
mother's side, and the only man she ever confided in except Cardinal
Pole. She lavished all the pent-up affection of an unloved existence
on her husband. She was repaid by cold neglect, studied indifference,
and open and vulgar infidelity. Philip made no pretence to care for
his wife. She was older in years, she was ungainly in person, she
possessed no charm of manner or grace of speech, her very voice was
the deep bass of a man. In the days of her joyous entrance into
London, amid the acclamations of the populace, her high spirit, her
kind heart, and the excitement of adventure lent a passing glow to her
sallow cheeks. But ill-health and disillusion followed. She became
morbid and sullen, sometimes remaining for days in a dull stupor, at
other times giving way to gusts of hysterical passion. But beneath her
forbidding exterior there beat a warm, tender, womanly heart, which
yearned for some one to love and to cherish. Her mother had died when
she was yet young, her father never encouraged her to display her
affection for him, and she was verging on middle age before she saw
Philip. He became her hero, her master. Wifely ob