and councils, and the layman was still sur- | recognized in the records of her life. Our rounded at his baptism, his marriage, and his only business is to consider how the two could burial, by the same rites which were endeared be so strangely intermingled in the same chato him and his fathers by the practice of count-racter, and how the most ludicrous and conless generations. Henry appeared in his own temptible foibles never interfered with her time as a gallant and magnificent monarch, veneration at the hands of that public opinion under whom the country enjoyed a peace to which is generally more disposed to forgive which it had been unaccustomed for nearly a the crimes than the follies of its princes. century; he gave his subjects as much religious reformation as they desired, and no more than they desired; his worst proceedings too were always done under a legal guise, for he found parliaments, judges, and convocations ready to sanction every caprice of his despotism. Such a one was easily forgiven those deeds of wanton bloodshed which have rendered his name a byword among posterity. The like too was the case with his daughter: the act which the warmest panegyrists of Elizabeth are driven to palliate is a dark stain upon her memory; the act from which she herself shrunk, and of which she meanly tried to throw the responsibility upon others, was not even an error in the eyes of her loving subjects. Mary Stuart, the deposed and captive queen, excited no feeling of romance or chivalry in the breast of the ordinary Englishman of her own time; he saw in her only the foe of his religion and the rival of his sovereign; crowds of petitions prayed that justice might be done upon the offender, and her execution was hailed with the same signs of public rejoicing as a coronation or a royal marriage.

Elizabeth, then, and all that pertains to her, is recommended to our attention not only by the acknowledged greatness of her character and the important events which marked her reign, but as a sovereign more thoroughly national and more thoroughly popular than any of her predecessors or successors during several centuries. She was not merely the sovereign, she was the head, the kinswoman, the representative of her people. Every feature of her character is thus invested with a special interest, one that is redoubled when we consider the foibles, the vices, and the crimes of which she stands convicted or charged. Elizabeth as drawn by her admirers, and Elizabeth as drawn by her enemies, appear like the portraits of two wholly distinct women. And yet neither portrait is to be set aside as an entirely fictitious one. We need not dispute whether the shield is gold or silver, whether the chameleon is green or blue. The glorious qualities which are held up to admiration by the one side, the degrading weaknesses which the other points out to our contempt, are both of them plainly to be

The knight approaching the shield from one side alone might well pronounce it to be all golden. The first aspect of Elizabeth's character is that of the wisest and mightiest of a line of rulers, surpassed in might and wisdom by none that history has recorded. It has seldom been the lot of England to fall under the sway of rois fainéans, such as have made their dignity contemptible in the eyes of many foreign nations; a succession of them she has never seen. Most of our kings have been men of more than average ability; several of them have been men of preeminent genius. But, since the mighty Norman first set foot upon our shores, one prince alone has worn his crown who can dispute the first rank with the daughter of Henry VIII. and of Anne Boleyn. The first Edward, great alike in war and peace, the founder of our commerce, the refounder of our law, may indeed claim a place by the side of one who in so many re spects trod in the same line of policy. He was the first, and, till Elizabeth arose, well-nigh the last, who felt that the sceptre of the old Bretwaldas was a nobler prize than shadowy dreams of continental aggrandizement; before the true greatness of either of them, the glories of Crecy and Agincourt sink into insignificance. During the forty-five years which beheld England under the sway of Elizabeth, she rose from a secondary position among the powers of Europe to a level with the mightiest of empires. And this not by dazzling and unsubstantial conquests, but by the steady growth of a great people led on by the guiding hand of a great ruler. The best comment on this fact is the history of preceding and succeeding centuries. We can trace no germ of the gradual and comparatively peaceful progress of the nation in the wild aggressions which were the favorite policy even down to the time of Elizabeth's own father. Still less can we recognize the glorious England of Elizabeth in the despised England of the reign of Charles II., when she became a pensioner of France. Under Elizabeth arose that naval greatness which has since formed our chief glory: under her auspices Drake and Frobisher and Raleigh extended alike the dominions of their sovereign and the limits of the habitable world.

