Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/452

414 arose. At one period the Protestants who resisted the wearing of ritual vestments at service, which they thought savored of Rome, were ruthlessly harried; at another, Catholic priests and laymen were driven in scores to death or ruin for their faith. But the Queen herself still ostentatiously clung to the Scriptures as her guide of life, and was exceedingly devout in the form of worship which for the moment seemed most expedient to her. It is true that she was fighting for her life and for the independence of her people. Conspirators thronged around her, and in every Catholic court in Europe plotters were compassing her murder and the enslavement of England, by means of Mary Stuart or Philip of Spain. Against such weapons as those employed against her it may be urged with some reason that Elizabeth might legitimately oppose all the weapons that craft could furnish, just as the imprisoned Mary Stuart might conspire, as she did, for eighteen years with those who sought the Queen of England's life. But whilst admitting this in both cases, as being according to the political ethics of the time, it destroys, for once and for all, the claim of the Queen of Scots to be regarded as a saint unjustly sacrificed, and that of Elizabeth to be accepted as the eminently "Good" Queen, whose pure Protestant piety conquered the Catholic ogre.

It is an extraordinary story, that of the cruel and heartless manner in which the Queen, during a series of years, played with the Duke of Alençon, and ultimately drove him to despair and death. No woman but one whose heart vanity and ambition had turned to stone could have carried on the long juggle as she did with the amorous young French prince, to the amazement, and often the disgust, of Her closest councillors. Swearing with awful oaths her promise to marry him and her eternal affection for him, sighing, languishing, and drawing him into compromising situations by her pretended love for him, she deceived not only her lover, but the keenest politicians in Europe: and yet, with her private correspondence now before us, we see that the whole comedy was a lie, so far as she was concerned; and that in what seemed her moments of utter self-abandonment in her love she was coolly calculating how to wriggle out of her compromise whilst leaving her suitor in the mire. When at length the poor lad was cajoled into leaving England with the fulfilment of his marriage still deferred, the Queen travelled to Gravesend with him to see him fairly on the way, for he tearfully resisted going to the last moment. In feigned grief at leaving "her husband," as she called him, she wept and wailed at the parting; but an eye-witness of the scene tells us that as soon as her persistent lover's back was turned she sought the privacy of her chamber, not to indulge in her grief, but to dance for very joy at having got rid of him so easily; and scoffed at his simplicity to his own false servant Simier. When later it served her political purpose to extort terms from the King of France by again pretending her intention immediately to marry his brother, she called down curses upon her own head in such appalling language if she did not fulfil her promise this time that so seasoned a vessel as the elderly French ambassador declared that it made his blood run cold; and solid old Cecil himself, who was deeper in the plot than any one, whispered in awe-stricken tones to Lady Stafford that "if the Queen failed to keep this pledge, surely God would send her to hell for such blasphemy."

As specimens of epistolary mystification and deception nothing equals the letters, now at Hatfield, sent by Elizabeth in answer to Alençon's desperate prayers from France and Flanders. Frantic appeals from the young man to the elderly coquette that he should not be abandoned, now that he had broken with every one else for her sake, were answered by obscure and involved replies, in which hypocrisy, suggestiveness, and professions of undying love are cunningly used to wrap up the cold cynicism that really inspired the communication. To the very end the farce was played. When in 1584 Alençon died, miserably conscious that he had been all along but a puppet used to serve the political ends and pander to the vanity of a heartless woman, it still suited Elizabeth to be friendly with France; and she mourned ostentatiously in widow's garb and with drawn hypocritical countenance the loss