“Your face, Cecil, is as long as a Lenten collect. What raven croaks in England on May Day eve?”
Cecil knelt before her, and gave into her hand a paper.
“What record runs here?” she asked, querulously.
“A prayer of your faithful Lords and Commons that your Majesty will grant speech with their chosen deputies to lay before your Majesty a cause they have at heart.”
“Touching of—?” darkly asked the Queen.
“The deputies wait even now—will not your Majesty receive them? They have come humbly, and will go hence as humbly on the instant, if the hour is ill chosen.”
Immediately Elizabeth’s humor changed. A look of passion swept across her face, but her eyes lighted and her lips smiled proudly. She avoided troubles by every means, fought off by subtleties the issues which she must meet; but when the inevitable hour came none knew so well to meet it as though it were a dearest friend, no matter what the danger, how great the stake.
“They are here at my door, these good servants of the state—shall they be kept dangling?” she said, loudly. “Though it were time for prayers and God’s mercy, yet should they speak with me, have my counsel, or my hand upon the sacred parchment of the state. Bring them hither, Cecil. Now we shall see—Now you shall see, Angèle of Rouen—now you shall see how queens shall have no hearts to call their own, but be head and heart and soul and body at the will of every churl who thinks he serves the state and knows the will of Heaven. Stand here at my left hand. Mark the players and the play.”
Kneeling, the deputies presented a resolution from the Lords and Commons that the Queen should, without more delay, in keeping with her oft-expressed resolve and the promise of her council, appoint one who should succeed to the throne in case of her death “without posterity.” Her faithful people pleaded with her gracious Majesty to forego unwillingness to marry, and seek a consort worthy of her supreme consideration, to be raised to a place beside her near that throne which she had made the greatest in the world.