Calais was called the "brightest jewel in the English crown." It was the last relic of the French possessions of the Plantagenets. It was the Gibraltar of the sixteenth century. It helped to make of the narrow seas an English channel. It was a mart for English goods. It afforded a foothold for Continental enterprises. To some extent it linked England with her traditional allies, the old Burgundian possessions in the Netherlands. By us, looking back over the chequered story of the last three centuries, the loss of Calais is seen to have been a blessing in disguise. England gained by it as she did by the loss of Normandy under John, and of Hanover at the accession of Queen Victoria. But to Mary's subjects it was a corroding humiliation. "If Spain should rise suddenly into her ancient strength," Froude truly remarks, "and tear Gibraltar from us, our mortification would be faint, compared to the anguish of humiliated pride with which the loss of Calais distracted the subjects of Mary." It was the galling reflection that Calais was lost to the French in a Spanish quarrel that crowned the poor Queen's obloquy. She had lost it through wanton neglect. Had the warnings of Wentworth and Grey been heeded, Calais might have been saved. Calais need never have been imperilled had the Queen thought more of English interests and less of the needs of her Spanish husband. {p.x} The odium in which Mary's memory was held was turned to account by the friends of the new religion. Early in the next reign there appeared one of the most remarkable books ever written--Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_. The authenticity of its narrative has been impugned by Lingard and other Catholic historians; Froude bears testimony to its trustworthiness wherever it can be tested, except when it deals with purely hearsay evidence. When Foxe's narrative of the horrible Guernsey case was challenged by a Catholic controversialist in the reign of Elizabeth, the matter was inquired into, and the account was found to be absolutely true. No one will be found, however, in these days to assert that a book, written by an avowed partisan, in an uncritical age, recording transactions of which from the very nature of things he could have had no personal knowledge, was not too highly coloured in parts and in others absolutely untrustworthy. Few books, nevertheless, have exercised a more abiding influence on the course of our national life. Its simplicity, its directness, its poignant style, and its dramatic power combined to make it an English classic. If it loaded Bonner and Gardiner with shame and hatred, it fixed for three centuries the popular estimate of Mary Tudor. Froude used it with extraordinary skill. His relation of the death of a young Protestant martyr, an apprentice from Essex, taken as it is almost bodily from Foxe, must thrill even yet the least emotional of his readers. The permanence of Mary's hideous title and her abiding unpopularity are