ELIZABETH, SECOND QUEEN REGNANT OF ENGLAND AND IRELAND. CHAPTER I. Birth of Elizabeth at Greenwich Palace-Chamber of the Virgins-Remark of - - - We now come to the most distinguished name in the annals of female It is not, perhaps, the most gracious office in the world to perform, calm light of truth, the flaws which mar the bright ideal of Spenser's "Glorianna," and Shakespeare's "Fair vestal throned by the west." Like the wise and popular Augustus Caesar, Elizabeth understood the importance of acquiring the good will of that class whose friendship or enmity goes far to decide the fortunes of princes; the might of her throne was supported by the pens of the master spirits of the age. Very different might have been the records of her reign, if the reasoning powers of Bacon, the eloquence of Sidney, the poetic talents of Spenser, the wit of Harrington, and the genius of Shakespeare had been arrayed against her, instead of combining to represent her as the impersonification of all earthly perfection-scarcely, indeed, short of divinity. It has been truly said, however, that no man is a hero to his valet de chambre, and it is impossible to enter into the personal history of England's Elizabeth without showing that she occasionally forgot the dignity of the heroine among her ladies in waiting, and indulged in follies which the youngest of her maids of honour would have blushed to imitate. The web of her life was a glittering tissue, in which good and evil were strangely mingled, and as the evidences of friend and foe are woven together, without reference to the prejudices of either, or any other object than to show her as she was, the lights and shades must sometimes appear in strong and even painful opposition to each other, for such are the inconsistencies of human nature, such the littlenesses of human greatness. Queen Elizabeth first saw the light at Greenwich palace, the favourite abode of her royal parents, Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn. Her birth is thus quaintly but prettily recorded by the contemporary historian, Hall:-"On the 7th day of September, being Sunday, between three and four o'clock in the afternoon, the queen was delivered of a faire ladye, on which day the duke of Norfolk came home to the christening." The apartment in which she was born was hung with tapestry representing the history of holy virgins, and was from that circumstance called the Chamber of the Virgins. When the queen, her mother, who had eagerly anticipated a son, was told that she had given birth to a daughter, she endeavoured, with ready tact, to attach adventitious importance to her infant, by saying to the ladies in attendance:-" They may now, with reason, call this room the Chamber of Virgins, for a virgin is now born in it on the vigil of that auspicious day, on which the church commemorates the nativity of the Virgin Mary." Heywood, though a zealous eulogist of the Protestant principles of Elizabeth, intimates that she was under the especial patronage of the blessed Virgin from the hour of her birth, and for that cause devoted to a maiden life. "The lady Elizabeth," says he, "was born on the eve of the Virgin's nativity, and died on the eve of the Virgin's annunciation. Even that she is now in heaven with all those blessed virgins that had oil in their lamps." 1 Leti's Life of Queen Elizabeth. |