Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/578

564 and terrible in its mixture of mental decay, dark remorse, and stubborn, indomitable hardiness and self-will. At the same time around her bed were men urging her to take broth, to name her successor, and to hear prayers. The kings of France and Scotland were named to her, but without eliciting the slightest notice; but when they named Beauchamp, the son of the Earl of Hertford and Lady Katherine Grey, one of Elizabeth's victims, she fired up and exclaimed—"I will have no rascal's son in my nest, but one worthy to be a king!"

At length they persuaded her to listen to a prayer by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and when he had once begun she appeared unwilling to let him leave off; half hour after half hour she kept the primate on his knees. She then sunk into a state of insensibility, and died at three o'clock in the morning of the 24th of March, 1603,in the seventieth year of her age and the forty-fourth of her reign. Robert Carey, afterwards Earl of Monmouth, was anxiously waiting under the window of Elizabeth's room at Richmond Palace, for the first news of her death, which Lady Scrope, his sister, communicated to him by silently letting fall, as a signal, a sapphire ring, afterwards celebrated as "the blue ring," which he caught, and the moment after was galloping off towards Scotland to be the first herald of the mighty event to the expecting James. Three hours later, that is, at six in the morning, Cecil, the lord keeper, and the lord admiral were with the Council in London, and it was resolved to proclaim James VI. of Scotland, James I. of England.

An Irish Trooper. From an old Manuscript.

The character of Elizabeth has, till of late, been taken on trust from the extravagant eulogies of the corrupt writers of her time. She had had a traditionary reputation as "the glorious Queen Bess," "the good Queen Bess;" but the researches into the actual records of her reign, as preserved in the State Paper Office, in our day, oblige us to modify greatly the gorgeous portraiture of her own courtiers and dependants. To judge her strictly by the purer and higher moral code of to-day would be evidently unjust. All monarchs that preceded, and most of those contemporary with her, had so much of the same character, that a very low, corrupt, and dishonest scale of conduct was deemed admissible, and almost inseparable from royalty. Crimes were permitted to them which would now excite horror and execration through every civilised nation. Nevertheless, virtue is virtue, and justice is justice in all times; the nature of truth is immutable and eternal; and judged by that, the character of Elizabeth, with all concessions to the general character and maxims of the time, must be admitted to be of a very mixed texture, and far below that assigned her in, and long after, her time. In a few plain words, she was a bold, clever, successful, bad woman. That she maintained Protestantism and defended England against a host of enemies is a great fact, for which we owe her much; though neither her maintenance of the one nor the defence of the other was conducted on principles which any moralist would now undertake to defend. With a high and defiant bearing, she condescended to arts in weakening foreign nations, which she continually and energetically condemned in her own professions, and which when applied to herself, she characterised in true terms, as dastardly, unroyal, and sometimes devilish. Her support of Protestantism, both in England, Scotland, and on the Continent, was by every means which Protestantism now abhors and denounces—by the utter suppression of religious liberty, by setting subjects against their rulers, and in the case of Mary Queen of Scots, by the violation of the Christian principle of doing as you would be