Then answered the chancellor of the university:—
“Your Highness, in the university nothing English may be said in public.”
“Then speak you for me,” bade the queen. “The chancellor is the queen’s mouth.”
“True, your Majesty,” he responded, “but I am merely the chancellor of the university; I have not the honor to be the chancellor of your Grace.”
After a little more urging, the queen delivered an excellent Latin speech, which she had evidently composed beforehand, and gave the authorities to understand that she should make the university a generous gift either during her life or at her death. This manner of arousing the expectations of her subjects was one of her ways of securing their faithfulness. She used to keep long lists of men of ability and worth, and a man, knowing that his name was on that list, would not fail to be true to her, expecting every day a pension or some other reward of his devotion.
Robert Dudley was high steward of Cambridge, and Elizabeth seems to have exhausted her generous intentions toward the university by presenting him with Kenilworth Castle and manor and other lands. Then it was that she made him Lord Leicester, and when in the ceremony he was kneeling gravely before her with bowed head, this queen of magnificence and barbarism, of subtlety of intellect and coarseness of manner, thought it a brilliant jest to stretch out the royal forefinger to tickle the back of his neck and arouse him from his unwonted seriousness.
CHAPTER IX
ELIZABETH AND PHILIP
However fond Elizabeth was of Leicester, she would never allow him to presume upon her favor. A friend of his one day demanded to see the queen, and the usher, or “gentleman of the black rod,” as he was called, refused to permit him to enter. Leicester threatened the usher with the loss of his position, but that gentleman went straightway to the queen, fell at her feet, and told the whole story.