Page:The Queens of England.djvu/349

JANE SEYMOUR, THIRD QUEEN OF HENRY THE EIGHTH. If the ascent of Anne Boleyn to the throne of Henry the Eighth met with well-merited censure, as being purchased at the heavy cost of misery to that good and virtuous queen, Katharine of Arragon, whose repudiation, and the ingratitude, insults, and cruelties that preceded and followed it, broke the proud and loyal heart of the noble Spaniard, what can be said of the successor of the hapless Anne, Jane Seymour, who mounted the steps of the throne still" ensanguined with the warm life blood of her predecessor ? That blood — shed only the previous day, and shed that the selfish and cruel Henry might remove the only obstacle to the gratification of his passion for Jane Seymour — was hardly cold, when, forgetting all womanly feel- ing and decency, Jane plighted her troth to the widower of a day — the self-made widower, too ! — who had condemned his wife's head to the block. As Anne Boleyn had betrayed her mistress, Queen Katharine, and wiled away from her the affection of the king, so did Jane Seymour win from Anne the fickle heart of Henry, and, indifferent to the anguish she inflicted, and the violent death she must have known would follow, to make place for her on the throne, thought only of gratifying her own pride and ambition. Of all Henry's acts of cruelty — and they were neither "few nor far between" — there is no one more revolting than these bloodstained nuptials, the unseemly haste of which have led im- partial readers to disbelieve the crimes of which Anne Boleyn was accused, and to attribute the charges brought against her to Henry's desire for the possession of her unfeeling rival. Like Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour is said to have resided some years in the French court, and to have filled a similar position in the regal retinue of the Princess Mary of England, queen to Louis the Twelfth. A portrait of her in the royal collection at Versailles, simply labeled as maid of honor to that queen- ap- 309