Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/55

 deception, then, worked easily enough. I could have done it at a pinch."

Mark next went into the life history of the great Queen, or supposed Queen. "She was a male character all over—a thousand acts of hers prove it," he insisted. "Now tell me what were the conspicuous Tudor traits—"

"But you said she wasn't a Tudor," I interrupted.

"Precisely, but she had to copy the Tudors as our stage impersonators imitate Bernhardt and Henry Dixie. Now what were those Tudor traits: remorselessness, cunning, lying till the cows come home, murder, robbery, despoliation! All of them Elizabeth, or the man who impersonated the Queen, practiced to the dotlet on the i. Think of the letters she wrote to Francis Drake, the inventor of fried potatoes, and to the second Philip of Spain. Wasn't that a man's game? Could woman ever get up anything so misleading and contraband?

"And the way she fooled her English, Spanish, Austrian, German and French admirers, setting each against the other, never neglecting to threaten Spain's flank, and, at the last, throwing them the head of Mary of Scots as a gage of battle—regular male strumpet's chicanery, I tell you."

From a drawer Mark pulled a highly decorated volume, and turned the leaves quickly. "Elizabeth's official lovers," he explained. 51