'sweet are the uses of adversity,' and Mary's life of tHirty-seven years before her accession had been one long course of adversity, but to her its uses had not been sweet. Her life had been throughout a most unhappy one. The estrangement between her father and mother began when she was still a mere child, and from that time till her mother's death her life was made miserable, not only by witnessing the constant persecution, injustice, and indignity, with which her mother was treated, but by enduring a full share of similar ill-treatment in her own person. On Katherine's death she became formally reconciled to her father, but in order to do so was compelled to write to him acknowledging his supremacy, the unlawfulness of her mother's marriage, and her own illegitimacy, and thus retained no right to the succession except what it pleased Henry afterwards to assign to her in his will. During her brother Edward's reign, her constant adhesion to the old faith—or, at any rate, her opposition to the further development of the Reformation—was a source of continual complaint to the Council and continual annoyance to herself. Her life, moreover, had been, for a person in her situation, a very secluded one; and thus her knowledge of the world and of mankind had not only been very limited in amount, but had been warped and coloured by the constant feeling that the world, so far as she knew of it and heard of it, was all going wrong, and that her first duty, if ever she came to take an active share in its government, would be to head it back, and lead, or rather drive, it once more into the ancient paths. Mary possessed by inheritance her full share of the pride and sternness of her Spanish mother, as well as the self-will and vehement temper, and also the courage and energy, of the Tudors, and the reaction
