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leyn lord Rochford, the lords William and Thomas Howard, the maternal kindred of the mother, and lord Hussey, a newly made lord of the Boleyn blood. The babe was wrapped in a mantle of purple velvet, with a train of regal length, furred with ermine, which was duly supported by the countess of Kent, assisted by the earl of Wiltshire, the grandfather of the little princess, and the earl of Derby. On the right of the infant, marched its great uncle, the duke of Norfolk, with his marshal's staff on the other, the duke of Suffolk. The bishop of London, who performed the ceremony, received the infant at the church door of the Grey Friars, assisted by a grand company of bishops and mitred abbots; and, with all the rites of the Church of Rome, this future great Protestant queen received the name of her grandmother, Elizabeth of York. Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, was her godfather, and the duchess of Norfolk and marchioness of Dorset her godmothers. After Elizabeth had received her name, garter king-at-arms cried aloud :"God, of his infinite goodness, send a prosperous life and long, to the high and mighty princess of England, Elizabeth!"

Then a flourish of trumpets sounded, and the royal child was borne to the altar, the gospel was read over her, and she was confirmed by Cranmer, who, with the other sponsors, presented the christening gifts. He gave her a standing cup of gold, the duchess of Norfolk a cup of gold fretted with pearls, being completely unconscious of the chemical antipathy between the acidity of wine and the misplaced pearls. The marchioness of Dorset gave three gilt bowls, pounced, with a cover; and the marchioness of Exeter three standing bowls, graven and gilt, with covers. Then were brought in wafers, comfits, and hypocras, in such abundance that the company had as much as could be desired.

The homeward procession was lighted on its way to the palace with five hundred staff torches, which were carried by the yeomen of the guard and the king's servants, but the infant herself was surrounded by gentlemen bearing wax flambeaux. The procession returned in the

same order that it went out, save that four noble gentlemen carried the sponsor's gifts before the child, with trumpets flourishing all the way preceding them, till they came to the door of the queen's chamber. The king commanded the duke of Norfolk to thank the lord mayor and citizens heartily in his name for their attendance, and after they had powerfully refreshed themselves in the royal cellar, they betook themselves to their barges.

The queen was desirous of nourishing her infant daughter from her own bosom, but Henry, with his characteristic selfishness, forbade it, lest the frequent presence of the little princess in the chamber of her royal mother should be attended with inconvenience to himself.1 He appointed for Elizabeth's nurse the wife of a gentleman named Hokart, whom he afterwards ennobled; and he invested the duchess-dowager of Norfolk with the office of state governess to the new-born babe, giving her for a residence the fair mansion and all the rich furniture, which he had bestowed on Anne Boleyn when he created her marchioness of Pembroke, with a salary of six thousand crowns.2

The lady Margaret Bryan, whose husband, sir Thomas Bryan, was a kinsman of queen Anne Boleyn, was preferred to the office of governess in ordinary to Elizabeth, as she had formerly been to the princess Mary: she was called "the lady mistress."

Elizabeth passed the two first months of her life at Greenwich Palace, with the queen her mother, and during that period she was frequently taken for an airing to Eltham, for the benefit of her health. On the 2nd of December, she was the subject of the following order in council:

:

"The king's highness hath appointed that the lady princess Elizabeth (almost three months old) shall be taken from hence towards Hatfield upon Wednesday next week; that on Wednesday night she is to lie and repose at the house of the earl of Rutland at Enfield, and the next day to be conveyed to Hatfield, and there to remain with such household as the king's highness has established for the same."3

1 Leti

2 Ibid.

3 Strype, vol. i. p. 236.

Hertford Castle was first named, but scratched through and changed to Hatfield.

A few weeks afterwards she became, in virtue of the act of Parliament which settled the succession, in default of heirs male to Henry VIII., on the female issue of that monarch by Anne Boleyn, the heiress-presumptive to the throne, and her disinherited sister, the princess Mary, was compelled to yield precedency to her.

Soon after this change in the prospects of the unconscious babe, she was removed to the palace of the bishop of Winchester, at Chelsea,' on whom the charge of herself and her extensive nursery appointments were thrust. When she was thirteen months old, she was weaned, and the preliminaries for this important business were arranged between the officers of her household and the cabinet ministers of her august sire, with as much solemnity as if the fate of empires had been involved in the matter. The following passages are extracted from a letter from sir William Powlet to Cromwell, on this subject:

"The king's grace, well considering the letter directed to you from my lady Brian and other my lady princess' officers, his grace, with the assent of the queen's grace, hath fully determined the weaning of my lady princess to be done with all diligence."

