Elizabeth I of England

“ Of all the sovereigns that have worn the crown of England, Queen Elizabeth is the most puzzling, the most fascinating, the most blindly praised, and the most unjustly blamed. To make lists of her faults and virtues is easy. ”

“ There never was a sovereign who maintained a conflict of world-wide importance amidst greater dangers and with greater success than Queen Elizabeth. Her grandfather had begun a political emancipation from the ruling influences of the continent, her father an ecclesiastical one: Elizabeth took up their task and accomplished it victoriously against Rome and against Spain, while her people had an ever-increasing part in public affairs, and thus entered into a new stage of development. Her memory is inseparably connected with the independence and power of England. ”

“ She sought only to place John softly on Elizabeth's heart. Some natures absorb flattery as the desert sands absorb the unfrequent rain, and Elizabeth—but I will speak no ill of her. She is the greatest and the best sovereign England has ever had. May God send to my beloved country others like her. She had many small shortcomings; but I have noticed that those persons who spend their evil energies in little faults have less force left for greater ones. ”

“ Elizabeth was the only sovereign who had tried to help her. Moreover, Mary had always laboured under the delusion that because most Englishmen regarded her as the next heir to the crown, and a great many preferred the old religion to the new, she had as good a party in England as Elizabeth herself, if not a better. During her prosperity, she had made repeated applications to be allowed to visit the southern kingdom. She was convinced that, if she once appeared on English ground, Elizabeth’s throne would be shaken ”

“ But when she retreated, her defeat had all the grace of victory; and the frankness and unreserve of her surrender won back at once the love that her resistance lost. Her attitude at home in fact was that of a woman whose pride in the well-being of her subjects and whose longing for their favour was the one warm touch in the coldness of her natural temper. If Elizabeth could be said to love anything, she loved England. "Nothing," she said to her first Parliament in words of unwonted fire, "nothing, no worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me as the love and goodwill of my subjects." ”

“ Elizabeth's courage and the loyalty with which she had been served by her brave subjects had saved England, and never since that time, with the exception of a raid by the American sailor, Paul Jones, have British shores been reached by a foreign foeman. The English nation was changing in Elizabeth's reign more than in any former period, and many blessings were being given to the Queen's subjects that they had never hitherto known. Her reign saw the last vestige of bondage and servitude die out; and men were now allowed to practise the Protestant religion without the constant fear of death. ”

“ England had never before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and bigoted Mary. When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister the gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter's feet, the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the crown. The poets idealized Elizabeth. She was to Spenser, to Sidney, and to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elizabeth was a great woman. ”

“ But the greatness of the queen rests above all on her power over her people.
We have had grander and nobler rulers, but none so popular as Elizabeth. The passion of love, of loyalty, of admiration, which finds its most perfect expression in the “Faery Queen,” throbbed as intensely through the veins of her meanest subjects. To England, during her reign of half a century, she was a virgin and a Protestant queen; and her immorality, her absolute want of religious enthusiasm, failed utterly to blur the brightness of the national idea. Her worst acts broke fruitlessly against the general devotion. ”

“ Elizabeth was about twenty-five years of age when she ascended the throne of England. It is odd that the date of her birth cannot be given with precision. The intrigues and disturbances of the English court, and the fact that she was a princess, made her birth a matter of less account than if there had been no male heir to the throne. At any rate, when she ascended it, after the deaths of her brother, King Edward VI., and her sister, Queen Mary, she was a woman well trained both in intellect and in physical development. ”

“ As to Elizabeth, certain writers have ascribed Philip's protection of her at this juncture to the following deduction of consequences;—that if she were taken off, and if the queen should die childless, England would become the inheritance of the queen of Scots, now betrothed to the dauphin, and thus go to augment the power of France, already the most formidable rival of the Spanish monarchy. ”

“ Elizabeth, with all the self-will of her father, lived to see both in people and Parliament, a spirit that made her lion-heart shrink with awe, and own, however reluctantly, a power looking already gigantically down upon her own. She felt more than once, in the pride of her might, the terror of that national will which, in less than half a century from her death, shattered the throne of her successor, and gave to the world the unheard-of spectacle of a king decapitated for treason to his people. ”

“ The personal history of Elizabeth may truly be said to begin with her birth; for she had scarcely entered her second year when her marriage—that never-accomplished project, which for half a century afterwards inspired so many vain hopes and was the subject of so many fruitless negotiations, was already proposed as an article of a treaty between France and England.
Henry had caused an act of succession to be passed, by which his divorce was confirmed, the authority of the pope disclaimed, and the crown settled on his issue by Anne Boleyn. ”

“ The 824 saving salt of Elizabeth’s character, with all its wellnigh incredible mixture of heroism and egotism, meanness and magnificence, was simply this, that, overmuch as she loved herself, she did yet love England better. Her best though not her only fine qualities were national and political, the high public virtues of a good public servant; in the private and personal qualities which attract and attach a friend to his friend and a follower to his leader, no man or woman was ever more constant and more eminent than Mary Queen of Scots. ”

“ A crisis had occurred which obliged Elizabeth to execute the man for whom among all men living she cherished the deepest and warmest feeling, just as formerly she had been forced to condemn one of the grandees connected with her by blood, and then her sister Queen of equal rights with herself—all of them for traitorous attempts against her government and person. She said she would gladly have saved Essex, but she was forced to let the laws of England take their course. ”

