A noble nature could not have contaminated itself with such slaughter-house work, but might have sought to mitigate the royal policy without forswearing allegiance. A nature less rigid than iron would at least have manifested compunction, as it found itself converted into a fleshless instrument of massacre. More decided than his master, however, he seemed by his promptness to rebuke the dilatory genius of Philip. The king seemed, at times, to loiter over his work, teasing and tantalizing his appetite for vengeance before it should be gratified. Alva, rapid and brutal, scorned such epicureanism. He strode with gigantic steps over haughty statutes and popular constitutions; crushing alike the magnates who claimed a bench of monarchs for their jury, and the ignoble artisans who could appeal only to the laws of their land. From the pompous and theatrical scaffolds of Egmont and Horn, to the nineteen halters prepared by Master Karl to hang up the chief bakers and brewers of Brussels on their own thresholds; from the beheading of the twenty nobles on the horse-market, in the opening of the governor’s career, to the roasting alive of Uitenhoove at its close; from the block on which fell the honored head of Antony Straalen, to the obscure chair in which the ancient gentlewoman of Amsterdam suffered death for an act of vicarious mercy; from one year’s end to another’s—from the most signal to the most squalid scenes of sacrifice, the eye and hand of the great master directed without weariness the task imposed by the sovereign.
QUEEN ELIZABETH.
By JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[Daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, second queen-regnant of England, born 1533, crowned 1558, died 1603. As princess during the reign of her sister, Queen Mary, she was subjected to many perils on account of her devotion to Protestantism. Shortly after her accession to the throne she was declared illegitimate by the pope and the Catholic kings of Europe, and a claim of the English succession set up for Mary, Queen of Scots. Threatened on all sides, Queen Elizabeth bore herself with consummate skill and prudence, and even managed to make herself felt aggressively in continental affairs. The more striking events of her reign were the defeat of the great Spanish Armada, probably the most brilliant and complete sea-victory recorded in history, and the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, her rival and captive. Queen Elizabeth’s reign shines as probably the most remarkable known for its intellectual flowering in every branch of human energy.]
England’s one hope lay in the character of her queen. Elizabeth was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had more than her mother’s beauty; her figure was commanding, her face long but queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick and fine. She had grown up amid the liberal culture of Henry’s court a bold horsewoman, a good shot, a graceful dancer, a skilled musician, and an accomplished scholar. She studied every morning the Greek Testament, and followed this by the tragedies of Sophocles or orations of Demosthenes, and could “rub up her rusty Greek” at need to bandy pedantry with a vice-chancellor. But she was far from being a mere pedant. The new literature which was springing up around her found constant welcome in her court. She spoke Italian and French as fluently as her mother-tongue. She was familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. Even amid the affectation and love of anagrams and puerilities which sullied her later years, she listened with delight to the “Faery Queen,” and found a smile for “Master Spenser” when he appeared in her presence. Her moral temper recalled in its strange contrasts the mixed blood within her veins.
She was at once the daughter of Henry and of 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, and her amazing self-confidence. Her harsh, manlike 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. “To see her was heaven,” Hatton told her, “the lack of her was hell.” 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, or that Philip of Spain wondered how “a wanton” could hold in check the policy of the Escurial. But the Elizabeth whom they saw was far from being all of Elizabeth. The willfulness 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 in 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 counselors, and she looked for a corresponding plainness of speech in return. If any trace of her sex lingered in her actual statesmanship, it was seen in the simplicity and tenacity of purpose that often underlies 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 was the instrument of none. She listened, she weighed, she used or put by the counsels of each in turn, but her policy as a whole was her own. It was a policy not of genius but of good sense. Her aims were simple and obvious: to preserve her throne, to keep England out of war, to restore civil and religious order. Something of womanly caution and timidity, perhaps, backed the passionless indifference with which she set aside the larger schemes of ambition which were ever opening before her eyes. She was resolute in her refusal of the Low Countries. She rejected with a laugh the offers of the Protestants to make her “head of the religion” and “mistress of the seas.” But her amazing success in the end sprang mainly from this wise limitation of her aims. She had a finer sense than any of her counselors of her real resources; she knew instinctively how far she could go and what she could do. Her cold, critical intellect was never swayed by enthusiasm or by panic either to exaggerate or to underestimate her risks or her power.
