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 slowly dying of dropsy, kept hoping for a baby. Philip showed her no love and little civility. Her reign had been a nightmare of terror, and it closed amid loss, ruin, pestilence and famine.

The Princess Elizabeth, who then came to the throne in November 1558, was a very different person to her sister. Her life had been several times in great danger during Mary's reign, and the Spanish councillors had often urged Mary to put her to death. She was a woman of the most strangely varied character; extraordinarily stingy and mean, extraordinarily brave and fierce (not cruel); passionately fond of her country, and English to the backbone; so jealous that she could not bear her courtiers to look at another woman; so vain of her beauty that even in old age she covered herself with gorgeous dresses and ridiculous Jewels; by turns a scold, a flirt, a cheat and a heroine. But, somehow or other, she made her people follow, obey and worship her, till at last she became a sort of crowned spirit and guardian angel of the whole nation, which felt that it had grown to full manhood and power under her protecting care. Men called her ‘Gloriana’.

Her position and that of her people was, at her accession, one of great danger. England was entirely without allies, and, owing to the bad management of the two last reigns, almost bankrupt. Catholic Europe and many Catholics in England considered that the Queen had no right to the throne, for they had never approved of her father's marriage to Anne Boleyn. The true Queen of England, they thought, was Mary Queen of Scots. So thought that young and beautiful lady herself, and, in Elizabeth's first year, Mary became Queen of France as well. Indeed, the prospect of the