Chapter I: Preface

Of all the sovereigns that have worn the crown of England, Queen Elizabeth is the most puzzling, the most fascinating, the most blindly praised, and the most unjustly blamed. To make lists of her faults and virtues is easy. One may say with little fear of contradiction that her intellect was magnificent and her vanity almost incredibly childish; that she was at one time the most outspoken of women, at another the most untruthful; that on one occasion she would manifest a dignity that was truly sovereign, while on another the rudeness of her manners was unworthy of even the age in which she lived. Sometimes she was the strongest of the strong, sometimes the weakest of the weak.

At a distance of three hundred years it is not easy to balance these claims to censure and to admiration, but at least no one should forget that the little white hand of which she was so vain guided the ship of state with most consummate skill in its perilous passage through the troubled waters of the latter half of the sixteenth century.

EVA MARCH TAPPAN.
_Worcester, March, 1902._

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BABY PRINCESS 1
II. THE CHILD ELIZABETH 20
III. A BOY KING 39
IV. GIVING AWAY A KINGDOM 56
V. A PRINCESS IN PRISON 75
VI. FROM PRISON TO THRONE 95
VII. A SIXTEENTH CENTURY CORONATION 113
VIII. A QUEEN'S TROUBLES 132
IX. ELIZABETH AND PHILIP 150
X. ENTERTAINING A QUEEN 169
XI. ELIZABETH'S SUITORS 188
XII. THE GREAT SEA-CAPTAINS 208
XIII. THE NEW WORLD 227
XIV. THE QUEEN OF SCOTS 245
XV. THE SPANISH ARMADA 263
XVI. CLOSING YEARS 280

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE.

ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF ENGLAND. (_From painting by an unknown
artist._) _Frontispiece._

LADY JANE GREY AND ROGER ASCHAM. (_From painting by J. C.
Horsley._) 66

KENILWORTH IN ELIZABETH'S TIME. (_From an old painting._) 184

ELIZABETH SIGNING THE DEATH WARRANT OF MARY STUART. (_From
painting by Liezen-Mayer._) 220

MARY STUART RECEIVING HER DEATH SENTENCE. (_From painting by
Carl Piloty._) 246

LAST MOMENT OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS. (_From painting by an
unknown artist._) 260

THE SPANISH ARMADA ATTACKED BY THE ENGLISH FLEET. (_From
Pine's engraving of the tapestry formerly in the House of
Lords, but destroyed by fire in the eighteenth century._) 274

LAST MOMENTS OF ELIZABETH. (_From painting by Delaroche._) 288

In the Days of Queen Elizabeth