Catharine of Arragon, the daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand, seems a truth-loving, devout woman, well prepared to welcome the great principles advanced by the Reformers, had she not been placed in circumstances most adverse to their influence. Had Henry embraced the doctrines and the principles of the Reformation from a conviction of their truth and importance—had he sought to regulate his own life by the pure precepts of the Bible, and thus striven to disseminate a pure faith among his people—had the conscientious Catharine been the patroness and the friend of the Reformers, instead of the trifling, if not guilty, Anne Boleyn—the English church and the state of religion in the English nation would doubtless have presented a different history for the past, and a different aspect for the future.
But these are vain speculations. Catharine lived and died in the Papal faith. From the circumstances in which she was placed, she clung to it as to her womanly honour, her queenly dignity—as she would preserve her name from blight, her child from shame. And when she saw herself supplanted, when she was disgraced, divorced, her child declared illegitimate, and she knew her death was desired by one to whom she had been a devoted, faithful wife, what words could be more touching than those the dramatist gives as her last message to the king! "Tell him, his long sorrow has passed away." Oh, none but a wife dying thus, with the bitter consciousness that her life was undesired and that her death would be unregretted, can feel their full import.
The bells which had tolled for Catharine of Arragon had hardly ceased to vibrate when the roar of the cannon announced the execution of Anne. The one died in January, the other was beheaded in May; and she who, by exciting and encouraging the unholy love of the king, had unchained his fierce passions and taught him to break through all restraints, was herself, full early, their victim.
Shall we pass from the palaces of England to the tents of Mesopotamia—from the last days of chivalry to those of the ancient patriarchs and shepherds of the earliest of recorded ages?
When the wandering Jacob reached the abode of his mother's kindred, the land of Haran, he met, at the same fountain at which Rebekah had watered the flocks of the messenger of Abraham, the daughter of her brother Laban. He had seated himself by the well, and when the maiden came, he aided her to water her flocks; and he was thus introduced to his kinsmen by Rachel; and he told them that he was the son of Rebekah, of whom, perhaps, they had long lost the recollection; and with all the hospitality of the East—that hospitality which ever prevails among a simple and pastoral people—he was welcomed by the kindred of the mother.
The brother of Rebekah had two daughters. Leah, the elder, was tender-eyed, but Rachel was beautiful; and both sisters loved their cousin, while the heart of Jacob clung to the younger, the fair damsel who first welcomed him; so that he overlooked the claims of the elder,—the plain, if not disfigured, Leah. He brought no offerings with him to conciliate the favour of the father, and, according to the custom of the East, to facilitate his marriage. But he offered his personal service as an equivalent. And the son of Isaac served seven years for the daughter of Laban. But this long period was passed; and dwelling, as Jacob did, in the presence of Rachel, a member of the household of her father, they seemed but as a few days, for the love he bore her.
But the time had now arrived when the marriage should be celebrated, and Jacob claimed his bride. But he who had wronged his brother, who had by disguise deceived his father, was now imposed upon by guile and treachery; and all the hopes and expectations of these long years were defeated. The customs of Eastern marriages favoured the deceit, and Jacob found that he was wedded to Leah, and not to the object of his affection. The deceit was most unjustifiable. The disappointment and the resentment must have been proportionally great; and miserable was the excuse of Laban, and wretched the device which was offered as an atonement. Yet Jacob must have bowed before the retributions of an avenging God, and the remembrance of his own treachery may have stayed his anger.
Thus commenced the family of Jacob, with all the elements of dissension, strife and bitterness incorporated into its very earliest existence. The daughters of Laban both became the wives of Jacob, and they were rivals as women, as sisters, as wives and as mothers—forced to dwell together, yet ever in sullen hatred or bitter strife. When the ties of natural affection are severed, the heart never ceases to bleed; and there is no hatred so deep, so implacable as that which springs up where hearts once knit are thus alienated and forced asunder: and the sorrows and evils which sprang up in the family of Jacob may have led to that command so explicitly given by Moses—"Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister to vex her, in her lifetime."