“Poor child!” said Catharine, “nevertheless you will be obliged to learn well how to submit; for one is not a princess without paying for it. No one asks whether our heart bleeds. They throw a purple robe over it, and though it be reddened with our heart’s blood, who then sees and suspects it? You are yet so young, Elizabeth; you yet hope so much!”
“I hope so much, because I have already suffered so much—my eyes have been already made to shed so many tears. I have already in my childhood had to take before-hand my share of the pain and sorrow of life; now I will demand my share of life’s pleasure and enjoyment also.”
“And who tells you that you shall not have it? This love forces on you no particular husband; it but gives you the proud right, once disputed, of seeking your husband among the princes of royal blood.”
“Oh,” cried Elizabeth, with flashing eyes, “if I should ever really be a queen, I should be prouder to choose a husband whom I might make a king, than such a one as would make me a queen. [Footnote: Elizabeth’s own words,—Leti, vol. ii, p. 62.] Oh, say yourself, Catharine, must it not be a high and noble pleasure to confer glory and greatness on one we love, to raise him in the omnipotence of our love high above all other men, and to lay our own greatness, our own glory, humbly at his feet, that he may be adorned therewith and make his own possession what is ours?”
“By Heaven, you are as proud and ambitious as a man!” said Catharine, smiling. “Your father’s own daughter! So thought Henry when he gave his hand to Anne Boleyn; so thought he when he exalted me to be his queen. But it behooves him thus to think and act, for he is a man.”
“He thought thus, because he loved—not because he was a man.”
“And you, too, Elizabeth—do you, too, think thus because you love?”
“Yes, I love!” exclaimed Elizabeth, as with an impulsive movement she threw herself into Catharine’s arms, and hid her blushing face in the queen’s bosom. “Yes, I love! I love like my father—regardless of my rank, of my birth; but feeling only that my lover is of equally high birth in the nobility of his sentiment, in his genius and noble mind; that he is my superior in all the great and fine qualities which should adorn a man, and yet are conferred on so few. Judge now, queen, whether that law there can make me happy. He whom I love is no prince—no son of a king.”
“Poor Elizabeth!” said Catharine, clasping the young girl fervently in her arms.
“And why do you bewail my fate, when it is in your power to make me happy?” asked Elizabeth, urgently.