Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/449

Rh loving legend of "Good Queen Bess" has lasted for three centuries, not because she was a good woman, but because she was a great Queen.

It was impossible for her to be both; and most Englishmen are content to take her greatness as proved, and her goodness for granted. Her enduring popularity is owing not a little to the haughty self-assertive patriotism which the circumstances of her birth almost forced upon her. She dared not allow herself or her country to be patronized by the great powers, all of which were Catholic, or submit for a moment to the suggestion that her sovereign status was irregular, or the whole basis upon which her greatness rested would have crumbled beneath her. If at any moment she had been drawn or cajoled—and many were the attempts made to snare her—into an admission of the power of the Pope, she would only have been Queen of England by sufferance of the Catholic powers, and to this her haughty spirit could never bend, and her people loved her for it; though to thousands of their fellows it meant cruel persecution, exile, and death. It may at once be granted that Elizabeth was one of the most successful, if not one of the greatest, monarchs that ever sat upon the English throne; the first to arouse in her people the proud spirit of national predestination that has since remained their heritage; and it is in no spirit of detraction from her achievement that an attempt will be made in this brief article to exhibit the tergiversation, the falsity, and the treachery of the methods by which that achievement was attained. The methods were, it is true, to a great extent, those considered legitimate in the sixteenth century, when the interests and life of the individual citizen were of no account in comparison with the well-being of the state, as personified by the sovereign. But whilst the standard of political morality was everywhere low—and that of Elizabeth was certainly not higher than that of her compeers,—the Queen of England was able with impunity to resort to expedients even then considered illegitimate, by reason of her real and assumed frivolity attenuating her responsibility, by her ungenerous and cowardly shifting of blame from herself to her instruments, which was a regular system with her, and, finally, as a last resource, when she was driven into a corner, by her appeal to the chivalry of her opponents in consideration of her sex and unmarried condition. Everything, from her dubious religion to her much-debated chastity, from her patriotism to her pruriency, from her comely body to her crooked spirit, was utilized to the very utmost for the furtherance of the policy that was to place in her hands the balance of power, and secure her personal triumph and her nation's invulnerability.

Within the limits of an article it would be impossible to follow, however cursorily, the infinite mutability of her religious professions throughout her career; but a few instances may be given to show how purely mundane a thing her religion was, for all the sanctimoniousness of her demeanor on occasions. She had of course been brought up in the somewhat amorphous Protestantism that had after her birth formed the faith of her father; but she had seen the champion of religious reform, Northumberland, thrust aside both her sister and herself from their inheritance, and she can have borne no very good will to the time-serving nobles who had greeted Jane Grey as the Protestant sovereign, to her own exclusion. Young, as she was, however, on Mary's accession, she understood that it would be policy for her to keep a hold on the Protestant party that had treated her so badly; and when Mary, the new Queen, summoned her on the 9th of August, 1553, to attend the requiem mass in the Tower of London for the soul of their brother Edward VI., Elizabeth resisted all her sister's persuasions to be present. But having thus apparently done enough to show the Protestants that they might look towards her as a leader in the coming religious changes, she made but little further resistance to Mary's devout attempts to win her. She had, it is true, a convenient stomachache when she was asked to attend the mass in honor of Courtenay's creation as Earl of Devon, but when she learned that a continuance of her recalcitrancy would lead to her banishment from court, she changed her tone promptly; and within a month of her first refusal she agreed to conform to Catholicism. Seeking