Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/579

] done by, of hospitality, common faith, and regard to the just rights, the liberty, and the life of an independent sovereign.

Much allowance must be made for her in all these cases, however, from the fact that the statesmen who surrounded her were of a class in whom cunning, intrigue, and contempt of honour and justice usurped the place of elevated genius and exalted principle. There are no arts, however contemptible or scandalous, by which pettifoggers and swindlers now-a-days reach their object, which were not then practised on a national scale as the most golden rules of diplomacy. Even when the queen's conscience and sense of right rose above her conventional notions of rule or the hurricane sweep of her passions, these men cajoled her by flattery, or terrified her by assertion of plots against her life or her kingdom into their dark and sinister measures.

The Death of Queen Elizabeth. (See page 564.)

As to freedom under Elizabeth, there was little or none. She had all the overweening notions of the Tudors of divine right. She constantly told her parliaments, like her father, that she had no occasion for them, but called them together not as a matter of right, but of courtesy; and as to the lives of her subjects, she held them as so many balls in her hands, which she tossed away at pleasure. The heads of the Dukes of Northumberland and Norfolk, of the Earls of Arundel and Essex, and of Mary of Scotland, besides those of numbers of lesser men, and the hundreds of people who perished at Tyburn and other places for their religion, testify to the lawless nature of her Royal will.