Womanly dreams, farewell! Stern truths of life
Stamp on my heart all that becomes a queen.
Dudley, you have dared much: yet, standing here
By my poor brother’s clay, I can forgive.
Will you kneel, Dudley?”
After this, let the poet depict Jane in the most attractive colors he can find, he has shown his Catholic heroine the greater woman. But, in fact, we are convinced this is his aim. For although, as a Protestant, he makes Jane become a saint (according to his idea of saintship), her “path a shining light that goeth forward and increaseth to perfect day”—while Mary’s way is over-clouded to the end, and cruel wrongs goad her into rage which rouses all the Tudor and all the Spaniard in her nature, and deepens her melancholy into madness—still, even in her most painful moments, the daughter of Catherine is great. Her enemies do homage to her greatness. Northumberland himself is forced to say of her, in the scene we have quoted from above:
“The eighth Harry’s soul lives in her voice and eye.”
But the spell of her majestic bearing is best portrayed in the scene where she meets the rebel leaders Wyatt and Brett with their followers. Sir Thomas Wyatt, true to his character as indicated in the first scene, indulges again in fine rhetoric, declaring that he and his men have decided to stand for Mary, but putting in the condition that “all things which touch the Church” shall “rest as King Edward left them.” The queen answers this appeal by another to the consciences of “English gentlemen,” demanding for her own the liberty she willingly extends to theirs; but when, presently, Wyatt insults her by raving, like a modern fanatic, about “the dogs of persecution, insatiate brood of Rome,” and Brett sullenly refuses to march with her to London, she passes on, leaving the two insurrectionists to
pay her tribute each in his own fashion.
“Brett. Now, by all saints and martyrs calendared!