The Tudors fame to the English throne in 1485.  There was no want of domestic quarrelling with them.  Arthur, Henry VII.’s eldest son, died young, but left a widow, Catharine of Aragon, whom the King treated badly; and he appears to have been jealous of the Prince of Wales, afterward Henry VIII., but died too soon to allow of that jealousy’s blooming into quarrels.  According to some authorities, the Prince thought of seizing the crown, on the ground that it belonged to him in right of his mother, Elizabeth Plantagenet, who was unquestionably the legitimate heir.  Henry VIII. himself, who would have made a splendid tyrant over a son who should have readied to man’s estate,—­an absolute model in that way to all after-sovereigns,—­was denied by fortune an opportunity to round and perfect his character as a domestic despot.  Only one of his legitimate sons lived even to boyhood, Edward VI., and Henry died when the heir-apparent was in his tenth year.  Of his illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, Henry was extravagantly fond, and at one time thought of making him heir-apparent, which might have been done, for the English dread of a succession war was then at its height.  Richmond died in his seventeenth year.  Having no sons of a tormentable age, Henry made his daughters as unhappy as he could make them by the harsh exercise of paternal authority, and bastardized them both, in order to clear the way to the throne for his son.  Edward VI. died a bachelor, in his sixteenth year, so that we can say nothing of him as a parent; but he treated his sister Mary with much harshness, and exhibited on various occasions a disposition to have things his own way that would have delighted his father, provided it had been directed against anybody but that severe old gentleman himself.  Mary I. was the best sovereign of her line, domestically considered; but then she had neither son nor daughter with whom to quarrel, and the difficulties she had with her half-sister, Elizabeth, like the differences between the Archangel Michael and the Fallen Angel, were purely political in their character.  We do not think that she would have done much injustice, if she had made Elizabeth’s Tower-dungeon the half-way house to the scaffold.  But though political, the half-sisterly dissensions between these ladies serve to keep Mary I. within the rules of the royal houses to which she belonged.  Mary, dying of the loss of Calais and the want of children, was succeeded by Elizabeth, who, being a maiden queen, had no issue with whom to make issue concerning things political or personal.  But observe how basely she treated her relatives, those poor girls, the Greys, Catharine and Mary, sisters of poor Lady Jane, whose fair and clever head Mary I. had taken off.  The barren Queen, too jealous to share her power with a husband, hated marriage with all “the sour malevolence of antiquated virginity,” and was down upon the Lady Catharine and the Lady Mary because they chose to become wives.  Then she imprisoned her cousin, Mary Stuart, for nineteen years, and finally had her butchered under an approach to the forms of law, and in total violation of its spirit.  She, too, kept within the royal rules, and made herself as great a pest as possible to her relatives.