e of her
accession she had lived a blameless, and, in many respects, a noble
life; and few men or women have lived less capable of doing knowingly
a wrong thing.

Philip's conduct, which could not extinguish her passion for him, and
the collapse of the inflated imaginations which had surrounded her
supposed pregnancy, it can hardly be doubted, affected her sanity.
Those forlorn hours when she would sit on the ground with her knees
drawn to her face; those restless days and nights when, like a ghost,
she would wander about the palace galleries, rousing herself only to
write tear-blotted letters to her husband; those bursts of fury over
the libels dropped in her way; or the marchings in procession behind
the host in the London streets--these are all symptoms of hysterical
derangement, and leave little room, as we think of her, for other
feelings than pity. But if Mary was insane, the madness was of a kind
which placed her absolutely under her spiritual directors; and the
responsibility for her cruelties, if responsibility be anything but a
name, rests first with Gardiner, who commenced them, and, secondly,
and in a higher degree, with Reginald Pole. Because Pole, with the
council, once interfered to prevent an imprudent massacre in
Smithfield; because, being legate, he left the common duties of his
diocese to subordinates, he is not to be held innocent of atrocities
which could neither have been commenced nor continued without his
sanction; and he was notoriously the one person in the council whom
the queen {p.318} absolutely trusted. The revenge of the clergy for
their past humiliations, and the too natural tendency of an oppressed
party to abuse suddenly recovered power, combined to originate the
Marian persecution. The rebellions and massacres, the political
scandals, the universal suffering throughout the country during
Edward's minority, had created a general bitterness in all classes
against the Reformers; the Catholics could appeal with justice to the
apparent consequences of heretical opinions; and when the reforming
preachers themselves denounced so loudly the irreligion which had
attended their success, there was little wonder that the world took
them at their word, and was ready to permit the use of strong
suppressive measures to keep down the unruly tendencies of
uncontrolled fanatics.

But neither these nor any other feelings of English growth could have
produced the scenes which have stamped this unhappy