Page:The Queens of England.djvu/446

 ELIZABETH, QUEEN REGNANT. As a sovereign Elizabeth was resolute and sagacious, but personally she was odious. Heartless, treacherous, envious, insatiate of the grossest flattery, coquettish, and vain almost beyond credibility, audacious and unfeeling, history transmits to us the delineation of no female more unamiable and dis- pleasing. These are no measured terms of condemnation, and they are meant to be read strictly au pied de la lettre. With many of the angry and domineering qualities of her ty- rant father, she united, in her personal intercourse with her courtiers, all the levity, and more than the unscrupulous bias of mind, of her unhappy mother. As a monarch, she was never deficient in head, though she rarely showed any heart; but in all the circumstances of private life she seemed to have been almost equally devoid of both. Wanton, fantastic, capricious, conceited, frivolous, ridiculous, dancing with joints stiffened by time and ogling striplings from behind a ridge of wrinkles and a panoply of paint, she was all that even the least rigid man would most abhor to detect in wife, sister or mother. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn, and was born on September 7th, 1533. Shortly af- terwards she was created Princess of Wales, and in the fol- lowing year declared heir to the throne. In 1536, upon the execution of her mother, her fickle sire, in a fit of antipathy, proclaimed her to be illegitimate ; but soon partially restored her to his favor, probably through the kind intervention of Lady Jane Seymour. The direct succession to the crown, however, he never again bestowed on her; but willed that It should be contingent upon the deaths, without issue, of, first, her brother Edward, and secondly, her sister Mary. Yet though he had withdrawn from her a partial and unjust preference, he seems to have treated her with kindness; and when she 402