Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/219

 without leaving her any real liberty of action, were of a kind calculated, above all others, to estrange him from her. Philip was the acknowledged champion of orthodoxy, and, as it were, the official leader of the Catholic world. Elizabeth had overthrown the whole polity which he had been at so much pains to establish in England, had slighted his Ambassador's advice, and had refused his own offer of marriage, and was now trifling with that of his cousin and nominee, the Archduke of Austria. The religious policy which, as we have seen, she was compelled to follow, was, therefore, just what was best calculated at once to embitter her enemies and to estrange her single ally. Need we wonder, then, if her policy became a by-word all over Europe for crookedness and duplicity, the perennial resource of the weak and the over-matched? She has been called the evil genius of Scotland, and she may have been so; but self-preservation, we are told, is the first law of Nature, and it is hard to blame a monarch if he saves his own people at the expense only of their enemies. Elizabeth was not a person who overvalued, and many would say that she undervalued, the accessories of religious worship, though it is fairly clear that, as a mere matter of taste and private inclination she liked pomp and ceremony in church, as she did elsewhere. Hence, on the one hand, when she found that her bishops and divines strongly objected to images and such things, she yielded her own wish, and ordered their abolition; but, on the other, it is hardly surprising that she should have retained something of ritual in her own chapel, and the more so when she hoped thereby to disarm the enmity of her Catholic subjects, or to mollify the rising anger of her only ally by holding forth to them a delusive hope that she might pos-