succession by the usurpation of Henry IV., ensured a civil war when the representative of the elder line found a favourable opportunity for asserting his claims. The French wars, by exhausting the resources of the crown, compelled the ministers of Henry VI. to resort to excessive taxation, and the yet more ruinous expedient of debasing the silver coinage. The military talents of the duke of York, his wealth, and family alliance with the most powerful and popular nobleman in England,—the earl of Warwick, must necessarily have turned the scale against the impoverished sovereign, even if he had been better fitted by nature and education to maintain a contest. The energies of Henry's queen, in truth, supported his cause long after any other person would have regarded it as hopeless. Her courage and firmness delayed a catastrophe which nothing could avert.

It is a curious study to trace the effect of the political changes of those unquiet times on the consorts of Henry VI., Edward IV., and Richard III. Three women more essentially opposite in their characteristics and conduct than the three contemporary, but not hostile, queens of the rival roses,-Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville, and Anne Neville, it would be difficult to find. The first, of royal birth and foreign education, schooled in adversity from her cradle, lion-like and indomitable under every vicissitude; the second, the daughter of one English knight and the widow of another, fair, insinuating, full of selflove and world-craft, inflated by sudden elevation, yet vacillating and submitting to become the tool of her enemies in her reverse of fortune; the third, the type of the timid dove, who is transferred without a struggle from the stricken eagle to the grasp of the wily kite. How strangely were the destinies of these three unfortunate queens allied in calamity by the political changes of an era, which is thus briefly defined by the masterly pen of Guizot :

"The history of England in the fifteenth century consists of two great epochs,—the French wars without, those of the roses within,—the wars abroad and the wars at home. Scarcely was the foreign war terminated when the civil war commenced; long and fatally was it continued while the houses of York and Lancaster contested the throne. When those sanguinary disputes were ended, the high English aristocracy found themselves ruined, decimated, and deprived of the power they had formerly exercised. The associated barons could no longer control the throne when it was ascended by the Tudors; and with Henry VII., in 1485, the era of centralization and the triumph of royalty commenced." The sovereign and the great body of the people from that time made common cause to prevent the re-establishment of an oligarchy, which had been found equally inimical to the rights of the commons and the dignity of the crown.

Having thus briefly traced the history and influence of the queens of

England from the establishment of the feudal system to its close, commencing with the first Anglo-Norman queen, Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror, and concluding with Anne of Warwick, the last Plantagenet queen, herself the powerless representative of the mightiest of all the aristocratic dictators of the fifteenth century—the earl of Warwick, surnamed 'the king-maker,' we proceed to consider those of the new epoch.

Elizabeth of York, the consort of Henry VII., is the connecting link between the royal houses of Plantagenet and Tudor. According to the legitimate order of succession, she was the rightful sovereign of the realm, and though she condescended to accept the crown-matrimonial, she might have contested the regal garland. She chose the nobler distinction of giving peace to her bleeding country by tacitly investing her victorious champion with her rights, and blending the rival roses of York and Lancaster in her bridal-wreath. It was thus that Henry VII., unimpeded by conjugal rivalry, was enabled to work out his enlightened plans, by breaking down the barriers with which the pride and power of the aristocracy had closed the avenues to preferment against the unprivileged classes. The people, tired of the evils of an oligarchy, looked to the sovereign for protection, and the first stone in the altar of civil and religious liberty was planted on the ruins of feudality. The effects of the new system were so rapid, that in the succeeding reign we behold, to use the forcible language of a popular French writer, “two of Henry the Eighth's most powerful ministers of state, Wolsey and Cromwell emanating, the one from the butcher's shambles, the other from the blacksmith's forge." Extremes, however, are dangerous, and the despotism which these and other of Henry's parvenu statesmen contrived to establish was, while it lasted, more cruel and oppressive than the tyranny and exclusiveness of the feudal magnates; but it had only an ephemeral existence. The art of printing had become general, and the spirit of freedom was progressing on the wings of knowledge through the land. The emancipation of England from the papal domination followed so immediately, that it appears futile to attribute that mighty change to any other cause. The stormy passions of Henry VIII., the charms and genius of Anne Boleyn, the virtues and eloquence of Katharine Parr, all had, to a certain degree, an effect in hastening the crisis; but the Reformation was cradled in the printing-press, and established by no other instrument.

