Elizabeth of England

“ There was great rejoicing all over the land when the Lords of the Council went down to Hatfield, to hail the Princess Elizabeth as the new Queen of England. Weary of the barbarities of Mary’s reign, the people looked with hope and gladness to the new Sovereign. The nation seemed to wake from a horrible dream; and Heaven, so long hidden by the smoke of the fires that roasted men and women to death, appeared to brighten once more.
Queen Elizabeth was five-and-twenty years of age when she rode through the streets of London, from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, to be crowned. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When she was weary of mystifying foreign statesmen she turned to find fresh sport in mystifying her own ministers. Had Elizabeth written the story of her reign she would have prided herself, not on the triumph of England or the ruin of Spain, but on the skill with which she had hoodwinked and outwitted every statesman in Europe during fifty years. Nothing is more revolting, but nothing is more characteristic of the Queen, than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom. ”

“ It required three hundred years for England to begin to hear those two words that the whole world cries in her ear: "William Shakespeare."
What is England? She is Elizabeth. There is no incarnation more complete. In admiring Elizabeth, England loves her own looking-glass. Proud and magnanimous, yet full of strange hypocrisies; great, yet pedantic; haughty, albeit able; prudish, yet audacious; having favourites but no masters; her own mistress, even in her bed; all-powerful queen, inaccessible woman,—Elizabeth is a virgin as England is an island. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We will now tell the story of a young girl who became the most famous Queen that the world has ever known and laid the real foundations for the modern greatness of the English nation. The name of this girl was Elizabeth, and the time in which she lived has since been called the Elizabethan Era. For England at that time was rich in the bravest soldiers, the most daring sailors and the greatest men of genius, and Elizabeth knew well how to surround herself with these men and use their great talents to benefit her country. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The popular judgment which has glorified the reign of Elizabeth as perhaps the most splendid period in the annals of England can be endorsed, without ignoring the defects in the character of the Queen, her Ministers, her Courtiers, or her People. A new day had dawned upon the world; new possibilities, vast and undefined, were presenting themselves; new thoughts were possessing the minds of men; new blood was throbbing in their veins. The English race was awaking to a sense of its powers, grasping with a splendid audacity at the mighty heritage whose full import was yet unrealised. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is the more unusual because the woman herself was not intended by nature to be wasted upon the cold and cheerless sport of chancellors and counselors and men who had no thought of her except to use her as a pawn. She was hot-blooded, descended from a fiery race, and one whose temper was quick to leap into the passion of a man.
In studying this phase of the long and interesting life of Elizabeth of England we must notice several important facts. ”

“ 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, 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, 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 power, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus, Henry IV. of France, and William III. of England have been admired in spite of their defects.
Queen Elizabeth is the first among the great female sovereigns of the world with whose reign we associate a decided progress in national wealth, power, and prosperity; so that she ranks with the great men who have administered kingdoms. If I can prove this fact, the sex should be proud of so illustrious a woman, and should be charitable to those foibles which sullied the beauty of her character, since they were in part faults of the age, and developed by the circumstances which surrounded her. ”

“ You know her best as the Queen of that great age of England which shattered the empire of Spain and won for the English blood and English ideals the heritage of the New World and changed the future of humanity. In the triumph of that fight we see the fierce, keen face of Elizabeth, and that cold Tudor craft of hers and the vehement will. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Elizabeth replied by feigning the utmost reluctance to shed the blood of that wicked woman, the Queen of Scots, though she had so often sought her life, and 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Queen Elizabeth used to behave to her brave admirals and generals, and her wise counsellors, and even to her great merchants, like a friend. She visited them in their houses, and talked to them cheerfully of her affairs. She took notice of even the poorest people, and she used to walk and ride about, so that all her subjects knew her and loved her. And now I am going to tell you a part of her history, which will show you how happy it was for her and for England that the people did love their good queen.
The King of Spain had never loved Elizabeth ”

“ Few in England know that the contemporary of our Queen Elizabeth in the Dekhan kingdoms was a woman of equal ability, of equal political talent, of equal, though in a different sense, education and accomplishments, [236] who ruled over a realm as large, a population as large, and as intelligent, and as rich as England; a woman who, surrounded by jealous enemies, preserved by her own personal valour and endurance her kingdom from destruction and partition ”

“ 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. ”

“ In this potency of the hereditary aristocracy of the country, and comparative feebleness, on some occasions at least, of the authority of the most despotic sovereign whom England had yet seen on the throne, we discern at once the excuse which Henry would make to himself for his severities against the nobility, and the motive of that extreme popularity of manners by which Elizabeth aimed at attaching to herself the affections of the middling and lower orders of her subjects. ”