capricious and cruel husband the dread and insecurity under which she laboured from the hour in which she discovered how nearly she had approached the terrible fate to which he had doomed her. Her life after this must have been, during the remainder of his, an unceasing scene of anxiety, distrust, and circumspection. She must have trembled, lest the utterance of a sentiment, or even a word, might excite the king's anger, and risk the uncertain tenure by which she held existence. Nevertheless, she continued as tender a nurse and as cheerful a companion as if she knew no dread, and Henry's affection and confidence in her was for the time restored. How loathsome must the proofs of this rekindled fondness have been to its object, may easily be imagined, when the state of the king's bodily suffering and mental anxiety are considered. With a bloated person, that rendered every movement not only impracticable, but even the attempt a torture, and an ulcerated leg that exhaled the most offensive odour, the queen must have thought a crown dearly purchased at the price of sitting day and night by his couch, during the tedious time that intervened, before his death released her from so heavy a trial. His temper, always bad, became insupportable as he approached his end; and cruelty, with him an instinct, increased as the time drew near when he could no longer exercise its dictates. His dying hours were fraught with horror, offering a fearful lesson of the results of an ill-spent life.

If we may credit the statements of more than one of his historians, Henry, when death overtook him, was on the point of bringing a fresh charge against his queen for heresy; but these statements appear almost too terrible for belief, except that, like the eastern tyrants, whom in many points he resembled, he might wish that the object of his gross love should not survive him, and therefore decided to doom her to death when he could no longer hope to retard his own departure from life.

That Katharine could have had no suspicion of Henry's last intention to destroy her, is proved by her unfeigned surprise and disappointment, when his will was made known to her, on finding that she had not been appointed to the regency nor intrusted with the care of the youthful Edward. Her annoyance on this occasion betrays that ambition still lived in her breast, notwithstanding that she had seen enough, Heaven knows, to have revealed the worthlessness of the fulfilment of its highest yearnings. The affection always professed towards her by the youthful sovereign must have led her to believe that she might still retain a powerful influence over him; but the Earl of

Hertford, who had determined to take charge of his nephew, allowed no opportunities to the queen to cultivate the affection of which she imagined she had sown the seeds too carefully to doubt a plentiful harvest.

Perhaps the hope of gaining access to the youthful king may have induced Katharine to violate all etiquette, in receiving the vows of her former suitor, Sir Thomas Seymour, ere yet the grave had closed over her royal husband. Sir Thomas was the younger brother of the Earl of Hertford, now become Duke of Somerset, who held full power over the king; and as Sir Thomas was also uncle to the sovereign, and had been appointed one of the regency till the king's majority, Katharine might naturally enough have thought that through this connexion she might again be brought in contact with Edward. Whatever might be the motive, certain it is that she had many private interviews, and at night too, with her admirer, who plied his suit so perseveringly, that in little more than four months from the death of Henry she bestowed on him her hand. The imprudence of the secret interviews between Katharine and Seymour, followed by their nuptials so long before etiquette or even decency could tolerate such a step, seems the more unaccountable when the extreme prudence and discretion of Katharine, through all her previous life, is remembered, and that she had now arrived at the mature age of thirty-five, a period at which passion is supposed to have less influence than in youth. Katharine must have been well aware that her marriage so soon after her widowhood would be deemed wrong, for it was kept concealed for some time; and she rendered herself liable to the charge of duplicity, by addressing, after she had wedded Seymour secretly, and during the early days of her marriage, a letter to the king, filled with expressions of affection to his late father. Conscious of the censures that she had incurred, Katharine is suspected of having advised Seymour to enlist the king's sympathies in their favour, and to induce the unsuspecting Edward to plead for his uncle with her, after that uncle's suit had been rewarded with her hand. Certain it is that Edward wrote to her to advise the marriage, and to promise his protection to the pair. He wished to contract it some weeks after it had been secretly solemnised; an artifice which, if really planned by her, was not creditable on the part of Katharine, whose previous good conduct could not have prepared the world for this change.

These untoward nuptials furnished an excuse to Somerset, of which he readily availed himself, to denounce, with the utmost severity, the

ill-assorted marriage of his brother. Fearful of the influence which the queen and her husband might acquire over the king, to the injury of his own power, he loudly censured Seymour, and refused to allow Katharine the possession of the valuable jewels bestowed on her by Henry during his lifetime. She was debarred access to the king, and the protector now treated her with an unceremonious want of courtesy, and even of justice, that must have goaded her to anger, by intimating that when she condescended to become his sister-in-law, he ceased to consider her a queen. But it was not the ambition alone of Somerset, although that was a potent motive for his ill-treatment of Katharine and his brother, which induced him to betray such enmity to them. A dislike had long subsisted between the queen and the wife of the protector, which now, no longer concealed on the part of the latter by respect for the station of the former, broke loose from all constraint. The Duchess of Somerset had the insolence not only to refuse to pay those honours to the queen which she had hitherto, as in duty bound, accorded to her, but positively pretended to take precedence of her. The slights and affronts offered to Katharine by her sister-in-law, and the injustice committed towards her by the protector, could be ill brooked by one who had shared a throne, and who was by no means deficient in pride and spirit. The sense of these annoyances must have been bitterly aggravated by Katharine's consciousness that she had drawn them on herself by her ill-advised and indecorous marriage with the object of her former flame; and being, soon after her nuptials, declared, in a state that gave promise of her becoming in due time a mother, the anxiety and indignation to which she was often made a prey must have greatly tended to impair her health.