He proceeds to state that the little princess is to have the whole of any one of the royal residences thought best for her, and that consequently he has given orders for

This

1 The air of this beautiful village agreed so well with the royal infant that Henry VIII. built a palace there, of which the husband of her governess, lady Bryan, was given the post of keeper; and so lately as the time of Charles II., one room in the Manor-house, as it was afterwards called, was known by the name of queen Elizabeth's nursery. There is an old mulberry tree in the gardens which claims the honour of having been planted by her hand. The king also erected a conduit at Kensington for supplying the nursery palace with spring water. conduit still exists within her majesty's forcing grounds, on the west side of Kensington palace green; it is a low building, with walls of great thickness, the roof covered with bricks instead of tiles: the roof is groined with rude arches, and the water pours copiously into a square reservoir. Tradition declares that it was used by queen Elizabeth, when a child, as a bathing house: it is therefore regarded with peculiar interest. Faulkner's Kensington, p. 26.

Langley to be put in order for her and her suite; which orders, he adds

"This messenger hath, withal, a letter from the queen's grace to my lady Brian, and that his grace and the queen's grace doth well and be merry, and all theirs, thanks be to God.-From Sarum, Oct. 9th."1

Scarcely was this nursery affair of state accomplished, before Henry exerted his paternal care in seeking to provide the royal weanling with a suitable consort, by entering into a negotiation with Francis I. of France for a union between this infant princess and the duke of Angoulême, the third son of that monarch. Henry proposed that the young duke should be educated in England, and stipulated that he should hold the duchy of Angoulême, independently of the French crown, in the event of his coming to the crown of England through his marriage with Elizabeth.3

2

The project of educating the young French prince, who was selected for the husband of the presumptive heiress of England, according to the manners and customs of the realm of which she might hereafter become the sovereign, was a sagacious idea, but Henry clogged the matrimonial treaty with conditions which it was out of the power of the king of France to ratify, and it proved abortive.

The tragic events which rendered Elizabeth motherless in her third year, and degraded her from the lofty position in which she had been placed by the unjust but short-lived paternal fondness of her capricious father, have been fully detailed in the memoir of her unhappy mother, Anne Boleyn. By the sentence which Cranmer had passed on the marriage of her parents and her own birth, 'The letter occurs in 1534. State Papers, Cromwell's correspondence, in the Chapter-house, Bundę P.

Herbert; Hall; Rapin.

This condition bears decidedly upon the now important question, whether the husband of a queen-regnant of England be entitled to the style of king-consort. It was Henry VIII.'s opinion that the husband of his daughter, in the event of her succeeding to the crown, might, by her favour, bear that title. Mary I., as we have seen, overstepped the constitutional boundary, by actually associating Philip of Spain in the executive power of the crown; but the law of nature and of reason decides that the husband of a queen-regnant of England ought not to occupy an inferior position in the state to the wife of a king of England, who derives a regal title from her marriage.

Elizabeth was branded with the stigma of illegitimacy; and that she was for a time exposed to the sort of neglect and contempt which is too often the lot of children to whom that reproach applies, is evidenced by the following letter from lady Bryan to Cromwell, imploring for a supply of necessary raiment for the innocent babe who had been so cruelly involved in her mother's fall:

"My lord,

"After my most bounden duty I recommend me to your good lordship, beseeching you to be good lord to me, now in the greatest need that ever was; for it hath pleased God to take from me hem (them) that was my greatest comfort in this world to my great heaviness. Jesu have mercy on her soul! and now I am succourless, and as a redles (without redress) creature, but only from the great trust which I have in the king's grace and your good lordship, for now in you I put all my whole trust of comfort in this world, beseeching you to *** me that I may do so. My lord, when your lordship was last here, it pleased you to say that I should not mistrust the king's grace nor your lordship. Which word was more comfort to me than I can write, as God knoweth. And now it boldeth (emboldens) me to show you my poor mind. My lord, when my lady Mary's Grace was born, it pleased the king's grace to appoint me ladymistress and made me a baroness, and so I have been governess to the children his grace have had since.

"Now it is so, my lady Elizabeth is put from that degree she was afore, and what degree she is at (of) now, I know not but by hearsay. Therefore I know not how to order her, nor myself, nor none of hers that I have the rule of that is her women and grooms, beseeching you to be good lord to my lady, and to all hers, and that she may have some raiment."1

Here Strype has interpolated a query for mourning. There is nothing of the kind implied in the original. If Strype had consulted any female on the articles enumerated, he would have found that few indeed of them were requisite for mourning. The list shews the utter destitution the young princess had been suffered to fall into in regard to clothes, either by the neglect of her mother, or because Anne Boleyn's power of aiding her child had been circumscribed long before her fall. Let any lady used to the nursery read over the list of the poor child's wants, represented by her faithful governess, and consider that a twelvemonth must have elapsed since she had a new supply:

"She," continues lady Bryan, "hath neither gown, nor kirtle (slip), nor petticoat, nor no manner of linen-nor forsmocks (day chemises), nor

1 Cott. MS. Otho. E. c. x. fol. 230.

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