Stuarts

202 THE STUARTS
clear complexion, almond-shaped dark eyes, dark hair, and an elegant
outline of features." The one great passion of her life was devotion to her
husband, which was to her a very anchorage of the soul. She was, by
the course of events over which she had but little control, cut off from
parental affection. She was brotherless, and, after her quarrel with Anne,
without a sister : above all she was childless, and thus her affections were
set upon William with the whole force of her nature. Although, not long
before her death, she took him to task for his conjugal infidelities, there is
no doubt she possessed his entire confidence and affection. His mother
had died of small-pox, and when he saw his wife sinking under a malignant
attack of the same complaint, he remained day and night near her bedside,
and, as the end drew near, his sorrow was piteous to behold ; the tears
ran unchecked down that face usually so stern and frigid. " There is no
hope," he cried to Burnet ; " I was the happiest man on earth ; and I am
the most miserable. She had no fault ; none : you knew her well : but you
could not know, nobody but myself could know her goodness."
Thus Mary was stricken in her prime, and in the midst of her greatness ;
and her partner was left solitary on a throne to which she alone had given
him a right. " Never was so universal a mourning," says John Evelyn
(March 5, 1695), "all the Parliament had cloaks given them, and 400 poore
women ; all the streets hung, and the middle of the streete boarded and
covered with black cloth. There were all the nobility, mayor, aldermen,
judges, &c, at her funeral."
Evelyn, who was a Tory of the Tories, allows some prejudices against
Mary to escape him, as, for instance, when he condemns her behaviour on
her arrival at Whitehall, and is offended by her "laughing and folly," and
by her rising early and going about from room to room, &c. ; but he cannot
deny her the testimony of his respect, and after describing her funeral, he
sums up her character in three words: she was, he says, "an admirable
woman."
It has been observed that there was not much natural affection in the
Stuart family. To this rule Charles I. may be an exception, but against the
rest of them it seems to be a more or less true indictment. At any rate,
the conduct of Mary and Anne gives ground for the assertion. They
seem to have had no common bond, they superseded their father upon the
throne, their mother probably they hardly knew.
The quarrel between the sisters is not a pleasant topic. There seems