[151] No one of our historians has been so severe on Mary's reign, except on a religious account, as Carte, on the authority of the letters of Noailles. Dr. Lingard, though with these before him, has softened and suppressed, till this queen appears honest and even amiable. A man of sense should be ashamed of such partiality to his sect. Admitting that the French ambassador had a temptation to exaggerate the faults of a government wholly devoted to Spain, it is manifest that Mary's reign was inglorious, her capacity narrow, and her temper sanguinary; that, although conscientious in some respects, she was as capable of dissimulation as her sister, and of breach of faith as her husband; that she obstinately and wilfully sacrificed her subjects' affections and interests to a misplaced and discreditable attachment; and that the words with which Carte has concluded the character of this unlamented sovereign, though little pleasing to men of Dr. Lingard's profession, are perfectly just: "Having reduced the nation to the brink of ruin, she left it, by her seasonable decease, to be restored by her admirable successor to its ancient prosperity and glory." I fully admit, at the same time, that Dr. Lingard has proved Elizabeth to have been as dangerous a prisoner, as she afterwards found the Queen of Scots. [152] Strype, ii. 17; Burnet, iii. 263, and Append. 285, where there is a letter from the king and queen to Bonner, as if even he wanted excitement to prosecute heretics. The number who suffered death by fire in this reign is reckoned by Fox at 284, by Speed at 277, and by Lord Burghley at 290. Strype, iii. 473. These numbers come so near to each other, that they may be presumed also to approach the truth. But Carte, on the authority of one of Noailles's letters, thinks many more were put to death than our martyrologists have discovered. And the prefacer to Ridley's _Treatise de Coenâ Domini_, supposed to be Bishop Grindal, says that 800 suffered in this manner for religion. Burnet, ii. 364. I incline, however, to the lower statements. [153] Burnet makes a very just observation on the cruelties of this period, that "they raised that horror in the whole nation, that there seems ever since that time such an abhorrence to that religion to be derived down from father to son, that it is no wonder an aversion so deeply rooted and raised upon such grounds, does upon every new provocation or jealousy or returning to it break out in most violent and convulsive symptoms."--P. 338. "Delicta majorum immeritus luis, _Romane_." But those who would diminish this aversion, and prevent these convulsive symptoms, will do better by avoiding for the future either such panegyrics on Mary and her advisers, or such insidious extenuations of her persecution as we have lately read, and which do not raise a favourable impression of their sincerity in the principles of toleration to which they profess to have been converted.