To her own subjects, indeed, who knew nothing of her manœuvres and retreats, of her “by-ways” and “crooked ways,” she seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution. Brave as they were, the men who swept the Spanish main or glided between the icebergs of Baffin Bay never doubted that the palm of bravery lay with their queen. Her steadiness and courage in the pursuit of her aims was equaled by the wisdom with which she chose the men to accomplish them. She had a quick eye for merit of any sort, and a wonderful power of enlisting its whole energy in her service. The sagacity which chose Cecil and Walsingham was just as unerring in its choice of the meanest of her agents. Her success, indeed, in securing from the beginning of her reign to its end, with the single exception of Leicester, precisely the right men for the work she set them to do, sprang in great measure from the noblest characteristic of her intellect. If in loftiness of aim her temper fell below many of the tempers of her time, in the breadth of its range, in the universality of its sympathy, it stood far above them all. Elizabeth could talk poetry with Spenser and philosophy with Bruno; she could discuss euphuism with Lyly, and enjoy the chivalry of Essex; she could turn from talk of the last fashions to pore with Cecil over dispatches and treasury books; she could pass from tracking traitors with Walsingham to settle points of doctrine with Parker, or to calculate with Frobisher the chances of a northwest passage to the Indies. The versatility and many-sidedness of her mind enabled her to understand every phase of the intellectual movement of her day, and to fix by a sort of instinct on its higher representatives. But the greatness of the queen rests above all on her power over her people.
We have had grander and nobler rulers, but none so popular as Elizabeth. The passion of love, of loyalty, of admiration, which finds its most perfect expression in the “Faery Queen,” throbbed as intensely through the veins of her meanest subjects. To England, during her reign of half a century, she was a virgin and a Protestant queen; and her immorality, her absolute want of religious enthusiasm, failed utterly to blur the brightness of the national idea. Her worst acts broke fruitlessly against the general devotion. A Puritan, whose hand she cut off in a freak of tyrannous resentment, waved his hat with the hand that was left, and shouted, “God save Queen Elizabeth!” Of her faults, indeed, England beyond the circle of her court knew little or nothing. The shiftings of her diplomacy were never seen outside the royal closet. The nation at large could only judge her foreign policy by its main outlines, by its temperance and good sense, and above all by its success. But every Englishman was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at home, in her love of peace, her instinct of order, the firmness and moderation of her government, the judicious spirit of conciliation and compromise among warring factions, which gave the country an unexampled tranquillity at a time when almost every other country in Europe was torn with civil war. Every sign of the growing prosperity, the sight of London as it became the mart of the world, of stately mansions as they rose on every manor, told, and justly told, in Elizabeth’s favor.
In one act of her civil administration she showed the boldness and originality of a great ruler; for the opening of her reign saw her face the social difficulty which had so long impeded English progress, by the issue of a commission of inquiry which ended in the solution of the problem by the system of poor-laws. She lent a ready patronage to the new commerce; she considered its extension and protection as a part of public policy, and her statue in the center of the London Exchange was a tribute on the part of the merchant class to the interest with which she watched and shared personally in its enterprises. Her thrift won a general gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the martyrs threw into bright relief the aversion from bloodshed which was conspicuous in her earlier reign, and never wholly wanting through its fiercer close. Above all, there was a general confidence in her instinctive knowledge of the national temper. Her finger was always on the public pulse. She knew exactly when she could resist the feeling of her people, and when she must give way before the new sentiment of freedom which her policy unconsciously fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the grace of victory; and the frankness and unreserve of her surrender won back at once the love that her resistance had lost. Her attitude at home, in fact, was that of a woman whose pride in the well-being of her subjects, and whose longing for their favor, was the one warm touch in the coldness of her natural temper. If Elizabeth could be said to love anything, she loved England. “Nothing,” she said to her first Parliament in words of unwonted fire, “nothing, no worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me as the love and good-will of my subjects.” And the love and good-will which were so dear to her she fully won.
She clung, perhaps, to her popularity the more passionately that it hid in some measure from her the terrible loneliness of her life. She was the last of the Tudors, the last of Henry’s children; and her nearest relatives were Mary Stuart and the house of Suffolk, one the avowed, the other the secret, claimant of her throne. Among her mother’s kindred she found but a single cousin. Whatever womanly tenderness she had, wrapped itself around Leicester; but a marriage with Leicester was impossible, and every other union, could she even have bent to one, was denied to her by the political difficulties of her position. The one cry of bitterness which burst from Elizabeth revealed her terrible sense of the solitude of her life. “The Queen of Scots,” she cried at the birth of James, “has a fair son, and I am but a barren stock.” But the loneliness of her position only reflected the loneliness of her nature. She stood utterly apart from the world around her, sometimes above it, sometimes below it, but never of it. It was only on its intellectual side that Elizabeth touched the England of her day. All its moral aspects were simply dead to her.
