on

remarks, she gave proof of a prudence above her years, was what we should now call the appointment of her ministers. She retained of her privy council thirteen Catholics, who had been of that of her sister, including Heath, Archbishop of York, the lord chancellor; William Paulett, Marquis of Winchester, the lord high treasurer; Edward, Lord Clinton, the lord high admiral; and William, Lord Howard of Effingham, the lord chamberlain. But with these she associated seven others of her own religion, the most eminent of whom was the celebrated William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley, whom she appointed to the office of secretary of state, which he had already held under Edward VI. Soon after, Nicholas Bacon (the father of the great chancellor) was added to the number of the privy councillors, and made at first lord privy seal, and next year lord keeper of the great seal, on the resignation of Archbishop Heath. Cecil became lord high treasurer the death of the Marquis of Winchester in 1572, and continued to be Elizabeth's principal adviser till his death in 1598, when he was succeeded by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (afterwards made Earl of Dorset by James I.). the other persons who served as ministers during Elizabeth's long reign, the most worthy of note were Sir Francis Walsingham (who was principal secretary of state from 1573 till his death in 1590, and was all the time they were in office together the confidential friend and chief assistant of Cecil the premier, under whose patronage he had entered public life), and Burghley's son, Robert Cecil (afterwards Earl of Salisbury), who succeeded Walsingham as secretary of state, and held that office till the end of the reign. Among the other persons of ability that were employed in the course of the reign, in different capacities, may be mentioned Sir Nicholas Throckmorton; “a man," says Camden, “of a large experience, piercing judgment,

Of

and singular prudence, who discharged several embassies with a great deal of diligence and much to his praise, yet could he not be master of much wealth, nor rise higher than to those small dignities (though glorious in title) of chief cupbearer of England and chamberlain of the Exchequer; and this because he acted in favour of Leicester against Cecil, whose greatness he envied;" Sir Thomas Smith, the learned friend of Cheke, who had been one of the secretaries of state along with him under Edward VI., and held the same office again under Elizabeth for some years before his death in 1577; and Sir Christopher Hatton, who was lord

chancellor from 1587 till his death in 1591, and whom Camden, after having related his singular rise from being one of the band of gentlemen pensioners, to which he was appointed by the queen, who was taken with his handsome shape and elegant dancing at a court masque, characterises as "a great patron of learning and good sense, and one that managed that weighty part of lord chancellor with that equity and clearness of principle as to be able to satisfy his conscience and the world too."

By the help of such men she was able to guard herself against the attacks of the Roman Catholics at home and abroad--for these constituted the great danger of her reign. She died on 24th March, 1603, in the 70th year of her age, and the forty-fifth of her reign. She never married, although one of the first requests addressed to her by the parliament after she came to the throne was that she would marry; but for reasons which were probably various, though with regard to their precise nature we are rather left to speculation and conjecture than possessed of any satisfactory information, she persisted in remaining single to the end of her days. Yet she coqueted with many suitors almost to the last. In the beginning of her reign, among those who aspired to

her hand, after she had rejected the offer of Philip of Spain, were Charles, Archduke of Austria (a younger son of the Emperor Ferdinand I.); James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, the head of the Protestant party in Scotland; Erick XIV., King of Sweden (whom she had refused in the reign of her sister Mary); and Adolphus, Duke of Holstein (uncle to Ferdinand II. of Denmark). "Nor were there wanting at home," adds Camden, "some persons who fed themselves (as lovers used to do) with golden dreams of marrying their sovereign;" and he mentions particularly Sir William Pickering, "a gentleman well-born, of a narrow estate, but much esteemed for his learning, his handsome way of living, and the management of some embassies into France and Germany;" Henry, Earl of Arundel; and Robert Dudley (afterwards the famous Earl of Leicester), a younger son of the Duke of Northumberland, "restored by Queen Mary to his honour and estate; a person of youth and vigour, and of a fine shape and proportion, whose father and grandfather were not so much hated by the people, but he was as high in the favour of Queen Elizabeth, who out of her royal and princely clemency heaped honours upon him, and saved his life whose father would have destroyed hers." Leicester continued the royal favourite till his death in 1588; certainly, whatever may be thought of the worst imputations that have been thrown upon him, showing himself little deserving of the honours and grants that were lavished upon him by his partial sovereign, who, having appointed him. commander-in-chief of the forces which she sent to the assistance of the Dutch, insisted upon maintaining him in that situation, notwithstanding the mischiefs produced by his incapacity and misconduct, and, at the perilous crisis of the Spanish invasion, was on the point of constituting him lieutenant-governor of England and Ireland. Camden says that the letters patent were already

drawn, when Burghley and Hatton interfered, and put a stop to the matter. Of the foreign princes that have been mentioned, the Archduke Charles persisted longest in his suit: a serious negociation took place on the subject of the match in 1567, but it came to nothing. In 1571 proposals were made by Catherine de Medicis for a marriage between Elizabeth and her son Charles IX., and afterwards in succession with her two younger sons, Henry, Duke of Anjou (afterwards Henry III.), and Francis. Duke of Alençon (afterwards Duke of Anjou). The last match was again strongly pressed some years after; and in 1581 the arrangement for it had been all but brought to a conclusion, when, at the last moment, Elizabeth drew back, declining to sign the marriage articles after she had taken up the pen for the purpose. Very soon after the death of Leicester the young Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, whose mother had married, was taken in the same favour that had been so long enjoyed by the deceased nobleman; and his tenure of the royal partiality lasted, with some intermissions, till he destroyed himself by his own hot-headedness and violence. He was executed for a frantic attempt to excite an insurrection against the government in 1601. Elizabeth, however, never recovered from this shock; and she may be said to have sealed her own sentence of death in signing the death-warrant of Essex.