“ During all this forty years it is admitted that Elizabeth and her wise and sagacious ministers managed very admirably. They maintained the position and honor of England, as a Protestant power, with great success; and the country, during the whole period, made great progress in the arts, in commerce, and in improvements of every kind. Elizabeth's greatest danger, and her greatest source of solicitude during her whole reign, was from the claims of Mary Queen of Scots. ”

“ But the number of the ungodly is so great in power, that there is not a corner left upon the whole earth now untainted with their wicked doctrines. Amongst which Elizabeth, pretended Queen of England, is above all the shelter and refuge of error and most noisome enemies. It is she, who, after she had possessed the Kingdom, usurping (monster-like) the place of the chief Sovereign of the Church in England and the principal jurisdiction and authority thereof, hath thrown into miserable ruin the whole kingdom, when it was even brought to the Catholic Faith, and began to bring forth good fruits. ”

“ Elizabeth, it was now thought, would not marry: the queen of Scots was generally admitted to be her legal heir; and it appeared highly important to the welfare of England that she should not transfer her claims, with her hand, to any of the more powerful princes of Europe; consequently the duke entertained little doubt of uniting in favor of his suit the suffrages of all those leading characters in the English court who had formerly conveyed to Mary assurances of their attachment to her title and interests. ”

“ As representing the crown, he had every man’s hand against him. To subsidise such a man was perfectly useless. If Elizabeth was to make his cause her own, she might just as well undertake the conquest of Scotland at once.
The essence of the good understanding between England and France was that both countries should keep their hands off Scotland. Elizabeth, knowing that if worst came to worst, she could always be beforehand with France in the northern kingdom, could afford to respect this arrangement, and she did mean to respect it. ”

“ THE AGE OF ELIZABETH, 1558-1603 The Reign of Elizabeth.—Queen Elizabeth, who ranks among the greatest of the world's rulers, was the daughter of Henry VIII. and his second wife Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth reigned as queen of England from 1558 until her death in 1603. The remarkable allowances which she made for difference of opinion showed that she felt the spirit of the Renaissance. She loved England, and her most important acts were guided, not by selfish personal motives, but by a strong desire to make England a great nation. ”

“ The Queen-mother in France, the Scots lords, Philip of Spain, and the Spanish ambassadors with the exception of De Silva, were as ready to make and ignore promises and professions as was Elizabeth herself. If they found her fully a match for them at their own game, we can hardly reproach her if we cannot applaud. But it is notable that in England, the arch-dissembler is Elizabeth herself. It is she who manages the undignified but eminently successful trickery of the marriage negotiations. It is she who evades committing herself irrevocably to the Huguenots or to the Prince of Orange. ”

“ The English longed to feel sure that the government would go on peacefully even if their queen should be taken from them. Before Henry’s father came to the throne, there had been in England a terrible time of civil war because there were different claimants to the crown who were supported by different parties, and most people in the land would rather have a form of worship with which they did not agree than feel that the death of their sovereign would be followed by a return of those bloody days. If Elizabeth married and had a child to inherit the crown, the land would settle down to quiet. ”

“ Proud nobles reply by rebellion, come down southwards with ignorant Popish henchmen at their backs; will restore Popery, marry the Queen of Scots, make the middle class and the majority submit to the feudal lords and the minority. Elizabeth, with her ‘aristocracy of genius,’ is too strong for them: the people’s heart is with her, and not with dukes. Each mine only blows up its diggers; and there are many dry eyes at their ruin. Her people ask her to marry. She answers gently, proudly, eloquently: ‘She is married—the people of England is her husband. ”

“ Elizabeth, now passing into womanhood, was the person to whom the affections of the liberal party in England most definitely tended. She was the heir-presumptive to the crown after her sister; in matters of religion she was opposed to the mass, and opposed as decidedly to factious and dogmatic Protestantism; while from the caution with which she had kept aloof from political entanglements, it was clear that her brilliant intellectual abilities were not her only or her most formidable gifts. Already she shared the favour of the people with the Queen. ”

“ Elizabeth replied with perfect serenity that she was unwilling to shed the blood of that wicked woman, the Queen of Scots, though she had so often sought her life, for the preservation of which she expressed her deep gratitude to Almighty God. She wished that she and Mary were two milkmaids, with pails upon their arms, and then she would forgive her all her wrongs. As for her own life, she had no desire on her own account to preserve it; she had nothing left worth living for; but for her people she could endure much. ”

“ There are writers who have made the discovery that Elizabeth was a very poor ruler, selfish and wayward, shortsighted, easily duped, fainthearted, rash, miserly, wasteful, and swayed by the pettiest impulses of vanity, spite, and personal inclination. They have not explained, and never will, how it was that a woman with all these disqualifications for government should have ruled England with signal success for forty-four years. Statesmen are indebted to good luck occasionally, like other people. ”

“ Justice will not be done to the great recovery under Elizabeth unless we understand how low the country had sunk when she came to the throne.
During the early years of her reign, it was the universal opinion at home and abroad that without Spanish protection she could not preserve her throne against a French invasion in the interests of Mary Stuart. Henry II. meant that, by the marriage of the Dauphin Francis with Mary, the kingdoms of England and Scotland should be united to one another and eventually to France. ”