Page:The Ifs of History (1907).pdf/51



EVER did greater events hinge upon a woman's caprice against marriage than those which were poised on the will of Elizabeth, Queen of England, in the long years that lay between the time when, as a young queen, it was proposed to marry her to the Duke of Anjou, and the sere and yellow leaf of her womanhood, when her potential maternity was past.

If Elizabeth had married, as her people often implored her to do, and if her progeny had sat upon the throne and continued the sway of the