One of the supremely great men of his tory was Sir Thomas More (beheaded 1535). A. close personal friend of King Henry VIII, he was sent on an embassy into the Netherlands (1516), and while there wrote 'Utopia,' prob ably the most interestingly practical of the books on ideal republics ever written. He had been, before this, one of the group of men, including Erasmus, Linacre and Dean Colet, most prominent in the Renaissance in Eng land. Erasmus thought him one of the great est minds of the time. On the fall of Wolsey, Henry VIII insisted on making More, Lord Chancellor. Wolsey declared him the most suit able to be his successor, but the post was ac cepted not without misgivings on the part of More. His well-known sympathy for the poor and his sterling uprightness of character had made him popular, so that his installation took °to the joy and applause of the whole ngdom.? His career fulfilled expectations. He is the only man who ever cleared the docket of the Court of Chancery. More refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, that is, that the king was the head of the Church. Practically all the bishops of England except John Fisher had consented to take the oath by some evasion of conscience, but More persisted in He was executed for treason going to the scaffold with a joke on his lips. Lord Camp bell of the Lord Chancellors') says, °Considering the splendor of his talent, the greatness of his acquirements and the innocence of his life, we must regard his murder as the blackest crime that has ever been perpetrated in England under the form of the law." He adds, °The mean, sordid, unprincipled chancel lors who succeeded him made the latter half of the reign of Henry VIII the most disgrace ful period in our annals." The century embraced the careers of a number of women in whom interest has never died. The list includes Vittoria Colonna and Marguerite of Navarre who corresponded with each other, Isabella and Beatrice d'Este, Saint Teresa, Lady Jane Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Elizabeth, Margaret More, Charitas Pirk heimer and Angela Merici, not to mention any but those whose lives are still felt. Queen Isa bella of Spain lived on into the century but her work was done mainly and has been treated of in the 15th century. Vittoria Colonna, called the Saint of the Renaissance, was a wonder ful character of fine intelligence and broad edu cation who deeply influenced her own and subsequent generations. She wrote some re ligious poetry that is still republished, but it was her personality that counted. Her deep impression on Michelangelo in his old age, as demonstrated by his sonnets to her, some of the greatest ever written to a women, reveal her power. The contrast to her would seem to be Lucrezia Borgia, whose name has be come the byword for all that is worst in feminine human nature, but Gregorovius has vindicated her. Her contemporaries deeply loved and respected her. Aldus, the great printer, who knew her well, praises her charity to the poor, her unselfish devotion to the af flicted and her ability as a ruler. Chevalier Bayard, sans peur et sans reprocke, declared °that neither in her time nor for any years be fore has there been such a glorious princess.* When she died at the early age of 40, all of Ferrara, where the last 20 years of her life were spent, followed her body to the tomb as that of a saint. Her popular reputation is a lesson of the fallibility of historical tradi tions without contemporary documents.
Saint Teresa of Spain has been called the greatest of intellectual women. Her works are still issued, edition after edition, in many lan guages. A number of 'Lives' of her have been written, even in English in this present century. Cardinal Manning, himself the most practical of men, declared that °she was one of those sovereign souls that are born from time to time, as if to show what her race was created for at first and to what it is still destined.* The Spaniards call her their Doctor of the Church, and her statue, the only one of a woman, is among the Fathers and Doctors of the Church in Rome, with the title Mater Spiritualium. She is the world authority on
mystical theology and an unsurpassed writer of Spanish prose. It has often been said that from behind her convent grill she, more than any other, was the barrier against that divisive religions movement which caused such bitter dissensions in most other countries of Europe, but spared Spain. In striking contrast to her is Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Francis I of France, herself a queen, whose volume of stories, the 'Heptameron,' is still popular in every language, while her poems, 'Les Mar guerites de la Reine Marguerite) are known to all lovers of literature. She had an ex tremely beautiful character and radiated the finest influence over her generation. In order to neutralize the evil done by certain immoral stories current at court in her time, she retold them in literary form, adding morals to them. Like so many good people, she had the idea that human passions may be influenced for the better by sweet reasonableness. Instead of doing good, her book has done harm. Most people read the stories and not the morals, or when they read both, forget the morals promptly, while the evil suggestions remain.
Mary Queen of Scots is one of the much disputed characters in history. After 18 years in prison, she was beheaded, at the age of 44. She was crowned queen of Scotland as an in fant on the death of her father, James V (1542). At the age of 16 she was married to the Dauphin of France. Her husband be came king as Francis II of France when she was 17. He died the next year and at 19 Mary returned to try to rule the turbulent Scottish barons. At 25 she was imprisoned and was released for two weeks only, when she threw herself on Elizabeth's mercy, who kept her in prison until her execution. She lived in the most difficult of times, and this brilliant intellectual woman, whose heart sometimes led her astray, is a type of the Renaissance. Her successful rival for the throne of England, for on Queen Mary's death Mary of Scots had claimed the English throne as well as Elizabeth, is a greater genius without heart. She had the discernment to gather around her the men who laid broad and deep the founda tions of modern England, and its colonial em pire. The °Good Queen Bess* of traditional history has suffered severely from modern historical research. She was a woman of great administrative ability, but of lamentable per sonal character. Prescott say of her, °she was haughty, arrogant, coarse and irascible, while with these fiercer qualities, she mingled deep dissimulation and strange irresolution. ... She was desperately selfish, incapable of forgiving, not merely a real injury, but the slightest af front to her vanity, and she was merciless in exacting retribution.* She had her father's Tudor character, but his genius for managing men.
The founder of feminine education in the century was Angela of Merici. A young woman of the lower middle class, of a small town of Italy, she recognized that not only the better class women but all women needed to be edu cated in order to bring up their children prop erly and influence those around them for the best. She established a little community for the teaching of girls. Under her direction this movement spread and she wrote a rule for the women who had come to share her work. In approving this constitution, Pope Paul III said to Saint Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, •I have given you sisters.* The Ursuline schools spread over Italy in a single generation and they had houses in Paris and Bordeaux in the second half of the century. They opened a school in Canada in 1639 and one in New Orleans in 1726. They were the first to offer more than a common-school education for girls, in the northern United States at least, though their house at Charlestown, Mass., was burned down by a mob in 1834. Most of the pupils at the convent at the time were from some of the old Puritan families of New England. The Ursulines have taken up college work for women in our time very successfully and they have schools all over the world with many thousands of members at work.