And perhaps it is as well that nothing can be proved against the personal morality of one of the greatest women in history. One imagines that her wraith would laugh ironically at all our vain efforts, as her young girlhood evidently laughed at poor Mary as she scratched the words Elizabeth prisoner.[(5)]
I take from the British Medical Journal of 1910 the description of her actual death, because it is in accordance with my own experience of the deaths of fierce and obstinate old ladies.
Lady Southwell, one of her maids of honour, said: “She kept her bed for fifteen dayes besides the three dayes that she sat upon her stool without speaking; until one day, being pulled upon her feet by force, she stood upon her feet for fifteen hours. Her Majestie understood that Mr. Secretarie Cecil had given forth that she was mad; and therefore in her sickness she said ‘Cecill, know thou that I am not mad; you must not try to make Queen Jane of me.’” Queen Jane was “Crazy Jane,” mother of Charles V, and this recollection of the days of her youth, when Charles V was the greatest man in the world, is very characteristic of an old person. “And,” continues Lady Southwell, “though by Cecil’s means many stories were spread about that she was mad, myself, nor anie that were about me, could never see that her speeches, so well adapted, proved her distracted mind.”
Then they lifted her into bed; she fell asleep; and the last of the great personal monarchs of England died in coma. There was no sectarian nonsense about her waking from a stupor to press anybody’s hand, when all she wanted was to get on with her dying.
But though Elizabeth was so great and had such an astonishing effect on English history[(8)] it would be a mistake to turn her into the heroine of a sentimental novel.
(1) A. F. Pollard, Political History of England.
(2) F. Chamberlin, Private Character of Queen Elizabeth.
(3) F. Chamberlin, The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth.
(4) Ben Jonson, Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden.