EDWARD AND MARY.--In pursuance of our plan, a few preliminary words will
present the historic features of that age. In the year 1547, Henry VIII.,
the royal Bluebeard, sank, full of crimes and beset with deathbed horrors,
into a dishonorable grave.[24] A poor, weak youth, his son, Edward VI.,
seemed sent by special providence on a short mission of six years, to
foster the reformed faith, and to give the land a brief rest after the
disorders and crimes of his father's reign.
After Edward came Queen Mary, in 1553--the bloody Mary, who violently
overturned the Protestant system, and avenged her mother against her
father by restoring the Papal sway and making heresy the unpardonable
sin. It may seem strange, in one breath to denounce Henry and to defend
his daughter Mary; but severe justice, untempered with sympathy, has been
meted out to her. We acknowledge all her recorded actions, but let it be
remembered that she was the child of a basely repudiated mother, Catherine
of Arragon, who, as the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was a
Catholic of the Catholics.
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