In detailing the successive historic tragedies of the queens of Henry VIII., we enter upon perilous ground. The lapse of three centuries has done so little to calm the excited feelings caused by the theological disputes with which their names are blended, that it is scarcely possible to state facts impartially without displeasing those readers, whose opinions have been biased by party writers on one side or the other.

Henry VIII. was married six times, and divorced thrice: he beheaded two of his wives, and left two surviving widows,-Anne of Cleves and Katharine Parr. As long as the virtuous influence of his first consort, Katharine of Aragon, lasted, he was a good king, and, if not a good man, the evil passions which rendered the history of the latter years of his life one continuous chronology of crime, were kept within bounds. Four of his queens claimed no higher rank than the daughters of knights: of these, Anne Boleyn and Katharine Howard were cousins-german; both were married by Henry during the life of a previously wedded consort of royal birth, and were alike doomed by the remorseless tyrant to perish on a scaffold as soon as the ephemeral passion which led to their fatal elevation to a throne had subsided. We know of no tragedy so full of circumstances of painful interest as the lives of those unhappy ladies. It ought never to be forgotten, that it was to the wisdom and moral courage of his last queen, the learned and amiable Katharine Parr, that England is indebted for the preservation of her universities from the general plunder of ecclesiastical property.

The daughters of Henry VIII., Mary and Elizabeth, occupy more important places than any other ladies in this series of royal biographies. They were not only queens but sovereigns, girded with the sword of state and invested with the spurs of knighthood at their respective inaugurations, in token that they represented their male predecessors in the regal office, not merely as legislators, but, if necessary, as military leaders. Mary virtually abdicated her high office when she became, in an evil hour both for herself and her subjects, the consort, and finally the miserable state-tool and victim, of the despotic bigot, Philip the Second of Spain.

for

Purely English in her descent, both on the father and mother's side many generations, Elizabeth, notwithstanding the regal blood of the Plantagenets, which she derived from her royal grandmother, Elizabeth of York, was, literally speaking, a daughter of the people, acquainted intimately with the manners, customs, and even the prejudices of those over whom she reigned. This nationality, which never could be acquired by the foreign consorts of the Stuart kings, endeared her to her subjects as the last of a line of native sovereigns, while her great regnal talents rendered her reign prosperous at home and glorious abroad, and caused the sway of female monarchs to be regarded as auspicious for the

time to come.

The biography of every queen of England whose name has been involved with the conflicting parties and passions excited by revolutions or differences of religious opinions, has been a task of extreme difficulty. More peculiarly so with regard to the consorts of Charles I., Charles II., and James II., since, for upwards of a century after the revolution of 1688, it was considered a test of loyalty to the reigning family and

attachment to the church of England to revile the sovereigns of the house of Stuart, root and branch, and to consign them, their wives and children, their friends and loyal adherents, to the reprobation of all posterity. Every one who attempted to write history at that period was, to use the metaphor of the witty author of Eöthen, "subjected to the immutable law, which compels a man with a pen in his hand to be uttering now and then some sentiment not his own, as though, like a French peasant under the old régime, he were bound to perform a certain amount of work on the public highways." Happily the necessity, if it ever existed, of warping the web of truth to fit the exigencies of a political crisis, exists no longer. The title of the present illustrious occupant of the throne of Great Britain to the crown she wears is founded on the soundest principles, both of constitutional freedom of choice in the people, and legitimate descent from the ancient monarchs of the realm. The tombs of the last princes of the male line of the royal house of Stuart were erected at the expense of George IV. That generous prince set a noble example of liberal feeling in the sympathy which he was the first to accord to that unfortunate family. He did more; he checked the hackneyed system of popular falsehood, by authorizing the publication of a portion of the Stuart papers, and employing his librarian and historiographer to arrange the life of James II. from his journals and correspondence.

