On the 27th of October, 1575, there was a grand christening at Westminster. The tiny baby, wrapped in a mantle of crimson velvet, was carried with royal pomp into the Abbey. Some of the most splendid and famous personages of the day attended to do honor to the child, and the queen's majesty was godmother.
Who was this baby? Why was all this display and ceremony expended on an infant only five days old?
The little girl was of noble birth. She was daughter of John, Baron Russell, second son of the Earl of Bedford, one of that famous family which has given England some of her best statesmen for hundreds of years. Her mother was a daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, of Gildea Hall in Essex, "a man of the ancient equanimity and worship," well known for his goodness and learning. Sir Anthony brought up his daughters to follow in his own footsteps. They were noble and accomplished gentlewomen and learned withal, for they could write easily in Greek, Latin and Italian, as well as in their own tongue. One of them, Mildred, married Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burleigh, Queen Elizabeth's famous councillor and adviser. Anne was wife of Sir Nicholas, afterwards Lord Chancellor Bacon, whose son was the great philosopher, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam. Elizabeth, Lady Russell, the mother of our "child of Westminster," had been married before to Sir Thomas Hobby, ambassador to France. And when he died in 1566, Queen Elizabeth wrote a letter full of affection and esteem to his widow. In this letter she praises the dead Sir Thomas; and then goes on:
And for yourself, we cannot but let you know that we hear out of France such singular good reports of your duty well accomplished toward your husband, both living and dead, with other your sober, wise and discreet behaviour in that court and country, that we think it a part of great commendation to us and commendation to our country, that such a gentlewoman hath given so manifest a testimony of virtue in such hard times of adversity. And therefore, though we thought very well of you before, yet shall we hereafter make a more assured account of your virtues and gifts; and where-insoever we may conveniently do you pleasure, you may be thereof assured. And so we would have you rest yourself in quietness, with a firm opinion of our special favour towards you. Given under our signet, at our city of Oxford, the —— of September, 1566, the eighth year of our reign.
Your loving friend,
Elizabeth R.
It was "at our city of Oxford" that we chanced upon this letter. Reading in the Bodleian Library, at the end of the great cross gallery lined with rows of books, tier upon tier, we sat in the month of September, 1884, at a quiet table beside a huge stone-mullioned window. One of its casements of leaded panes, guarded with brown rusty iron bars, was open. In the acacia-tree outside a bird was singing. Beyond the delicate green foliage, untouched by any thought of autumn, the towers and spires of the glorious city rose above red and gray roofs. The silence about us was only broken by the crisp turning of leaves or the stealthy foot-fall of the attendants bringing fresh heaps of books to the half-dozen busy workers. There was a fragrant smell of old books—of leather bindings—so dear to the student's heart. The warm, sweet outer air and hot sunshine streamed in at the open window. "The merry, merry Christ Church bells—one, two, three, four, five, six," chimed the quarters; and "Mighty Tom" tolled the hours as the morning stole by only too quickly.
Two hundred and eighteen years ago in this very month of September, Queen Elizabeth was at Oxford, on her way to or from Kenilworth Castle, and she wrote the letter to Lady Hobby with those same Christ Church bells chiming the quarters and the hours within hearing of her lodgings.
What times those were! The fortunes of England under Elizabeth were recovering from long disgrace and decay. The foundation of the Royal Exchange, by Sir Thomas Gresham, in that very year 1566, gave English trade an impetus of which we in England and America are reaping the benefits. English ships under such men as Drake and Frobisher, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, were sailing the seas, fighting the Spaniards, and bringing home the wealth of every country in the known globe to the port of London. A few years later, Drake in his little vessel with eighty men would sail through the straits of Magellan, and load his bark with gold-dust and silver ingots, with pearls, diamonds and emeralds, the spoils of the "great galleon that sailed once a year from Lima to Cadiz," and Raleigh would name Virginia after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.
But something more precious than commerce, or mere tangible wealth, was reviving in England. The prosperity of Elizabeth's reign was signalized by an outburst of literature such as the world has seldom seen. In 1566 Edmund Spenser was fourteen; Sir Philip Sidney was twelve; and William Shakespeare was a little two-year-old lad playing about his father's black and white half-timbered house in sunny Stratford-on-Avon. What need to go further? Those three names alone are enough, to say nothing of the host of other writers—Bacon and Fulke Grenville with the philosophers and the essayists, Hakluyt and his library of voyages and travels, Michael Drayton and the patriotic poets. These were some of the men who as statesmen, soldiers, discoverers, poets, have made the Elizabethan age the synonym for all that is most splendid, most brilliant at home and abroad.