Both the personal character of Elizabeth and the character of her government have been estimated very differently by writers of opposite parties. That she had great qualities will hardly be disputed by any one who duly reflects on the difficulties of the position she occupied, the consummate policy and success with which she directed her course through the dangers that beset her on all sides, the courage and strength of heart that never failed her, the imposing attitude she maintained in the eyes of foreign

nations, and the admiration and pride of which she was the object at home. She was undeniably endowed with great good sense, and with a true feeling of what became her place. The weaknesses, and also the more forbidding features of her character, on the other hand, are so obvious as scarcely to require to be specified. Many of the least respectable mental peculiarities of her own sex were mixed in her with some of the least attractive among those of the other. Her selfishness and her vanity were both intense-and of the sympathetic affections and finer sensibilities of every kind she was nearly destitute.

Her literary knowledge was certainly very considerable; but of her compositions (a few of which are in verse) none are of much value, nor evidence any very superior ability, with the exceptions perhaps of some of her speeches to the parliament. A list of the pieces attributed to her may be found in Walpole's "Royal and Noble Authors."

There has been a good deal of controversy as to the proportion in which the elements of liberty and despotism were combined in the English constitution, or in the practice of the government, in the reign of Elizabeth; the object of one party being to convict the Stuarts of deviating into a new course in those exertions of the prerogative and that resistance to the popular demands which led to the civil wars of the seventeenth century,―of the other, to vindicate them from that charge, by showing that the previous government of Elizabeth had been as arbitrary as theirs. There can be no doubt that the first James and the first Charles pursued their object with much less art, and much less knowledge and skill in managing the national character, as well as in less advantageous circumstances, than Elizabeth and her ministers; they did not know nearly so

well when to resist and when to yield as she did; but it may notwithstanding be reasonably questioned if her notion of the rightful supremacy of the crown was very different from theirs. However constitutional also (in the modern sense of the term) may have been the general course of her government, her occasional practice was certainly despotic enough. She never threw aside the sword of the prerogative, although she may have usually kept it in its scabbard.

Her reign, however, take it all in all, was a happy as well as a glorious one for England. The kingdom, under her government, acquired and maintained a higher and more influential place among the states of Europe, principally by policy, than it had ever been raised to by the most successful military exertions of former ages. Commerce flourished and made great advances, and wealth was much more extensively and more rapidly diffused among the body of the people than at any former period. It is the feeling of progress, rather than any degree of actual attainment, that keeps a nation in spirits; and this feeling everything conspired to keep alive in the hearts of the English in the age of Elizabeth; even the remembrance of the stormy times of their fathers, from which they had escaped, lending its aid to heighten the enjoyment of the present calm. To these happy circumstances of the national condition was owing, above all, and destined to survive all their other products, the rich native literature, more especially in poetry and the drama, which now rushed up, as if from the tillage of a virgin soil, covering the land with its perennial fruit and flowers. Spenser and Shakspere, Beaumont and Fletcher, Raleigh and Bacon, and many other distinguished names, gained their earliest celebrity in the Elizabethan age.

one of those unfortunate women whose actions were for a number of reasons apt to be judged too harshly by those about her. Perhaps posterity has made up for this by judging her actions too favourably; but this is not a thing of benefit to the unhappy queen, whatever it might be to her memory. It is at It is at least certain that if Mary acted wrongfully, she at least suffered greatly, and of this no better example could be found than the famous case of David Rizzio.

"This was an Italian of humble origin, who had been promoted from being a menial in the queen's family, to the confidential office of French secretary. His talents for music gave him frequent admission to Mary's presence, as she delighted in that art; and his address, and arts of insinuation, gained him a considerable influence over her mind. It was almost necessary that the queen should have near her person some confidential officer, skilled at once in languages and in business, through whom she might communicate with foreign states, and with her friends in France in particular. No such agent was likely to be found in Scotland, unless she had chosen a Catholic priest, which would have given more offence to her Protestant subjects than even the employment of a man like Rizzio. Still, the elevation of this person, a stranger, a Catholic, a man of mean origin, to the rank of a minister of the crown-and, yet more, the personal familiarity to which the queen condescended to admit him, and the airs of importance which this low-born foreigner

of offence to the proud Scottish nobles, and of vulgar scandal among the common people.

Darnley, anxious to strengthen his interest with the queen on every hand, formed an intimacy with Rizzio, who employed all the arts of flattery and observance to gain possession of his favour, and unquestionably was serviceable to him in advancing his suit. The queen, in the meanwhile, exerted herself to remove the obstacles to her union with Darnley, and with such success, that, with the approbation of far the greater part of her subjects, they were married at Edinburgh on July 29, 1565.

We do not intend to describe here the after circumstances of that unfortunate marriage; suffice it to say that Darnley became bitterly jealous of and enraged against Rizzio, and that he at last determined upon his death. Among the fierce and turbulent Scottish nobles he found many who were not only ready, but willing to aid him.

The chief of Darnley's accomplices was James Douglas, Earl of Morton, Chancellor of the kingdom, tutor and uncle uncle to the Earl of Angus (who chanced then to be a minor), and administrator, therefore, of all the power of the great House of Douglas. He was a nobleman of high military talent and political wisdom, but although a pretender to sanctity of life, his actions show him to have been a wicked and unscrupulous man. Although Chancellor of the kingdom, and therefore bound peculiarly to respect the laws, he did not hesitate to enter into the young king's cruel and unlawful purpose. Lord Ruthven, a man whose frame was exhausted by illness, nevertheless under