The displeasure which Dr. White incurred for his panegyric of Mary,[704] was but the beginning of a systematic blackening of her memory, by those, whose interest it was to stand well with Elizabeth. Eleven out of the thirty-five members who composed Mary’s Privy Council at the end of her reign became Privy Councillors under Elizabeth, a process that entailed some turning of coats for the second and even the third time. Those pamphleteers and manufacturers of low abuse, who had embittered Mary’s last days with insult and calumny might now pursue their trade unmolested, while the loose statements of reformers such as John Knox, John Foxe and John Bale,[705] afterwards too carelessly credited, and copied by Strype, Burnet and others, and elaborated by Hume and Froude, have marred beyond recognition the reputation of one who has been tardily recognised in our own day, as “amongst the best, although not the greatest of our sovereigns”.[706]
No monument has ever been raised to the memory of Queen Mary I. Two small black tablets mark the spot where she lies buried, in the north aisle of Henry VIIth’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, at the foot of the tomb erected by James I. over the remains of Elizabeth. They bear this inscription:—
| Regno consortes | Et Maria sorores |
| & urna Hic obdor | in Spe Resurrec- |
| mimus Elizabetha | tionis. |
Mary’s last Will and Testament, dated the 30th April 1558, with a Codicil, added a little more than a fortnight before her death, is an interesting and characteristic document, containing many glimpses into her mind and heart. It was not only entirely ignored by Elizabeth, but lay utterly forgotten for nearly 300 years. Sir Frederick Madden printed a copy of it in 1831.[707]
FOOTNOTES:
[684] Burnet, vol. ii., preface, p. 23.
[685] Secret. de Estado, Leg. 811 and 812, Simancas Arch., De Feria to the King.
[686] MS., St. Mark’s Library, Cod. xxiv., Cl. x., p. 197.