anise, and cummin.  They made clean the outside of the cup and platter.  They firmly believed that they were pleasing the Deity they worshipped when they deluged England with blood.  The spirit of the Marian martyrs is one of the noblest tributes to the power of true religion that the annals of Christendom contain.  Henry’ s victims were few and conspicuous.  Their crime, or alleged crime, was treason.  Mary’s were obscure, and numbered by the hundred.  Many of them were artisans and mechanics, who, as Burghley afterwards said, knew no faith except that they were called upon to abjure.  They went to the stake without a murmur, sustained against the terrors of demonology by their own English hearts, by the love of their friends, and by the grace of God.  Tennyson, in his play of Queen Mary, has put into the mouth of Pole some highly edifying sentiments on the want of true faith which prompts persecution.  Pole’s example was very different from these precepts.  For the wretched Mary there may be some excuse; she was perhaps not wholly sane.  Her fixed idea, that if she killed Protestants enough Heaven would give her a son, was the conviction of a lunatic.  Her own husband fled from her, and left her with no earthly consolation save the stake.  But Pole was sane enough when he burnt better Christians than himself.  The true story of Mary’s reign deserved to be told as Froude could tell it.  The tale has two sides, and is a warning which has been taken to heart.  Mary’s subjects could not rebel.  Her Spanish husband had behind him the military strength of a great Power.  But never again, except during the brief and disastrous period which led to the expulsion of the second James, has England endured a Catholic sovereign.  Neither her rulers nor her laws have always been just to Catholics.  To tolerate intolerance, though a truly Christian lesson, is hard to learn.  Mary Tudor and Reginald Pole taught the English people once for all what the triumph of Catholicism meant.  So long as they are not supreme, Catholics are the best of subjects, of citizens, of neighbours, of friends.  There is only one country in Europe where they are supreme now, and that country is Spain.  They might have been supreme in England for at least a century if it had not been for the daughter of Katharine of Aragon and the Legate of Julius iii.

Froude had now completed the first part of his great History.  The second part, the reign of Elizabeth, was reserved for future issue in separately numbered volumes.  The death of Macaulay in December, 1859, left Froude the most famous of living English historians, and the ugly duckling of the brood had become the glory of the family.  The reception of his first six volumes was a curious one.  The general public read, and admired.  The few critics who were competent to form an instructed and impartial opinion perceived that, while there were errors in detail, the story of the English Reformation, and of the Catholic reaction