Page:The Queens of England.djvu/487

 ANNE OF DENMARK. 439 Suffolks and Walsinghams, who were "the great favourites of Sir Robert ;" and Francis Bacon, who published his essay on Deformity some month or two after the deformed statesman's death, seems to have penetrated that as well as every other mystery. "Whosoever," says the Chancellor of Mankind, "hath anything fixed in his person that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver him- self from scorn ; therefore all deformed persons are extremely bold." It is to this extreme boldness James often coarsely refers in his letters to his "little beagle" (so he had nicknamed Cecil for his sure scent, his keen pursuit, his faithful ser- vice), "Ye and your fellows there are so proud," would run the dignified monarch's epistle, "now ye have gotten again the guiding of a feminine court in the auld fashion, as I know not how to deal with you". ' . . It is with some similar covert allusion that Arabella Stuart protests in one of her letters that she will not tell tales out of the queen's coach, but in another letter the same lady (who, though in the same rela- tion as James to the throne, and put forth as its claimant by Raleigh and his party, had not yet become the victim of the king's despicable cruelty), reports favorably of the queen as contrasted with the rest of the court,' on the occasion of its sojourn at Woodstock. "If ever," she writes, "there was such a virtue as courtesy at the court, I marvel what is become of it, for I protest I see little or none of it but in the queen ; who, ever since her coming to Newbury, hath spoken to the people as she passeth, and receiveth their prayers with thanks and thankful countenance, barefaced (that is, without a mask), to the great contentment of native and foreign people." Ladies protected their faces in those days with masques, when riding. It had been one of the popular habits of Elizabeth to lift her mask to the common people, as she rode along ; and here Anne shrewdly copied her. Unhappily for Anne's name in history, however, this favor- able contrast between herself and the court cannot be said to have continued. She became identified, as years passed on, with its worst extravagance and ' excess. David Hume re- marks, with melancholy truth, that the history of James' reign is the history of the court, not the nation ; and this court, with king and queen at its head became a scene in which all the actors were without exception odious, profligate, or, in some sense or other, despicable. Its likings were those