she ascended the throne amid their acclama-
tions; and if, from the satiety which comes
with long familiarity, she did not descend to
her grave amid their tears, her memory soon
became dearer to them than ever from the
contrast she presented to her inglorious suc-
cessor, and remained thenceforward embalm-
ed among the most precious recollections of
their past history.
and ap-

She first raised her own England to the rank | she won the love in which she delighted; of mistress of the ocean, and laid the first foundation of another England on its farther shore. She carried the name and the glory of her country into regions hardly trodden by an English foot since the days of Alfred. She could not only boast of hurling defiance at Parma and at Spain, but her diplomatic and commercial intercourse embraced the Czar of Muscovy and the Sophi of Persia. She was looked to by all Europe as the bulwark of Protestantism and of liberty, and was recompensed by the offer of foreign crowns which she had the wisdom to refuse. At home she established and maintained a government which for those times was both firm and gentle, a despotism which drew its power from the national affection. Nearly her whole reign was one triumphal procession; everywhere her people gathered around her as round a parent; gracious and accessible to all, no petitioner was repulsed from her presence. Stern and unbending when necessity required it, she knew how to give way with grace, or, by anticipating remonstrance, to avoid the necessity of yielding. She reared up the fabric of a church, free alike from the superstitions of the Papist and the licentiousness of the Puritan. In abolishing a foreign jurisdiction and a corrupt ceremonial, she preserved a regular order of church government, and a ritual at once simple and decorous. And all this was essentially her own doing. She was surrounded by able counsellors; but no stronger proof than this can be given of her own ability. In days when kings governed as well as reigned, the predominance of a great minister is no doubtful sign of the existence of a great sovereign. And assuredly no counsellor, however able, could have forced Elizabeth into any course contrary to her own will and judgment. Whatever was done in the name of one who so dearly loved the authority she was born to exercise, must, if not the fruit of her own mere motion, at least have had the deliberate sanction of her searching intellect. Versed in all the learning and accomplishments of her age, delighting in the gayety and splendor of a court, she never forgot the duties of a real ruler in the idleness and dissipation of the vulgar mob of princes. She maintained the credit of her kingdom abroad without plunging into unnecessary or expensive wars; she encouraged the arts of peace without suffering the decay of a martial spirit; she maintained a magnificent court, without its being purchased by the misery of the nation. The true parent of her people,

Let us now change our course, proach the object of controversy from an opposite quarter. An aspect may indeed be found in which the shield can hardly be considered even as silver, but its material might well be deemed to be a baser metal. The mighty queen is transformed into a weak, if not a vicious, woman; her personal character is well-nigh surrendered, and even her political capacity does not come out unscathed. Caprice, affectation, and coquetry appear as the leading features of the one; vacillation, parsimony, and persecution are stamped as the indelible characteristics of the other. From youth to old age she was the slave of the most egregious personal vanity: Queen and heroine, sacred Majesty and Defender of the Faith, were titles less acceptable to the royal ear than the flattery which extolled the royal person as surpassing the beauty of all women past, present, or to come. The sovereign of seventy was never more delighted than when her courtiers exchanged the respectful demeanor of subjects for a strain of amorous adulation which might have disgusted a sensible girl of seventeen. Her earliest determination was to live and die a virgin queen; but throughout her reign the strength of that determination was exhibited by continually running to the brink of temptation. Her whole life was a chronicle of love-passages, or what affected to pass as such. Every foreign prince who thought the throne of England a convenient restingplace, every subject who professed that loyalty and chivalry had been fanned into a warmer devotion, was sure of encouragement in the wooing, even though the winning might be denied him. The court of the virgin monarch was ruled by a succession of favorites, admitted to a perilous, if not a guilty familiarity; the carpet knight and the dancing lawyer swayed the deliberations of her council no less than the grave statesman and the experienced warrior. But in proportion to the license she allowed herself was the severity of the discipline she inflicted on others. The refounder of the Protestant Church regarded the most lawful matrimony

succession, rather than give any one a direct and undoubted interest in her death. In a word, if she had attained to some of the virtues of the other sex, she had acquired with them some of its less amiable characteristics, while of her own she retained nothing but, to say the least, some of its most degrading weaknesses.