Of political wisdom, indeed, in its larger and more generous sense Elizabeth had little or none; but her political tact was unerring. She seldom saw her course at a glance, but she played with a hundred courses, fitfully and discursively, as a musician runs his fingers over the key-board, till she hit suddenly upon the right one. Her nature was essentially practical and of the present. She distrusted a plan, in fact, just in proportion to its speculative range or its outlook into the future. Her notion of statesmanship lay in watching how things turned out around her, and in seizing the moment for making the best of them. A policy of this limited, practical, tentative order was not only best suited to the England of her day, to its small resources and the transitional character of its religious and political belief, but it was one eminently suited to Elizabeth’s peculiar powers. It was a policy of detail, and in details her wonderful readiness and ingenuity found scope for their exercise. “No war, my lords,” the queen used to cry imperiously at the council-board, “No war!” but her hatred of war sprang less from her aversion to blood or to expense, real as was her aversion to both, than from the fact that peace left the field open to the diplomatic manœuvres and intrigues in which she excelled. Her delight in the consciousness of her ingenuity broke out in a thousand puckish freaks—freaks in which one can hardly see any purpose beyond the purpose of sheer mystification. She reveled in “by-ways” and “crooked ways.” 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. When she was weary of mystifying foreign statesmen, she turned to find fresh sport in mystifying her own ministers.
Had Elizabeth written the story of her reign, she would have prided herself not on the triumph of England or the ruin of Spain, but on the skill with which she had hoodwinked and outwitted every statesman in Europe during fifty years. Nor was her trickery without political value. Ignoble, inexpressibly wearisome as the queen’s diplomacy seems to us now, tracing it as we do through a thousand dispatches, it succeeded in its main end. It gained time, and every year that was gained doubled Elizabeth’s strength. Nothing is more revolting in the queen, but nothing is more characteristic than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom. A falsehood was to her simply an intellectual means of meeting a difficulty; and the ease with which she asserted or denied whatever suited her purpose, was only equaled by the cynical indifference with which she met the exposure of her lies as soon as their purpose was answered. The same purely intellectual view of things showed itself in the dexterous use she made of her very faults. Her levity carried her gayly over moments of detection and embarrassment where better women would have died of shame. She screened her tentative and hesitating statesmanship under the natural timidity and vacillation of her sex. She turned her very luxury and sports to good account. There were moments of grave danger in her reign, when the country remained indifferent to its perils, as it saw the queen give her days to hawking and hunting and her nights to dancing and plays. Her vanity and affectation, her womanly fickleness and caprice, all had their part in the diplomatic comedies she played with the successive candidates for her hand. If political necessities made her life a lonely one, she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting war and conspiracies by love-sonnets and romantic interviews, or of gaining a year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning out of a flirtation.
As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of lying and intrigue, the sense of her greatness is almost lost in a sense of contempt. But, wrapped as they were in a cloud of mystery, the aims of her policy were throughout temperate and simple, and they were pursued with a singular tenacity. The sudden acts of energy which from time to time broke her habitual hesitation proved that it was no hesitation of weakness. Elizabeth could wait and finesse; but when the hour was come she could strike, and strike hard. Her natural temper indeed tended to a rash self-confidence rather than to self-distrust. She had, as strong natures always have, an unbounded confidence in her luck. “Her Majesty counts much on Fortune,” Walsingham wrote bitterly; “I wish she would trust more in Almighty God.” The diplomatists who censured at one moment her irresolution, her delay, her changes of front, censure at the next her “obstinacy,” her iron will, her defiance of what seemed to them inevitable ruin. “This woman,” Philip’s envoy wrote after a wasted remonstrance, “this woman is possessed by a hundred thousand devils.”