It was a time when men were being lifted into nobleness by the new moral energy which seemed suddenly to pulse through the whole people, when honor and enthusiasm took colors of poetic beauty, and religion became a chivalry. But the finer sentiments of the men around her touched Elizabeth simply as the fair tints of a picture would have touched her. She made her market with equal indifference out of the heroism of William of Orange or the bigotry of Philip. The noblest aims and lives were only counters on her board. She was the one soul in her realm whom the news of St. Bartholomew stirred to no thirst for vengeance; and while England was thrilling with its triumph over the Armada, its queen was coolly grumbling over the cost, and making her profit out of the spoiled provisions she had ordered for the fleet that saved her. To the voice of gratitude, indeed, she was for the most part deaf. She accepted services such as were never rendered to any other English sovereign without a thought of return. Walsingham spent his fortune in saving her life and throne, and she left him to die a beggar.
But, as if by a strange irony, it was to this very want of sympathy that she owed some of the grander features of her character. If she was without love, she was without hate. She cherished no petty resentments; she never stooped to envy or suspicion of the men who served her. She was indifferent to abuse. Her good-humor was never ruffled by the charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the Jesuits filled every court in Europe. She was insensible to fear. Her life became at last the mark for assassin after assassin, but the thought of peril was the one hardest to bring home to her. Even when the Catholic plots broke out in her very household, she would listen to no proposals for the removal of Catholics from her court.
MARY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS.
By DAVID HUME.
[Daughter of James V of Scotland and Mary of Lorraine, a princess of the Guise family of France, born 1542, died 1587. As great-granddaughter of Henry VII of England, Mary was heir to the English throne after the failure of direct descendants of Henry VIII, the last of whom was Queen Elizabeth. At the age of sixteen she was married to the dauphin of France; and, as she was put forward as claimant of the English throne (even as against Elizabeth, whom the Catholic powers of Europe affected to treat as the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII), the arms of England were quartered with those of France and Scotland on her escutcheon. Mary’s persistence in protruding this claim, under advice of her Catholic friends, was a main cause of the misfortunes of her sad and romantic career. On the death of Mary’s husband, Francis II of France, she returned to Scotland to resume the functions of government, thoroughly imbued with Catholic and French notions of policy, and already antagonistic to a large portion of her subjects, who had become fanatically Protestant under the leadership of such men as John Knox. Henceforward the Queen of Scots was embarked on a sea of troubles, which are familiar history. She married Lord Darnley in 1565, against the wish of her own Protestant subjects and of Queen Elizabeth; and on the murder of Darnley by the Earl of Bothwell, she consummated her follies by espousing the latter. The rebellion which ensued resulted first in her imprisonment by her own subjects, and afterward, consequent on her escape and defeat in battle by the Protestant lords, her confinement by the Queen of England, on whom she had thrown herself for protection. For nineteen years Mary was the inmate of successive English prisons, though not rigorously treated otherwise. The numerous conspiracies in which she was implicated by the enthusiasm of her supporters in England and France, some of which involved the assassination of Elizabeth, and all of which looked to the complete overthrow of Protestantism, at last caused her trial and condemnation by an English commission. The signature to the death-warrant has been claimed by some historians to have been a forgery; by others to have been genuine, but its commission under the great seal an act without Elizabeth’s consent. But the weight of evidence shows Elizabeth’s conduct to have been a piece of consummate duplicity, and that she manœuvred to receive the benefits of Mary’s death without incurring the odium of its authority. There is no personage in history whose character has been the subject of more controversy. A school of English historical critics, among whom are Carlyle, Froude, and Kingsley, stigmatize her as the incarnation of all that was brilliantly wicked; while others, equally distinguished, soften her errors and eulogize her virtues as the victim of circumstances, and one “far more sinned against than sinning.”]
Her change of abode and situation was very little agreeable to the Scottish princess. Besides her natural preposessions in favor of a country in which she had been educated from her earliest infancy, and where she had borne so high a rank, she could not forbear both regretting the society of that people, so celebrated for their humane disposition and their respectful attachment to their sovereign, and reflecting on the disparity of the scene which lay before her. It is said that, after she was embarked at Calais, she kept her eyes fixed on the coast of France, and never turned them from that beloved object till darkness fell and intercepted it from her view. She then ordered a couch to be spread for her in the open air, and charged the pilot that if in the morning the land were still in sight, he should awake her, and afford her one parting view of that country in which all her affections were centered. The weather proved calm, so that the ship made little way in the night-time, and Mary had once more an opportunity of seeing the French coast. She sat up on her couch, and, still looking toward the land, often repeated these words: “Farewell, France, farewell; I shall never see thee more.”
The first aspect, however, of things in Scotland was more favorable, if not to her pleasure and happiness, at least to her repose and security, than she had reason to apprehend. No sooner did the French galleys appear off Leith, than people of all ranks, who had long expected their arrival, flocked toward the shore with an earnest impatience to behold and receive their young sovereign. Some were led by duty, some by interest, some by curiosity; and all combined to express their attachment to her, and to insinuate themselves into her confidence on the commencement of her administration. She had now reached her nineteenth year, and the bloom of her youth and amiable beauty of her person were further recommended by the affability of her address, the politeness of her manners, and the elegance of her genius. Well accomplished in all the superficial but engaging graces of a court, she afforded, when better known, still more promising indications of her character; and men prognosticated both humanity from her soft and obliging deportment, and penetration from her taste in all the refined arts of music, eloquence, and poetry. And as the Scots had long been deprived of the presence of their sovereign, whom they once despaired ever more to behold among them, her arrival seemed to give universal satisfaction; and nothing appeared about the court but symptoms of affection, joy, and festivity.