“Far be it from the intentions of your Majesty’s servants to suggest anything displeasing to your Grace, but if it be in accordance with your will, it would be highly gratifying to your councilors, should you grant this their humble petition that your Highness will consider the matter of the Archduke Charles and the suit that he so recently made.”
Elizabeth replied:—
“Of my own will the thought of marriage has ever been far from me, but I cannot refuse the request of my councilors in whose judgment I have so much confidence.”
An ambassador was sent at once to the German emperor with the message:—
“The queen of England regrets deeply that her frequent illnesses, the wars in France and Flanders, and difficult matters in her own government have prevented her from returning a final answer to the suit of his imperial Majesty’s brother. If he is pleased to come to England, he will be most welcome, and she doubts not that her subjects can be persuaded to permit him the free exercise of his own religion.”
“It is a pleasure,” returned the emperor, “to send to her Majesty, the queen of England, assurances of my warmest regard. Most highly do I esteem the honor of receiving a message from a sovereign of such beauty of face and greatness of mind;” and then he continued, not without a little enjoyment it may be, “My brother is most grateful for her Majesty’s good intentions toward him, but he would say that after a delay of three years he had supposed that she did not wish to accept his suit, and he is now engaged to a princess of his own faith, but he earnestly hopes that the queen will ever regard him as a brother.”
The youthful envoy was presented with a silver vessel and treated with all courtesy, but these attentions to her ambassador did not soothe the rage of Elizabeth. “If I were a man,” she stormed, “and the emperor had offered me such an insult, I would have called him out to single combat.”
The last of Elizabeth’s wooers was the Duke of Alençon. Catherine de Medicis had tried hard to win the hand of the queen for an older son who was not at all eager for the honor. When this plan failed, Catherine wrote to her minister in England: “Would she have my son Alençon? He is turned of sixteen, though but little for his age.” She went on to say that “this youth had the understanding, visage, and demeanor of one much older than he is.” Elizabeth was thirty-eight, and when the scheme was first proposed to Cecil, he exclaimed, “Why, it would look like a mother with her son.”
Elizabeth never refused a suitor at once, and she demanded full information about the Duke of Alençon. “How tall is he?” she asked. The duke was really so stunted as to be almost dwarfed; he had an enormous nose, a wide mouth, and a face scarred by the smallpox.
“I have waited a long time,” said the queen, “and if I should now marry a man so much younger than myself and so badly marked with the pox, indeed I know not what they would say.”