The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events

by Leigh Hunt

Even poor Lady Jane Grey's character does not improve upon inspection. The Tudor blood (she was grand-daughter of Henry's sister) manifested itself in her by her sudden love of supremacy the moment she felt a crown on her head, and her preferring to squabble with her husband and his relations (who got it her), rather than let him partake her throne. She insisted he should be only a Duke, and suspected that his family had given her poison for it. This undoes the usual romance of "Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guildford Dudley;"—and thus it is that the possession of too much power spoils almost every human being, practical or theoretical. Lady Jane came out of the elegancies and tranquillities of the schools, and of her Greek and Latin, to find her Platonisms vanish before a dream of royalty. She rediscovered them, however, when it was over; and that is something. She was brought up a slave, and therefore bred to be despotic in her turn; but habit, vanity, and good sense alike contributed to restore her to the better part of herself at the last moment.

We confess we pity "Bloody Mary," as she has been called, almost as much as any unfortunate sovereign on record. She caused horrible and odious suffering, but she also suffered horribly herself, and became odious where she would fain have been loved. She had a bigoted education and a complexional melancholy; was stunted in person, plain in face, with impressive but gloomy eyes; a wife with affections unrequited; and a persecuting, unpopular, but conscientious sovereign. She derived little pleasure apparently from having her way, even in religious matters; but acted as she did out of a narrow sense of duty; and she proved her honesty, however perverted, by a perpetual anxiety and uneasiness. When did a charitable set of opinions ever inflict upon honest natures these miseries of an intolerant one?

It was under Elizabeth that Whitehall shone out in all its romantic splendour. It was no longer the splendour of Wolsey alone, nor of Henry alone, or with a great name by his side now and then; but of a Queen, surrounded and worshipped through a long reign by a galaxy of the brightest minds and most chivalrous persons ever assembled in English history.

Here she comes, turning round the corner from the Strand, under a canopy of state, leaving the noisier, huzzaing multitude behind the barriers that mark the precincts of the palace, and bending her eyes hither and thither, in acknowledgment of the kneeling obeisances of the courtiers. Beside her are Cecil and Knolles, and Northampton, and Bacon's father; or, later in life, Leicester, and Burleigh, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Greville, and Sir Francis Drake (and Spenser is looking on); or, later still, Essex, and Raleigh, and Bacon himself, and Southampton, Shakspeare's friend, with Shakspeare among the spectators. We shall see her by and by, at that period, as brought to life to us in the description of Heutzner the traveller. At present (as we have her at this moment in our eye) she is younger, of a large and tall, but well-made figure, with fine eyes, and finer hands, which she is fond of displaying. We are too apt to think of Elizabeth as thin and elderly, and patched up; but for a good period of her life she was plump and personable, warranting the history of the robust romps of the Lord Admiral, Seymour; and till her latter days (and even then, as far as her powers went), we are always to fancy her at once spirited and stately of carriage, impulsive (except on occasions of ordinary ceremony), and ready to manifest her emotions in look and voice, whether as woman or Queen; in a word, a sort of Henry the Eighth corrected by a female nature and a better understanding—or perhaps an Anne Bullen, enlarged, and made less feminine, by the father's grossness. The Protestants have represented her as too staid, and the Catholics as too violent and sensual. According to the latter, Whitehall was a mere sink of iniquity. It was not likely to be so, for many reasons; but neither, on the other hand, do we take it to have been anything like the pattern of self-denial which some fond writers have supposed. Where there is power, and leisure, and luxury, though of the most legitimate kind, and refinement, though of the most intellectual, self-denial on the side of enjoyment is not apt to be the reigning philosophy; nor would it reasonably be looked for in any court, at all living in wealth and splendour.

Imagine the sensations of Elizabeth, when she first set down in the palace at Whitehall, after escaping the perils of imputed illegitimacy, of confinement for party's sake and for religion's, and all the other terrors of her father's reign and of Mary's, danger of death itself not excepted. She was a young Queen of twenty-five years of age, healthy, sprightly, good-looking, with plenty of will, power, and imagination; and the gallantest spirits of the age were at her feet. How pitiable, and how respectable, become almost all sovereigns, when we consider them as human beings put in possession of almost superhuman power; and when we reflect in general how they have been brought up, and what a provocative to abuse at all events becomes the possession of a throne! We in general spoil them first;—we always tempt them to take every advantage, by worshipping them as if they were different creatures from ourselves;—and then we are astonished that they should take us at our word. How much better would it be to be astonished at the likeness they retain to us, even in the kindlier part of our weaknesses.

By a very natural process, considering the great and chivalrous men of that day, Elizabeth became at once one of the greatest of Queens and one of the most flattered and vain of women. Nor were the courtiers so entirely insincere as they are supposed to have been, when they worshipped her as they did, and gave her credit for all the beauty and virtue under heaven. On the contrary, the power to benefit them went hand-in-hand with their self-love to give them a sincere though extravagant notion of their mistress; and the romantic turn of the age and its literature, its exploits, its poetry, all conspired to warm and sanction the enthusiasm on both sides, and to blind the admiration to those little outward defects, and inward defects too, which love at all periods is famous for overlooking—nay, for converting into noble grounds of denial, and of subjection to a sentiment. Thus Elizabeth's hook nose, her red hair, nay, her very age and crookedness at last, did not stand in the way of raptures at her "beauty" and "divine perfections," any more than a flaw in the casket that held a jewel. The spirit of love and beauty was there; the appreciation of the soul of both; the glory of exciting, and of giving, the glorification;—and all the rest was a trifle, an accident, a mortal show of things, which no gentleman and lady can help. The Queen might even swear a good round oath or so occasionally; and what did it signify? It was a pleasant ebullition of the authority which is above taxation; the Queen swore, and not the woman; or if the woman did, it was only an excess of feeling proper to balance the account, and to bring her royalty down to a level with good hearty human nature.

It has been said, that as Elizabeth advanced in life, the courtiers dropped the mention of her beauty; but this is a mistake. They were more sparing in the mention of it, but when they spoke they were conscious that the matter was not to be minced. When her Majesty was in her sixty-second year, the famous Earl of Essex gave her an entertainment, in the course of which she was complimented on her "beauty" and dazzling outside, in speeches written for the occasion by Lord, then "Mr. Francis, Bacon."[343] Sir John Davies, another lawyer, who was not born till she was near forty, and could not have written his acrostical "Hymns" upon her till she was elderly, celebrates her as awakening "thoughts of young love," and being "beauty's rose indeed;"[344] and it is well known that she was at a reverend time of life when Sir Walter Raleigh wrote upon her like a despairing lover, calling her "Venus" and "Diana," and saying he could not exist out of her presence.

At the entrance from Whitehall to St. James's Park, where deer were kept, was the following inscription, recorded by Heutzner, the German traveller:—

"The fisherman who has been wounded learns, though late, to beware:

But the unfortunate Actæon always presses on.