We are conscious of a certain amount of exaggeration in both these sketches, in which we have by turns spoken the language of her ardent admirers and of her bitter opponents. There are lineaments in both portraits which rest more on popular conceptions than on historical evidence, but both are true in the main, and each expresses one side of a strangely mingled and contradictory character, which cannot be better summed up than in the words of one of the most eminent of her councillors, that "one day she was greater than man, and the next less than woman."

as something altogether unbecoming in the priesthood, and as a hardly allowable liberty even in the laity. The marriage of a bishop was expiated by the confiscation of a manor; that of a female of royal blood was the surest passport to the interior of the Tower. Her personal habits were those of one who had thrown off alike the dignity of the monarch and the gentleness of the woman; her diversions seem to have surpassed the ordinary brutality of the times; the "most godly queen" interlarded her discourse with oaths worthy only of a Rufus or a John; she boxed the ear of one courtier, and spat upon the fringed mantle of another. The hand of the sovereign was open to receive, and shut when she should repay; her military schemes were ruined by an unworthy parsimony; at home she quartered herself in the houses of her subjects, and neither justice nor mercy ever stood in the way of her exacting to the utter most farthing the pecuniary obligations even of her most honored servants. Her government was constantly that of a despot; the rights of Parliament were openly jeered at; patents and monopolies enriched her favorites with wealth wrung from the scanty fare of the peasant and the artisan. Although the sincerity of her personal religion was doubtful, she enforced a conformity with her exconformity with her external standard by a rigorous persecution in all directions. While the fires of Smithfield still received an occasional Protestant, the lay votary of Rome had to struggle through life with confiscation or imprisonment, and his spiritual adviser lived in a perpetual apprehension that the last sight afforded him in this world would be that of his own bowels committed to the flames before his eyes. Vacillation and obstinacy contended for the mastery in her councils; the sovereign's will was indeed law, but that will seldom remained the same for two consecutive days. In great and small matters alike, the "varium et mutabile" betokened the true womanhood of one who had yet cast off the gentler feelings of her sex. No man could calculate cn her course on a progress; no man could cal-writings of this lady, notwithstanding a perculate on the ultimate punishment or ultimate vading poverty of style and an equally perpardon of a convicted offender. A marriage vading feebleness of thought, and notwithtreaty was entered upon, broken off, recom- standing the graver faults of frequent inacmenced, and finally repudiated; a death-curacy and almost constant partiality, are by warrant was alternately despatched and recalled, and the responsibility thrown at last upon her confused or deluded agents. With out lineal heirs, with a heritage ready to be claimed by a contending hereditary and parliamentary right, an absurd personal caprice led her to expose her kingdom to a disputed

It is with the private and personal character of this famous queen that we propose chiefly to deal at present. We have no intention of entering at large on the great external events of her reign. We shall not repeat the tale of the destruction of Spain's invincible Armada, nor engage in any minute consideration of her civil government or her ecclesiastical reforms. All these important matters we shall only regard so far as they throw light upon the individual character of her who was the chief agent in them. We shall rather endeavor to draw a portrait of Elizabeth as she was received by Leicester at Kenilworth, or by Burleigh at Theobalds, as she hearkened to the courtship of Anjou, and mourned over the grave of Essex. It so happens that this more personal aspect of Elizabeth's character has of late years had the public attention called to it by several writers of very various orders. The greatest of the Queens of England has naturally commanded her full share of attention at the hands of their biographer, and the career of Elizabeth accordingly occupies a thick volume in the last edition of Miss Strickland's series.

