Philip" (Lingard), affairs of State demanded his absence from
England. The disappointment as to her expected child was cruel. She
knew that she had become unpopular, and she could not look for the
success of her Church, to which she was sincerely attached. M.
Auguste Filon thought that Queen Mary might secure dramatic rank for
Tennyson, "if a great actress arose who conceived a passion for the
part of Mary." But that was not to be expected. Mary was middle-
aged, plain, and in aspect now terrible, now rueful. No great
actress will throw herself with passion into such an ungrateful part.
"Throughout all history," Tennyson said, "there was nothing more
mournful than the final tragedy of this woman." MOURNFUL it is, but
not tragic. There is nothing grand at the close, as when Mary Stuart
conquers death and evil fame, redeeming herself by her courage and
her calm, and extending over unborn generations that witchery which
her enemies dreaded more than an army with banners.

Moreover, popular tradition can never forgive the fires of
Smithfield. It was Mary Tudor's misfortune that she had the power to
execute, on a great scale, that faculty of persecution to the death
for which her Presbyterian and other Protestant opponents pined in
vain. Mr Froude says of her, "For the first and last time the true
Ultramontane spirit was dominant in England, the genuine conviction
that, as the orthodox prophets and sovereigns of Israel slew the
worshippers of Baal, so were Catholic rulers called upon, as their
first duty, to extirpate heretics as the enemies of God and man."
That was precisely the spirit of Knox and other Presbyterian
denouncers of death against "Idolaters" (Catholics). But the
Scottish preachers were always thwarted: Mary and her advisers had
their way, as, earlier, Latimer had preached against sufferers at the
stake. To the stake, which he feared so greatly, Cranmer had sent