MARY. 



705 



prime minister. All the other members of the coun- 

 cil of state agreed with the king, partly from flattery, 

 partly from fear of opposing him, partly from the 

 wretched state of the kingdom. The king was ap- 

 prehensive, in consequence of the suggestions of the 

 cardinal, that the queen intended to put her second 

 son Gaston on the throne. The queen therefore 

 received orders, in 1631, to retire to the castle of 

 Compiegne, and all her adherents were either banish- 

 ed, or confined in the Bastile. The queen soon felt 

 that she was in reality a prisoner at Compiegne, and 

 fled, in the same year, to Brussels. She afterwards 

 repeatedly demanded justice from the parliament, and 

 died in 1642, in great want, at Cologne. Paris owes 

 to her the magnificent palace of the Luxembourg, 

 fine aqueducts, and the public walk, called Cours-la- 

 Reine. She was jealous, obstinate, and ambitious. 

 With Henry IV. she had not been happier than with 

 Louis XIII. The amours of her husband caused her 

 the greatest grief, and jealousy often excited her to 

 violence. With unbounded passion, she united all 

 the weaknesses of her sex. She was ambitious from 

 vanity, confiding from want of intelligence, and more 

 avaricious of distinction than power. Her biography 

 appeared in 1774 (Paris, 3 vols.) 



MARY I., queen of England, daughter of Henry 

 VIII., by Catharine of Arragon, was born in 1516. 

 In her infancy, she was betrothed, first to the dauphin 

 of France, afterwards to the emperor Charles V. , and, 

 lastly, to the duke of Orleans. After her mother's 

 death, she was declared illegitimate, but was restored 

 to her rights, when the succession was finally settled 

 in 1544. She was bred up by her mother, in a zeal- 

 ous adherence to the Roman Catholic faith ; on which 

 account, she was treated with rigour under Edward 

 VI. She ascended the throne in 1553, after an abor- 

 tive attempt to set her aside in favour of lady Jane 

 Grey. One of her first measures was the reinstate- 

 ment of the prelates who had been superseded in the 

 late reign, while Cranmer was prosecuted for high 

 treason, and several other Protestant bishops impri- 

 soned. The marriage of the queen with the arch- 

 duke Philip, son of the emperor Charles V., after- 

 wards Philip II., united as it was with a complete 

 restoration of the Catholic worship, produced much 

 discontent. Insurrections broke out under Cave, in 

 Devonshire, and Wyat, in Kent, which, although 

 suppressed, formed sufficient excuses for immuring 

 the princess Elizabeth in the Tower, and dooming the 

 youthful and unfortunate Jane Grey and her husband, 

 Guildford Dudley, who had been hitherto spared, to 

 execution. Philip arrived in England in 1554, when 

 the nuptials were celebrated ; but the attempts of 

 Mary to secure him a paramount authority in Eng- 

 land were unsuccessful. She succeeded better in a 

 reconciliation of the kingdom to the pope, which was 

 effected, in great form, by the legate cardinal Pole. 

 The sanguinary laws against heretics were revived, 

 and those shocking scenes of cruelty followed, which 

 have fixed upon this princess the hateful epithet of 

 bloody queen Mary. The legate Pole disapproved of 

 this severity ; but the arguments of Gardiner and 

 others were more congenial to the gloomy bigotry of 

 the sovereign, and 277 persons were committed to the 

 flames, including prelates, private clergymen, laymen 

 of all ranks, women, and even children. Her union 

 with Philip II. was equally unpropitious to herself 

 and the nation. Eleven years younger than the 

 queen, he treated her with great neglect ; and, to 

 prevent the fulfilment of his threat of desertion, 

 England was forced into a war with France, and the 

 assistance of English troops facilitated the Spanish 

 victory over the French at St Quentin. This result, 

 which was of no service to England, was quickly 

 counterbalanced at her expense, by the loss of Calais, , 



which was taken in 1558, after it had been in the 

 hands of the English for 200 years. This disgrace 

 sank deep in the heart of Mary, who was already 

 declining from a dropsical complaint, and preyed 

 upon by a consciousness of the hatred of her subjects, 

 and the indifference or aversion of her husband. She 

 terminated her short and dark reign, of little more 

 than five years, in November, 1558, in the forty- 

 second year of her age. Mary was not destitute of 

 the characteristic vigour and ability of her family; 

 but her natural capacity was clouded by bigotry, and 

 the prejudices fostered by the connexion of her 

 mother's divorce and ill-treatment with the separation 

 from the see of Rome. Hateful as was the severity 

 really displayed, it has not unfrequently been highly 

 exaggerated, and censured with too little regard to 

 the intolerance prevalent in that age. With Mary 

 I., ended the dominion of popery in Great Britain. 



MARY II., queen of England, born in 1662, was 

 the daughter of James, duke of York, afterwards 

 James II., by his wife Anne Hyde, daughter of lord 

 Clarendon. She was married, in 1677, to William, 

 prince of Orange, and, when the revolution was 

 effected, which dethroned her father, Mary was de- 

 clared joint-possessor of the throne with her husband, 

 king William, on whom all the administration of the 

 government devolved. This arrangement cost Mary . 

 no sacrifice, her strong regard to, and profound respect 

 for, her consort being always conspicuous. She was 

 strongly attached to the Protestant religion and the 

 church of England. During the absence of William 

 in Ireland, in 1690, Mary managed parties at home 

 ivith extreme prudence, and acted with equal ability 

 during his various visits to the continent. The 

 unfriendly terms on which she lived with her sister 

 Anne have been regarded as a blemish in her charac- 

 ter; but political jealousies, and the weak attach- 

 ment of the latter to overbearing favourites, may 

 sufficiently account for it. Mary died of the small- 

 pox, at Kensington, in the year 1695, in her thirty- 

 third year. See ffilliam HI. 



MARY STUART, queen of Scots, celebrated for 

 her beauty, her accomplishments, her errors, and her 

 misfortunes, was born at Linlithgow palace, Decem- 

 ber 8, 1542, and was the daughter of James V. of 

 Scotland, by his queen, Mary of Lorraine, a French 

 princess, of the family of Guise. Her father dying 

 when she was about eight days old, violent disputes 

 arose among the nobility about the guardianship of 

 the infant sovereign, and the conduct of public affairs. 

 The regency was at length vested in the earl of Ar- 

 ran, and Henry VIII. of England having demanded 

 the hand of Mary in marriage for his son Edward, the 

 regent's rejection of the proposal occasioned a war, 

 in which the Scots were defeated at the battle of 

 Musselburgh. At the age of six, the young queen 

 was sent by her mother to France, where she was 

 educated in a convent, and appears to have been 

 instructed in every branch of learning and polite 

 accomplishment which was fashionable at that period. 

 April 20, 1558, she was married to the dauphin, after- 

 wards Francis II. He died about six months after 

 tiis accession to the crown, in December, 1560, and 

 ;he widowed queen returned to Scotland. The- 

 future incidents of her life are matter of well-known 

 liistory, and, remarkable as they are, a very slight 

 notice of the most important can alone be intro- 

 duced into this article. The queen, having received 

 overtures of marriage from various quarters, gratified 

 tier inclination by uniting herself with her cousin, 

 :he young and handsome Henry Stuart, lord Darn- 

 ley, by whom she became the mother of James VI. 

 Darnley proved a profligate and ungrateful husband, 

 and a weak and worthless man. Excited by jealousy, 

 :ie caused his wife's secretary, David Rizzio, to be 

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