The consort of James II., Mary Beatrice of Modena, played an important rather than a conspicuous part in the historic drama of the stirring times in which her lot was cast. The tender age at which she was reluctantly torn from a convent to become the wife of a prince whose years nearly trebled her own, and the feminine tone of her mind, deterred her from interfering in affairs of state during the sixteen years of her residence in England. The ascetic habits and premature superannuation of her unfortunate consort compelled her, for the sake of her son, to emerge at length from the sanctuary of the domestic altar to enter upon the stormy arena of public life, when she became, and continued for many years after, the rallying point of the Jacobites. All the plots and secret correspondence of that party were carried on under her auspices. There are epochs in her life when she comes before us in her beauty, her misfortunes, her conjugal tenderness, and passionate maternity, like one of the distressed queens of Greek tragedy struggling against the decrees of adverse destiny. The slight mention of her that appears on the surface of English history has been penned by chroni clers of a different spirit from "Griffith,"-men whose hearts were either hardened by strong political and polemic animosities, or who, as a matter of business or expediency, did their utmost to defame her, because she was the wife of James II. and the mother of his unfortunate son. The bitterest of her unprovoked enemies, Burnet, was reduced to the paltry expedients of vituperation and calumny in the attacks he con

stantly made on her. The first, like swearing, is only an imbecile abuse of words, and the last vanishes before the slightest examination. History is happily written on different principles in the present age. "We have now," says Guizot, "to control our assertions by the facts;" in plain English, to say nothing either in the way of praise or censure which cannot be substantiated by sound evidence.

It was the personal influence of Mary Beatrice with Louis XIV., the dauphin, and the duke of Burgundy, that led to the infraction of the peace of Ryswick by the Courts of France and Spain, through their recognition of her son's claims to an empty title: to please her, Louis XIV. allowed the dependent on his bounty to be proclaimed at the gates of one of his own royal palaces as James III., king not only of Great Britain and Ireland, but even of France, and to quarter the fleur-de-lis unmolested. The situation of the royal widow and her son, when abandoned by their protector, Louis XIV., at the peace of Utrecht, closely resembles that of Constance of Bretagne and her son Arthur after the recognition of the title of king John by their allies; but Mary Beatrice exhibits none of the fierce maternity attributed by Shakspeare to the mother of the rejected claimant of the English throne: her feelings were subdued by a long acquaintance with adversity and the fever of disappointed hope.

Our Dutch king, William III., is supposed to have intimated his contempt for the fair sex in general, and his jealousy of his illustrious consort's superior title in particular, when it was proposed to confer the Sovereignty of Great Britain on her, by his coarse declaration that "he would not hold the crown by apron-strings.” But the fact was, that Mary, though nearer in blood to the regal succession, had no more right to the crown than himself as the law then stood; and if the order of legitimacy were to be violated by setting aside the male heir, William saw no reason why it should be done in Mary's favour rather than his own. The conventional assembly adjusted this delicate point by deciding that the prince and princess of Orange should reign as joint sovereigns, to which William outwardly consented; yet the householdbooks furnish abundant proofs that, as far as he durst, he deprived his queen of the dignity which the will of the people had conferred upon her. The Lord Chamberlain's warrants were for a considerable time issued in his name singly, and dated in the first or second years "of his," instead of "their majesties' reign." It is also observable, that he never allowed her to participate with himself in the ceremonial of opening or proroguing parliament, on which occasions he occupied the throne solus, and arrogated exclusively to himself the regal office of sceptering or rejecting bills, which ought to have been submitted to her at the same time.

Mary, though naturally ambitious and fond of pageantry, endured