The “storms of puberty” that had shattered the frail barque of Edward VI, and brought his latent spirochætes to the surface, beat hard upon Mary’s body, and left her an embittered and sickly woman, with an intellect below her station, and a conscience above it. But what she mistook for the love of God—religion—was probably a love more fleshly; the desire of the moth for the star, as Shelley puts it poetically. Indeed, it is difficult to describe this primitive instinct in language that shall not be poetical; the great brain of man has idealised love until it is the emotion furthest from prose that humanity is capable of suffering; and that which is originally common to man and the brutes becomes the noblest feeling of the human brain; transcendental. And when again sublimated it may lead to the fiercest of injustices, to the most savage of religious persecutions. To that goal it led Mary Tudor, the most unhappy woman in English history. As a girl she suffered from menstrual troubles that caused her great pain; her normal menstruation was often scanty; and this has been attributed to overstudy. To this day we find that any overstrain, or even a sudden change of climate, may cause amenorrhœa in a young woman; many of our English girl-immigrants, having left the depths of an English summer for the mildness of a Sydney winter, suddenly terrify their friends by becoming amenorrhœic, often to their unfounded mental distress. Later on she suffered from what she called her “old guest,” of which the chief symptom was amenorrhœa. The probability is that soon after her marriage with Philip she really did become pregnant, and miscarried. The disappointment weighed heavily on her mind. Was it possible that she, who was so earnest, virtuous and religious, should be affected by the same curse as the wives of her father? She became cachectic—that is to say, her complexion assumed the ashy hue of a person dying of cancer; and her abdomen swelled as though she were again pregnant. Sir Spencer Wells in 1877 hazarded the guess that she probably suffered from “ovarian dropsy,” an old-fashioned term for what we should now call “parovarian cyst,” a tumour that takes its origin from a little body adjacent to the ovary, and, being distended with fluid, causes enormous swelling of the abdomen. It is the one abdominal tumour which, if tapped, may possibly not return, and the patient may be cured with no further ado. For years before she died she had suffered from very bad health; she was never well, and could never attend to her work properly, owing to the terrible headaches that afflicted her; these were possibly due to her bad eyesight. With these also went palpitation of the heart. She never became old, for she died at forty-two; and most likely the proverb was as true with her as it still is with every young person—“If you feel your heart, it is not your heart; it is something else, generally your stomach.”