rmy of Spanish soldiers, and let the queen
live at her beads like a good antient lady."--John
Bradford to the Earls of Arundel, Shrewsbury,
Derby, and Pembroke: Strype's _Memorials_, vol. vi.
p. 340, etc.]

Struggle as the queen might against such a representation of {p.222}
her husband's feelings towards her, it was true that he had left her
with a promise to return; and the weeks went, and he did not come, and
no longer spoke of coming. The abdication of the emperor would keep
him from her, at least, till the end of the winter. And news came soon
which was harder still to bear; news, that he, whom she had been
taught to regard as made in the image of our Saviour,[493] was
unfaithful to his marriage vows,[494] Bradford had spoken generally of
the king's vulgar amours; other accounts convinced her too surely that
he was consoling himself for his long purgatory in England, by
miscellaneous licentiousness. Philip was gross alike in all his
appetites; bacon fat was the favourite food with which he gorged
himself to illness;[495] his intrigues were on the same level of
indelicacy, and his unhappy wife was forced to know that he preferred
the society of abandoned women of the lowest class to hers.

[Footnote 493: Prayer written by Cardinal Pole for
Queen Mary: _supra_.]

[Footnote 494: Noailles to the King of France,
October 21: _Ambassades_, vol. v.]

[Footnote 495: Noailles to Montmorency, December 5:
Ibid.]

The French ambassador describes her as distracted with wretchedness,
speaking to no one except the legate. The legate was her only comfort;
the legate and the thing which she called religion.

Deep in the hearts of both queen and cardinal lay the conviction that
if she would please God, she must avoid the sin of Saul. Saul had
spared the Amalekites, and God had turned his face from him. God had
greater enemies in England than the Amalekites. Historians have
affected to exonerate Pole from the crime of the Marian persecution;
although, without the legate's sanction, not a bishop in England could
have raised a finger, not a bishop's court could have been opened
{p.223} to try a single heretic. If not with Pole, with whom did the
guilt rest? Gardiner was jointly responsible for the commencement, but
after the first executions,