The

no means without their use. They have doubtless been far more in vogue with the general reader than the historical student, but we cannot but think they are more really valuable to the latter, both for the copious extracts they contain, and as pointing out sources of various and often neglected infor

mation. If not always a safe guide herself, she is at least useful as directing the reader to better and more trustworthy authorities. Of our other writers, Mr. Craik has given us a valuable work under an ill-chosen title. The "Romance of the Peerage" is not, as might be supposed, a collection of highwrought scenes and anecdotes, in which dukes and countesses form the actors; but is a work of much research and good sense, which should rather have been called by its secondary title only, "Curiosities of Family History." As tracing out in detail the private career, the family connections, marriages, and genealogies, of many of the eminent characters of Elizabeth's reign, it is of great service towards drawing a picture of her court, its manners, and its morals.

the Captain's readers, and one which puts Elizabeth in a new and very extraordinary light. Captain Devereux's book is just what a biographical and family memoir should be a help to history, but not trenching on its peculiar domain, and still less invading the tempting fields of romance.

With this general acknowledgment, we shall press into our service all the writers we have enumerated, along with those of earlier and more established reputation, in our attempt to give a general sketch of the courtly and domestic life of our greatest and weakest female sovereign.

Elizabeth was born at Greenwich Palace on the 7th of September, 1533. Every one remembers the rapturous exclamation of our great moralist :

The "Memoirs of the Life and Times of "Pleased with the place which gave Eliza birth, Sir Christopher Hatton" are still more misI kneel and kiss the consecrated earth,named than the work of Mr. Craik. The book consists of little else than a collection lines which seem to convert the Protestant of letters-the majority of them state docu- queen into a sort of Our Lady of Walsingments-to which Sir Harris Nicolas has at- ham, and to represent a visit to her birthtached a few very slight connecting links and place as equivalent to a Pilgrimage of Grace. occasional brief explanatory notes. His prin- England was at that moment on the eve of cipal efforts have been directed to correcting the great religious revolution, of which Elizathe errors in the lively but inaccurate notice beth's own birth was in some sort the earnest. of Hatton, to be found in Lord Campbell's The monasteries were still standing; the "Lives of the Lord Chancellors." The bishoprics were still unplundered; the papal genuine portrait of the supposed dancer in jurisdiction was not yet formally cast off; the high places proves to have no resemblance papal ritual still flourished in all its splendor." in many important particulars to the fanciful But the die had been cast which had made sketch which the Lord Chief Justice has an irreconcilable breach between England and drawn; and besides the illustration which Rome. The daughter of Ferdinand and the letters afford of the true character of Isabella, the aunt of Charles V., had been Hatton, they throw much light on both the put aside from her royal dignity; and, in depersonal and political history of the princess fiance of imperial and papal protests, the in whose reign he played so important a part. daughter of an obscure country knight had Finally, Captain Devereux has well and occupied the place which Queen Katharine wisely employed the professional leisure of had vacated. The marriage, the coronation, which he complains in his preface, in putting the birth, had followed each other in quick, together two volumes on the lives of three in too quick succession. In the judgment of eminent members of his own family. We those who are precise in matrimonial chrowish family pride always took a turn as pro-nology, the three events came too close tofitable to the interests of knowledge and gether for the spotless reputation of Anne literature, though certainly there are many Boleyn, even if we regard the marriage of persons with as long a pedigree as Captain Katharine as so palpably null that no sort of Devereux, who could not find so much that process whatever was needed to set it aside. is worth telling about the individual mem- But as this last view was that in which the bers of it. Essex, the favorite of Elizabeth, royal conscience ultimately settled down, is a name as familiar as any in history; Es- Elizabeth came into the world, presumptive sex, the husband of Lady Frances Howard, heiress to the crown of England, to the great though a less conspicuous character, is known disappointment of a father who passionately to every one as the leader of the Parliament-longed for male issue. Born to a throne, ary army; but the first earl, notwithstanding that he was indubitably the best and greatest of the three, will, we imagine, be almost a new discovery to the majority of

baptized with all the pomp with which the ancient ritual could surround a royal infant, in her third year she was converted into a merely illegitimate scion of royalty, being her

elder sister.

