If this Queen ever loved any one it was the Earl of Leicester, the man who sent his lovely wife, Amy Robsart, to a cruel death in the delusive hope of marrying a Queen. We are unwilling to harbor the suspicion that she was accessory to this deed; and yet we cannot forget that she was the daughter of Henry VIII.!--and sometimes wonder if the memory of a crime as black as Mary's haunted her sad old age, when sated with pleasures and triumphs, lovers no more whispering adulation in her ears, and mirrors banished from her presence, she silently waited for the end. She died in the year 1603, and succumbing to the irony of fate, named the son of Mary Stuart--James VI. of Scotland--her successor. CHAPTER VIII. [Sidenote: House of Stuart, 1603-1714.] The House of Stuart had peacefully reached the long coveted throne of England in the person of a most unkingly King. Gross in appearance and vulgar in manners, James had none of the royal attributes of his mother. A great deal of knowledge had been crammed into a very small mind. Conceited, vain, pedantic, headstrong, he set to work with the confidence of ignorance to carry out his undigested views upon all subjects, reversing at almost every point the policy of his great predecessor. Where she with supreme tact had loosened the screws so that the great authority vested in her might not press too heavily upon the nation, he tightened them. Where she bowed her imperious will to that of the Commons, this puny tyrant insolently defied it, and swelling with sense of his own greatness, claimed, "Divine right" for Kingship and demanded that his people should say "the King can do no wrong," "to question his authority is to question that of God." If he ardently supported the Church of England, it was because he was its head. The Catholic who would have turned the Church authority over again to the Pope, and the "Puritans" who resisted the "Popish practices" of the Reformed Church of England, were equally hateful to him, for one and the same reason; they were each aiming to diminish _his_ authority. [Sidenote: First English Colony in New England] When the Puritans brought to him a petition signed by 800 clergymen, praying that they be not compelled to wear the surplice, nor make the sign of the cross at baptism--he said they were "vipers," and if they did not submit to the authority of the Bishops in such matters "they should be harried out of the land." In the persecution implied by this threat, a large body of Puritans escaped to Holland with their families, and from thence came that band of heroic men and women on the "Mayflower," landing at a point On the American Coast which they called "Plymouth" (1620). A few Englishmen had in 1607 settled in Jamestown, Virginia. These two colonies contained the germ of the future "United States of America." [Sidenote: "Gunpowder Plot, 1605."]