All was utterly strange, yet nothing was altered; it looked the same as when, weeping to leave England, she had come down these waters in a barge with her silent husband, ten years ago, and waited at Gravesend for the wind.
One difference attracted Mary's eyes. Behind and beyond the Tower a mass of scaffolding rose that dominated the whole city, and through the crossed poles, boards, and ropes, she could discern the majestic outline of the dome of that vast church which had been slowly rising out of the ashes of the old St. Paul's since she was a child.
At the Tower Wharf she landed, laughing hysterically, and hardly knowing what she did. They gave her a royal salute of cannon, and she saw all the guards drawn up in squares, with their spears in the midst, and a red way of brocade carpet laid down for her, and a coach with white horses and running footmen, and beyond, a press of noblemen and officers, and the sheriffs and aldermen of the city with the Lord Mayor.
She hesitated on the gangway, amidst her ladies, her spirit completely overwhelmed. She looked round desperately for some one to whom to say—"I cannot do it—I cannot put it through. I must die, but I cannot be Queen."
The complete incomprehension on the excited faces of these ladies, the strangeness of many of them, recalled her with a shock to herself; she felt as if she had been on the point of betraying her husband. She recalled his last letter, in which he had asked her to show no grief or hesitation in her manner, and, biting her lips fiercely, she stepped firmly on to English soil, and managed somehow to respond to the lowly salutations of the crowd pressing to receive her. The Prince was by the coach door; she noticed that he wore his George and garter, which he had not done perhaps twice before. There were a great many gentlemen behind him, many of them those whom she had already met at The Hague, others strange to her, several of the Dutch officers, and M. Bentinck in mourning for his wife.
Mary, still English enough to think her country the finest in the world, was thrilled with pleasure to see how respectfully all these great nobles held themselves to the Prince. She was used to see him receive this homage in his own country and from the magnates of the Empire, but these Englishmen were to her more than any German princes.
The Prince took her hand and kissed it, and said very quickly in Dutch—
"I would that this had been in Holland."
The English gentlemen bowed till their long perukes touched their knees, Mary entered the coach with Lady Argyll and a Dutch lady, the Prince mounted his white horse, and the cavalcade started through the expectant city with all that pomp which the people would not forgo and the Prince to-day could not avoid.
All London was eager for a sight of the Princess. The last Queen, foreign, proud Romanist, and hard, had never been a favourite, the Queen Dowager had never counted for anything, and was now a forgotten figure in Somerset House; but Mary was English, Protestant, and her image had long been faithfully cherished in England as that of a native Princess who would some day restore the old faith. Therefore her greeting was such as made her turn pale; she had never before heard such thunders of acclamation, popular as she was in the United Provinces.