Who fostered her lone childhood, now destroy her
By death or exile. You are malcontent.
Conform ye to my will: I shall not swerve.”
In the following scene, where Mary and Elizabeth have it all to themselves, the generosity of the former is the more touching by reason of her reproaches, which Elizabeth can only answer by acting a part which such a dissembler could very easily feign. Mary shows strong grounds for suspecting her loyalty, but nobly acquits her and replaces on her finger the ring which was the pledge of love between them, saying:
“Or innocent or guilty, I forgive you.”
We regret that space does not allow us to transcribe this scene in full.
We pass to the third Act, which introduces the two best-drawn characters of the play—Philip and Reginald Pole.
In these two men the author has illustrated—perhaps unconsciously—the antipodal extremes of the moral results of the Catholic religion. In Pole we see a character perfectly Christlike in its mixture of majesty with gentleness; in Philip one who has degraded faith into superstition, and made doctrines and means of grace the instruments of selfishness and passion. The greater the good in a system, the greater the evil into which it may be perverted. The amiable Fakenham tells Gardiner, in the previous scene, his mind about the Spaniard’s portrait:
“A moody man,
Whose countenance is ghastly, bearing dismal: