And so, with a prayer for mercy and peace upon her lips, and her last gaze on earth resting upon the holy mystery of her faith, Mary Tudor went to her account.[165] Her life was but a passing episode in the English Reformation; for she was handicapped from the first by her unpopular marriage, and the unstatesmanlike religious policy of her ecclesiastical advisers. Like her mother, and her grandmother Isabel, she would deign to no compromise with what she considered evil. ‘Rather would I lose ten crowns if I had them,’ she exclaimed once, ‘than palter with my conscience’; and, though to a less exalted degree, this was Philip’s attitude of mind also. Fate cast them both in an age when rigidity of belief was breaking down before the revival of ancient learning, and the widened outlook of life growing from the renaissance. They were pitted against rivals whose convictions were as wax, but who were determined not only to win but to appear right in this world, at any sacrifice of principle; and the fight was an unequal one. Mary could not change—only once under dire compulsion did she even pretend to give way in the matter of religion—Elizabeth changed as often and as completely as suited her purpose: Philip had only one invariable set of convictions and methods, his rivals had none, but invented them and abandoned them as occasion served.
And so Mary Tudor failed; pitiably, because she was naturally a good woman, who did her best according to her conscience. But the defects of her descent were too strong for her: she was a Tudor, and consequently domineering and obstinate; she was a grand-daughter of Isabel the Catholic, and as a natural result mystically devout and exalted, caring nothing for human suffering in the pursuit of her saintly aims; she was an English Queen, proud of her island realm; a Spanish princess, almost equally proud of the land of the Catholic kings; and, to crown all, she was the consort of Philip II., pledged to the cause for which he lived, the unification of the Christian faith and the destruction of the power of France. Within a year of her death England was a Protestant country, and Philip was married to a French princess.
BOOK III II ISABEL OF THE PEACE (ELIZABETH DE VALOIS)