Bacon in his Apophthegms relates on this subject the following anecdote. "Queen Elizabeth, seeing sir Edward—— in her garden, looked out at her window and asked him, in Italian, 'What does a man think of when he thinks of nothing?' Sir Edward, who had not had the effect of some of the queen's grants so soon as he had hoped and desired, paused a little, and then made answer; 'Madam, he thinks of a woman's promise.' The queen shrunk in her head, but was heard to say; 'Well, sir Edward, I must not confute you: Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.'"
"Queen Elizabeth," says the same author, "was dilatory enough in suits of her own nature; and the lord treasurer Burleigh, being a wise man, and willing therein to feed her humor, would say to her; 'Madam, you do well to let suitors stay; for I shall tell you, Bis dat qui cito dat; if you grant them speedily, they will come again the sooner.'"
It is probable that the popular story of this minister's intercepting the very moderate bounty which her majesty had proposed to herself the honor of bestowing on Spenser, is untrue with respect to this great poet; since the four lines relating to the circumstance,
"Madam,
You bid your treasurer on a time
To give me reason for my rhime,
But from that time and that season
I have had nor rhyme nor reason,"
long attributed to Spenser, are now known to be Churchyard's. Yet that the author of the Faery Queen had similar injuries to endure, is manifest from those lines of unrivalled energy in which the poet, from the bitterness of his soul, describes the miseries of a profitless court-attendance. Few readers will have forgotten a passage so celebrated; but it will here be read with peculiar interest, as illustrative of the character of Elizabeth and the sufferings of her unfortunate courtiers.
"Full little knowest thou that hast not tried
What hell it is in suing long to bide;
To lose good days that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed today, to be put back tomorrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow;
To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers;
To have thy asking, yet wait many years;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run;
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."
Mother Hubbard's Tale.
One of the most laudable objects of the parsimony exercised by Elizabeth at this period was that of enabling herself to afford effectual aid to Henry IV. of France, now struggling, with adverse fortune but invincible resolution, to conquer from the united armies of Spain and the League the throne which was his birthright. In the depth of his distress, just when his Swiss and German auxiliaries were on the point of disbanding themselves for want of pay, the friendship of Elizabeth came in aid of his necessities with a supply of twenty-two thousand pounds; a sum, trifling as it may seem in modern estimation, which sufficed to rescue Henry from his immediate embarrassment, and which he frankly avowed to be the largest he had ever seen. The generosity of his ally did not stop here; for she speedily equipped a body of four thousand men and sent them to join him at Dieppe under command of the gallant lord Willoughby. By this reinforcement Henry was enabled to march to Paris and possess himself of its suburbs, and subsequently to engage in several other enterprises, in which he gratefully acknowledged the eminent service rendered him by the valor and fidelity of this band of English.
The next year Elizabeth, alarmed at seeing several of the ports of Bretagne opposite to her own shores garrisoned by Spanish troops, whom the Leaguers had called in to their assistance, readily entered into a new treaty with Henry, by virtue of which she sent a fresh supply of three thousand men to assist him in the recovery of this province. Her expenses however were to be repaid by the king after the expulsion of the enemy.
Sir John Norris, the appointed leader of this force, ranked among the most eminent of Elizabeth's captains; and was also possessed of some hereditary claims to her regard, which she did not fail to acknowledge as far as the jealousy of her favorites would give her leave. One of sir John's grandfathers was that Norris who suffered in the cause of Anne Boleyn; the other was lord Williams of Tame, to whom she had herself been indebted for so much respectful attention in the days of her greatest adversity. She had called up his father to the house of peers, as lord Norris of Ricot; and his mother she constantly addressed by a singular term of endearment, "My own Crow." This pair had six sons, of whom sir John was the eldest;—all, it is said, brave men, addicted to arms, and much respected by her majesty. But an unfortunate quarrel with the four sons of sir Francis Knolles, their Oxfordshire neighbour, arising out of a tournament in which the two brotherhoods were opposed to each other, procured to the Norrises the lasting enmity of this family, which, strong both by its relationship to the queen and its close alliance with Leicester, was able to impede their advancement to stations equal to their merits.
Sir John Norris learned the rudiments of military science under the celebrated admiral Coligni, to whom in his early youth he acted as a page; and he enlarged his experience as captain of the English volunteers who in 1578 generously carried the assistance of their swords to the oppressed Netherlanders when they had rushed to arms in the sacred cause of liberty and conscience. This gallant band particularly signalized its valor in the repulse of an assault made by don John of Austria upon the Dutch camp; a hot action in which Norris had three horses shot under him. In 1588 he was a distinguished member of the council of war. The expedition to Portugal in which he commanded has been already related, and its ill-success was certainly imputable to no want of courage or conduct on his part. In the war of Bretagne he gained high praise by a skilful retreat, in which he drew off his small band of English safe and entire amid a host of foes. We shall afterwards hear of him in a high command in Ireland.