Concerning Queen Elizabeth's temper, there is, besides a wealth of other evidence, this from the "Character of Queen Elizabeth," by Edmund Bohun, Esq., published in Nichols's "Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth:" "She was subject to be vehemently transported with anger, and when she was so, she would show it by her voice, her countenance, and her hands. She would chide her familiar servants so loud, that they that stood afar off might sometimes hear her voice. And it was reported that for small offences she would strike her maids of honor with her hand; but then her anger was short and very innocent. And when her friends acknowledged their offences, she, with an appeased mind, easily forgave them many things."
The famous story of the ring is perhaps too well known to be repeated here. The queen had once given the Earl of Essex a ring, which, if ever sent to her as a token of his distress, "might entitle him to her protection." While under sentence of death, the earl, looking out of his prison window one morning, engaged a boy to carry the ring to Lady Scroope, the Countess of Nottingham's sister, an attendant on the queen, and to beg that she would present it to her Majesty. "The boy, by mistake," continues Birch's version of the story, "carried it to the Lady Nottingham, who showed it to her husband, the admiral, an enemy of Lord Essex. The admiral forbid her to carry it, or return any answer to the message, but insisted on her keeping the ring." When, two years later, this countess was on her death-bed, she sent for the queen, told her all, and begged forgiveness. "But her Majesty answered, 'God may forgive you, but I never can,' and left the room with great emotion. Her mind was so struck with the story, that she never went into bed, nor took any sustenance from that instant, for Camden is of opinion that her chief reason for suffering the earl to be executed was his supposed obstinacy in not applying to her for mercy."
Of one of Queen Elizabeth's most characteristic traits. Miss Aikin says: "It has been already remarked that she was habitually, or systematically, an enemy to matrimony in general; and the higher any persons stood in her good graces, and the more intimate their intercourse with her, the greater was her resentment at detecting in them any aspirations after this state; for a kind of jealousy was in these cases superadded to her malignity; and it offended her pride that those who were honored with her favor should find room in their thoughts to covet another kind of happiness, of which she was not the dispenser." When Leicester married the widowed Countess of Essex, the queen had him confined in a small fort in Greenwich Park, and would probably have sent him to the Tower, but that the Earl of Sussex dissuaded. Later, when Essex married Sir Philip Sidney's widow, Walsingham's daughter, Elizabeth showed rage and chagrin in a degree only less than in the case of Leicester. One of her attendants wrote, "Yet she doth use it more temperately than was thought for, and, God be thanked, doth not strike at all she threats." Both these marriages were conducted secretly, and without previous request for the permission her Majesty would have refused. So was that of Southampton, in 1598, by which that nobleman so incurred the queen's displeasure that, when she heard that Essex, commanding the troops in Ireland, had appointed him general of the horse, she reprimanded and ordered Essex to recall his commission. It was her unhappy fate that all her favorites, save Hatton, should marry.
"She was jealous of her reputation with the old and cool-headed lords about her," writes Leigh Hunt, of Elizabeth at the time of the Essex conspiracy. That she had grown loath to betray the weaknesses which in earlier years she had made no attempt to conceal, is to be inferred also from the lessening degrees of wrath she evinced as her favorites, one after another, married; and from Bohun's statement, regarding her anger, that "she learned from Xenophon's book of the Institution of Cyrus, the method of curbing and correcting this unruly passion." A wonderfully human and pathetic figure: the vain woman whose glass belied the gross flattery of her courtiers, yet who could delude herself into believing them sincere; the "greatest Gloriana" whose worshippers declared her favor their breath of life, yet risked it for the smiles of mere gentlewomen; the stateswoman, wise enough to see her kingdom's future safety in the death of her beautiful rival, courageous enough to sanction that death, weak enough to shift the blame on poor Davison; the queen, who could say on horseback, to her "loving people," "I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too, and think foul scorn that Parma, or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms;" and yet had to study in a classic author, how to keep from slapping the faces of her maids!
The pursuivants who, in this and the next reign, executed warrants of arrest, are not to be confused with the pursuivants of the Heralds' College. "Send for his master with a pursuivant, presently," orders Suffolk, concerning an apprentice's master accused of treason, in "Henry VI., Part II." It is of these pursuivants that Hume writes as follows, concerning persons who sued great lords for debt in Elizabeth's reign: "It was usual to send for people by pursuivants, a kind of harpies, who then attended the orders of the council and high commission; and they were brought up to London, and constrained by imprisonment, not only to withdraw their lawful suits, but also to pay the pursuivants great sums of money." The pursuivant, with his warrants, proclamations, and his constant "In the queen's name," is a familiar figure in Elizabethan literature. In Sir Valentine Fleetwood's case, the council would have been perhaps equally or more in custom had it entrusted the prisoner's conveyance to London to some gentleman of equal rank to his.