self supplanted as she had supplanted her | Career commences at a tolerably early period. Her mother had been got rid Her father's death left her, at the age of of by the twofold and somewhat contradict- fourteen, a girl of precocious intellect and ory process of a divorce which pronounced attainments, of pleasing manners, endowed her marriage null, and a beheading for adul- with a considerable revenue, a contingent tery, which necessarily implied that it was right to the throne, and some claims to pervalid. Notwithstanding, however, the lack sonal beauty. Whether her charms were of raiment which seems at one time to have either so extraordinary or so permanent as it befallen the infant princess, and on which was loyal to maintain during the first three Miss Strickland becomes minute and pathetic years of the seventeenth century, it is certo a degree in which male critics can hardly tain that in the middle of its predecessor,* if be expected to sympathize, it does not ap- not strictly beautiful, she was a well-grown pear that she was ever treated otherwise than girl, with a good figure of which she made with kindness, either by her father or by her the most, and with well-formed hands which successive stepmothers. She was always she always took pains to display. The first recognized as a member of the royal family, wooer of one so well provided in mind, body, and appeared as such on all public occasions. and estate, was no other than the brother of In fact, after Henry's hatred to Anne Boleyn the woman for whose sake her mother had had been forgotten in four succeeding mar- been sent to the block, and herself branded riages, another divorce, and another decapi- with a sort of modified and temporary bastation, there seems no reason why he might tardy. Thomas Seymour, the younger bronot have acknowledged Elizabeth as his legi- ther of the Protector Somerset, a handsome, timate child. For as the axe had fallen on ambitious, and unprincipled man, was a forthe neck of Anne a single day before her midable rival to his brother, who had been place was filled by her successor, the recog- placed in so much higher a position by the nition of her daughter would in no wise have favor of Henry. A barony and the office affected the legitimacy of Edward VI. This of Lord High Admiral might have seemed a act of justice was, however, deferred till considerable elevation for the younger son of Henry's last will and testament recognized a plain Wiltshire knight, but it certainly was all his children in the natural order of suc- a small matter compared with the monopoly cession, though, in a strictly legal point of of honor and power enjoyed by his brother. view, it is impossible that both Mary and Seymour is said to have been an old lover of Elizabeth could have been his legitimate off- Katharine Parr before the promotion of that spring.* lady to the highest and most dangerous of her many matrimonial positions. If his royal brother-in-law had cheated him out of the third turn, he at least remained ready to take advantage of the next vacancy; and thus, before Henry was well in his grave, he became the fourth husband of the liberated queen - dowager. Whether the very brief period of her widowhood did not witness two courtships on her lover's part; whether, before he applied for the queen, he had not made an unsuccessful attempt upon the princess, is open to some doubt. But it is very certain that Katharine's fourth and not very prolonged experience of married life was embittered by the open attentions of her husband to the young step-daughter to whom she discharged the office of a parent. It might almost be doubted whether an incident in the career of Elizabeth's own mother had not been transferred to a wrong place, when we read of the queen-dowager's

Our main subject in considering the personal history of Elizabeth is of course afforded by those negotiations for her hand which occupy well-nigh the whole of her life. From the age of ten to that of seventy, her marriage was perpetually on the tapis. At the outset, indeed, her father had to offer her, and that in vain, first to a Scottish subject, and secondly to the heir of Spain and the Indies. Her connection with Philip is certainly strange; he first refused her, then married her sister, then was refused by her, and finally became her great religious and political rival.

But passing by these mere political schemes, the private romance of Elizabeth's

It may, however, be said that, as each was the offspring of a mother recognized at the time as the legitimate wife, they both stood on a different ground from ordinary illegitimate children, with whom nothing but the merest legal subtlety could confound them. This practical common-sense view seems to have been ultimately taken both by Henry and by the nation at large.

"Well-favored" and "neat" are the strongest expressions contained in the well-known description of Naunton, p. 79.