This much will serve for our republican delectation; but it is not the only instance in which we find mention of her Majesty’s dalliance with verse: In an old book called the Garden of the Muses, of the date of 1600, the author says the flowers are gathered out of many excellent speeches spoken to her Majesty at triumphs, masques, and shows, as also out of divers choice ditties sung to her; and “some especially proceeding from her own most sacred selfe.” No one of them, however, would have ranked her with any of the poets of whom we have made particular mention; but for fine, clear, nervous, masculine English, to put into a letter, or into a despatch, or into a closet scolding, I suspect she would have held rank with any of them.
If not a poet, she led poets into gracious ways of speech. Her culture, her clear perceptions, her love of pageants even, her intolerance of all forms of dulness or slowness, her very vanities—were all of them stimulants to those who could put glowing thought into musical language. Her high ruff, her jewelled corsage, her flashing eye, her swift impulses, her perils, her triumphs, her audacities, her maidenhood—all drew flatteries that heaped themselves in songs and sonnets. So live a woman and so live a Queen magnetized dulness into speech.
The Queen’s Progresses.
I spoke but now of her love of pageants; every visiting prince from every great neighbor kingdom was honored with a pageant; every foreign suitor to her maidenly graces—whether looked on with favor or disfavor (as to which her eye and lip told no tales)—brought gala-days to London streets—brought revels, and bear-baitings, and high passages of arms, and swaying of pennons and welcoming odes. Many and many a time the roystering poets I named to you—the Greenes, the Marlowes, the Jonsons, the Peeles, may have looked out from the Mermaid Tavern windows upon the royal processions that swept with gold-cloth, and crimson housings through Cheapside, where every house blazed with welcoming banners, and every casement was crowded with the faces of the onlookers.
Thereby, too, she would very likely have passed in her famous “Progresses” to her good friends in the eastern counties; or to her loved Lord Burleigh, or to Cecil, at their fine place of Theobalds’ Park,[122] near Waltham Cross. True, old Burleigh was wont to complain that her Majesty made him frequent visits, and that every one cost him a matter of two or three thousand pounds. Indeed it was no small affair to take in the Queen with her attendants. Hospitable people of our day are sometimes taken aback by an easy-going friend who comes suddenly on a visit with a wife, and four or five children, and Saratoga trunks, and two or three nursery-maids, and a few poodles and a fox-terrier; but think of the Queen, with her tiring-women, and her ladies of the chamber, and her ushers, and her grand falconer, and her master of the hounds, and her flesher—who knows the cuts she likes—and her cook, and her secretary, and her fifty yeomen of the guard, and her sumpter mules, and her chaplain, and her laundry-women, and her fine-starchers! No wonder Lord Burleigh groaned when he received a little notelet from his dear Queen saying she was coming down upon him—for a week or ten days.
And Elizabeth loved these little surprises overmuch, and the progress along the high roads thither and back, which so fed her vanities: She was a woman of thrift withal, and loved her savings; and the kitchen fires at Nonsuch palace, or at Greenwich or at Richmond, might go out for a time while she was away upon these junketings.
I know that my young readers will be snuggling in their minds a memory of that greatest Progress of hers, and that grandest of all private entertainments—at Kenilworth Castle; wondering, maybe, if that charming, yet over-sad story of Walter Scott’s is true to the very life? And inasmuch as they will be devouring that book, I suspect, a great deal oftener than they will read Laneham’s account of the great entertainment, or Gascoigne’s,[123] I will tell them how much, and where it varies from the true record. There was a Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—a brilliant man, elegant in speech, in person, in manner—at a court where his nephew Philip Sidney had shone—altogether such a courtier as Scott has painted him: And the Queen had regarded him tenderly—so tenderly that it became the talk of her household and of the world. It is certain, too, that Leicester gave to the Queen a magnificent entertainment at his princely castle of Kenilworth, in the month of July, 1575. There were giants, there were Tritons, there were floating islands. Lawns were turned into lakes, and lakes were bridged with huge structures, roofed with crimson canopies, where fairies greeted the great guest with cornucopias of flowers and fruits. There was fairy music too; there were dances and plays and fireworks, that lighted all the region round about with a blaze of burning darts, and streams and hail of fire-sparks.
In all this there is no exaggeration in Scott’s picturing; none either in his portraiture of the coquetries and princely graces of the Queen. It is probable that no juster and truer picture of her aspect and bearing, and of the more salient points of her character ever will or can be drawn.