When Mary came to the throne she was intensely unhappy. During the dreadful years that preceded the divorce of Catherine of Aragon, Charles had strongly supported Catherine’s cause; and Mary did not forget his aid when she found herself a monarch, lonely and friendless. She let him know that she would be quite prepared to marry him if he would take her.[7] Probably Charles was terrified by the advances of the plain-faced old maid, but the opportunity of strengthening the Catholic cause was too good to miss. The house of Austria was always famous for its matrimonial skill; the hexameter pasquinade went: “Bella gerant alii--tu, felix Austria, nube!” (“Others wage war for a throne--you, happy Austria, marry!”) Charles, in his dilemma, turned to his son Philip, who nobly responded to the call of duty. Of him Gibbon might have said that “he sighed as a lover, but obeyed as a son” if he had not said it concerning himself; and Philip broke off his engagement to the Infanta of Portugal, and married the fair English bride himself. Charles was still the greatest and most romantic figure in Europe--a mighty conqueror and famous Emperor; any woman would have preferred him to his mean-spirited son; and Mary was grateful to him for powerful support during years of anguish. She obeyed his wishes, and took the son instead of the father. Queen Mary’s sad life deserves a word of sympathetic study. With her mother she had passed through years of hideous suffering, culminating in her being forced by her father to declare herself a bastard--probably the most utterly brutal act of Henry’s reign. She had seen the fruits of ungovernable sexuality in the fate of her enemy Anne Boleyn; added to her plain face this probably caused her to repress her own sex-complex; finally she married the wretched young creature Philip, who, having stirred her sexual passions, left her to pursue his tortuous policy in Spain. All the time, as I read the story, she was really desirous of Charles, his brilliant father. Love-sick for Charles; love-sick for Philip, to whom she had a lawful right set at naught by leagues of sea; love-sick for _any_ man whom her pride would allow her to possess--and I do not hint a word against her virtue--she is not a creature to scorn; she is rather to be pitied. Her father had been a man of strong passions and violent deeds; from him she had inherited that tendency to early degeneration of the cardiovascular system which led to her death from dropsy at the early age of forty-two; and her repressed sex-complex led her into the ways of a ruthless religious persecution, probably increased by the object-lesson set her by her hero. From this repressed sex-complex also sprang her fierce desire for a child, though the historians commonly attribute this emotion to a desire for some one to carry on her hatred of the Protestants. I remember the case of a young woman who was a violent Labour politician; unfortunately it became necessary for her to lose