“The presence-chamber was hung with rich tapestry, and the floor, after the English fashion, strewn with hay, through which the queen commonly passed on her way to chapel. At the door stood a gentleman dressed in velvet, with a gold chain, whose office was to introduce to the queen any person of distinction who came to wait upon her. It was Sunday, when there was usually the greatest attendance of nobility. In the same hall were the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, a great number of councillors of state, officers of the crown, and gentlemen who waited the queen’s coming out, which she did from her own apartment when it was time to go to prayers, attended in the following manner: first went gentlemen, barons, earls, Knights of the Garter, all richly dressed and bareheaded; next came the chancellor, bearing the seals in a red silk purse, between two, one of which carried the royal sceptre, the other the sword of state in a red scabbard studded with golden fleur-de-lys, the point upward.
“Next came the queen, in the sixty-sixth year of her age, as we were told, very majestic; her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked, her lips narrow and her teeth black (a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar). She had in her ears two pearls, with very rich drops; she wore false hair, and that red; upon her head she had a small crown, reported to be made of some of the gold of the celebrated Lunebourg table. Her bosom was uncovered, as all the English ladies have it till they marry, and she had on a necklace of exceeding fine jewels. Her hands were small, her fingers long, and her stature neither tall nor low; her air was stately, her manner of speaking mild and obliging. That day she was dressed in white silk, bordered with pearls of the size of beans, and over it a mantle of black silk, shot with silver threads; her train was very long, the end of it borne by a marchioness. Instead of a chain she had a collar of gold and jewels. As she went along in all this state and magnificence, she spoke very graciously, first to one, then to another, in English, French, and Italian; for besides being well skilled in Greek, Latin, and the languages I have mentioned, she is mistress of Spanish, Scotch, and Dutch. Whoever speaks to her it is kneeling; now and then she raises some with her hand. Wherever she turned her face as she was going along everybody fell down on their knees. The ladies of the court followed next to her, very handsome and well shaped, and for the most part dressed in white. She was guarded on each side by the gentlemen pensioners, fifty in number, with gilt battle-axes. In the ante-chapel, next the hall, where we were, petitions were presented to her, and she received them most graciously, which occasioned the acclamation of ‘Long live Queen Elizabeth!’”
But while the queen was still at service in the chapel, her table was set out with the following solemnity:—
“A gentleman entered the room, bearing a rod, and along with him another, who had a table-cloth, which, after they had both kneeled three times with the utmost veneration, he spread upon the table, and after kneeling again they both retired. Then came two others, one with the rod again, the other with a salt-cellar, a plate, and bread; when they had kneeled as the others had done, and placed what was brought upon the table, they too retired, with the same ceremonies performed by the first. At last came an unmarried lady (we were told she was a countess), and along with her a married one, bearing a tasting knife; the former was dressed in white silk, who, when she had prostrated herself three times in the most graceful manner, approached the table and rubbed the plates with bread and salt, with as much awe as if the queen had been present. When they had waited there a little while, the yeomen of the guard entered, bareheaded, clothed in scarlet, with a golden rose upon their backs, bringing in at each turn a course of twenty-four dishes, served in plate, most of it gilt; these dishes were received by a gentleman in the same order they were brought, and placed upon the table, while the lady-taster gave to each of the guard a mouthful to eat of the particular dish he had brought, for fear of any poison. During the time that this guard,—which consists of the tallest and stoutest men that can be found in all England, being carefully selected for this service,—were bringing dinner, twelve trumpets and two kettle-drums made the hall ring for half an hour together.
“At the end of all this ceremonial a number of unmarried ladies appeared, who, with particular solemnity, lifted the meat off the table, and conveyed it into the queen’s inner and more private chamber, where, after she had chosen for herself, the rest goes to the ladies of the court. The queen dines and sups alone, with very few attendants; and it is very seldom that anybody, foreign or native, is admitted at that time, and then only at the intercession of some person in power.”
This same traveller, Hentzner, states “that he counted on London bridge no less than three hundred heads of persons who had been executed for high treason.” Surely a lamentable evidence of Elizabeth’s cruelty.
J. R. Green, M. A., in his “History of the English People,” thus sketches the character of Queen Elizabeth:—
“Her moral temper recalled in its strange contrasts the mixed blood within her veins. She was at once the daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn. From her father she inherited her frank and hearty address, her love of popularity and of free intercourse with the people, her dauntless courage, her amazing self-confidence. Her harsh, man-like voice, her impetuous will, her pride, her furious outbursts of anger, came to her with her Tudor blood. She rated great nobles as if they were school-boys; she met the insolence of Essex with a box on the ear; she would break, now and then, into the gravest deliberations, to swear at her ministers like a fish-wife.
“But strangely in contrast with the violent outlines of her Tudor temper stood the sensuous, self-indulgent nature she derived from Anne Boleyn. Splendor and pleasure were with Elizabeth the very air she breathed. Her delight was to move in perpetual progresses from castle to castle through a series of gorgeous pageants, fanciful and extravagant as a caliph’s dream. She loved gayety and laughter and wit. A happy retort or a finished compliment never failed to win her favor. She hoarded jewels. Her dresses were innumerable. Her vanity remained even to old age, the vanity of a coquette in her teens. No adulation was too fulsome for her, no flattery of her beauty too gross. She would play with her rings, that her courtiers might note the delicacy of her hands; or dance a coranto, that the French ambassador, hidden dexterously behind a curtain, might report her sprightliness to his master. Her levity, her frivolous laughter, her unwomanly jests, gave color to a thousand scandals. Her character, in fact, like her portraits, was utterly without shade. Of womanly reserve or self-restraint she knew nothing. No instinct of delicacy veiled the voluptuous temper which had broken out in the romps of her girlhood, and showed itself almost ostentatiously throughout her later life. Personal beauty in a man was a sure passport to her liking. She patted handsome young squires on the neck when they knelt to kiss her hand, and fondled her ‘sweet Robin,’—Lord Leicester,—in the face of the court.
“It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted held Elizabeth almost to the last to be little more than a frivolous woman. But the Elizabeth whom they saw was far from being all of Elizabeth. The wilfulness of Henry, the triviality of Anne Boleyn, played over the surface of a nature hard as steel, a temper purely intellectual, the very type of reason untouched by imagination or passion. Luxurious and pleasure-loving as she seemed, Elizabeth lived simply and frugally, and she worked hard. Her vanity and caprice had no weight whatever with her state affairs. The coquette of the presence-chamber became the coolest and hardest of politicians at the council-board. Fresh from the flattery of her courtiers, she would tolerate no flattery in the closet; she was herself plain and downright of speech with her councillors, and she looked for a corresponding plainness of speech in return. Her expenditure was parsimonious, and even miserly. If any trace of her sex lingered in her actual statesmanship, it was seen in the simplicity and tenacity of purpose that often underlie a woman’s fluctuations of feeling. It was this in part which gave her her marked superiority over the statesmen of her time. No nobler group of ministers ever gathered round a council-board than those who gathered round the council-board of Elizabeth. But she is the instrument of none. She listens, she weighs, she uses or puts by the counsels of each in turn, but her policy as a whole is her own. It was a policy, not of genius, but of good sense. Of political wisdom, indeed, in its larger and more generous sense, Elizabeth had little or none; but her political tact was unerring. It was a policy of detail, and in details her wonderful readiness and ingenuity found scope for their exercise. She played with grave cabinets as a cat plays with a mouse, and with much of the same feline delight in the mere embarrassment of her victims.