Nor were these the sole trials and annoyances to which Katharine was exposed. Some infinitely more fatal to her domestic happiness assailed her. The Princess Elizabeth had resided with her since the death of Henry, as well as previously, and the familiarity to which a daily intercourse seldom fails to lead, by degrees became so marked between Seymour and the princess, as to occasion great pain to the queen. Elizabeth, a lively and attractive girl of fifteen, was a dangerous temptation to have continually before the eyes of a man at all times more disposed to yield than to resist it; and although no more blameable impropriety than romping may have ever been contemplated by Seymour, the evident pleasure it afforded him. wounded her who had sacrificed so much to become his wife, and who, now in a state that demanded his affectionate attentions, found

that her husband preferred a game of romps, often verging on, if not passing, the bounds of propriety, with her youthful step-daughter, to a tête-à-tête with herself. It appears quite clear that, however Katharine might at first have permitted these indecorous familiarities between her husband and the Princess Elizabeth, they at length excited her jealousy, and she endeavoured to check them. Finding this more difficult than she had anticipated, she took measures for the removal of the princess from her house. This step was fortunately carried into effect without any disagreeable words, or aught approaching a misunderstanding on either side; and a friendly intercourse was maintained between Katharine and the princess, by letter, up to the death of the queen.

In August, 1548, the queen gave birth to a daughter, and, seven days after, resigned her life, not without strong suspicions having been excited that her husband had hastened that event, owing to his attachment to the Princess Elizabeth, to whose hand he presumed to lift his eyes. The suspicion of this iniquitous conduct on the part of Seymour was founded on some vague reproaches uttered by Katharine in the presence of her attendants, and probably when in the delirium of the violent fever which caused her death. Those around her saw nothing in the manner of her husband to justify suspicion of his guilt. He was watchful and affectionate to her; and the vague reproaches she uttered might be easily explained by the well-known proneness of all of all persons under the influence of delirium to accuse those most dear to them of unkindness, even while receiving proofs of the utmost tenderness and

care.

The fate of Katharine's husband, Lord Thomas Seymour, is well known to the readers of history. He was beheaded on Tower-hill, March 20th, 1549, on a charge of endeavouring to supplant his elder brother, the Duke of Somerset, in the office of guardian to the king. Thus he perished only six months and fourteen days after Katharine's death. His ambitious brother, also at a later day, fell by the same fate. It has generally been supposed that the child of Lord Thomas and Queen Katharine, Mary Seymour, died unmarried; but Miss Strickland has satisfactorily shown that this was not the case. After having been stripped of her hereditary property, she married Sir Edward Bushel, and from her are descended the Lawsons of Clevedon and Hereford.

LADY JANE GREY.

THERE is no character in English history which has excited a deeper or a purer interest than that of Lady Jane Grey. Though she perished by the axe of the executioner before she had reached her twentieth year, we forget that she was little more than a child as we contemplate the wisdom and the noble fortitude which she displayed in that brief career of existence. We listen to the words of a sagacity as profound as the piety which animated them; behold her, under the pressure of unfortunate circumstances, passing from a throne to a violent death with a calm propriety and a lofty philosophy which leave irresistibly behind them the impression of a mature and deeply-experienced woman. Lady Jane Grey was a mere girl, who had been brought up in the highest walks of life, close to the throne, and with the varied objects of human ambition thickly scattered under her very feet, and yet had from actual childhood treated all such things with the indifference of a stoic, and embraced the better part of religion and of intellectual pleasures with a devotion that could not have been exceeded by the most portionless, unallied, and time-worn philosopher. It was only in her fourteenth year that Roger Ascham, finding her at Bradgate, reading her Plato, while her father and mother were with their friends out hunting, and expressing his astonishment that she was not partaking the pleasures of her family, received the startling answer, "Alas! good folk, they never felt what true pleasure means; I wisse all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato !"

Such a singular taste in one so very a child, and which continued with her to the last, would have led us to suspect that she possessed more head than heart, had not history put it beyond a doubt that she was as affectionate and tender in her disposition as she was extraordinary in her capacity, the elevation of her taste, and the extent of her acquirements. In the freshness of her teens Lady Jane Grey had