efforts to enlarge the wealth and prosperity of the kingdom; and all this had, of course, the very strongest tendency to increase her general popularity. It must have been from

sources such as these that so much of admiration was lavished upon one who never uttered one amiable sentiment, and never performed one generous deed.

It is not less difficult to estimate Elizabeth's religious character, than to do justice to her personal and political life. During her sister's reign, she regularly attended confession and mass, and conformed to all the ritual observances of Popery.* Nor was this merely from policy, or from a desire to escape persecution from that ferocious bigot, who was well known to cherish no sisterly regard towards her; for after her accession to the throne, she continued to pray to the Virgin Mary, and, as we shall see, maintained many of the peculiar doctrines of Romanism. She believed in the real presence, which, as then understood, was synonymous with transubstantiation,† publicly censured a preacher, who preached against it in her presence, and praised another who preached in its favour. The people, in the sudden ebullition of their joy, at what they conceived the downfall of Romanism, pulled down the rood lofts, broke in pieces altars and images, and burnt up the pictures and crucifixes, which, in the days of their ignorance, they had worshipped.‡ Elizabeth, however, indignant at such sacrilege, ordered these appendages of idolatry to be restored; and it was only after the most strenuous exertions of her prelates and counsellors, she could be induced to yield to their removal.§

† Ibid. 2, 3.

But

+ Ibid. 260-2.

* Strype's Annals, i. 2. § Ibid. 237, 241. There is a singular letter from Jewell to Peter Martyr, (Burnet's Hist. Ref. Records, Bk. vi. No. 60,) dated 4th Feb. 1560, beginning, "O my father, what shall I write thee?" in which he says, "That controversy about crosses (in Churches) is now hot amongst us. You can scarcely believe in so silly a matter, how men, who seemed rational, play the fool. Of these the only one you know is Cox. To-morrow a disputation is appointed to take place upon this matter. Some members of parliament are chosen arbitrators. The disputants are, in favour of crosses, the Archbishop of Canterbury, (Parker) and Cox; against them Grindal (Bishop of London) and myself. The result lies at the mercy of our judges. However, I laugh when I think with what, and how grave and solid arguments they shall defend their paltry crosses. I shall write you the result, however it may go. At present the cause is in dependence. However, so far as I can divine, this is the last letter you shall receive from me as a bishop,

although she gave a reluctant assent to have them removed from the churches, she still retained a crucifix, with tapers burning before it, upon the altar in her own private chapel. Against this open idolatry, all her prelates, not even Cox excepted, remonstrated in a style of very unusual vehemence; and in terms the most obsequious, yet firm, they begged leave to decline officiating in her majesty's chapel until the abomination was removed. For the moment she seems to have given way to the storm. But she soon recovered her obstinate determination in favour of her crucifix and lighted tapers,―restored them to their former place upon the altar,* and there they remained at least as late as 1572. Nor were these badges of idolatry retained merely as ornaments. Strype informs us distinctly, that "she and her nobles used to give honour to them." Nor could it be any ambiguous manifestation of popery and idolatry, which could extract from Cox that long and urgent declinature to officiate in her chapel, in which he says, "I most humbly sue unto your godly zeal, prostrate and with wet eyes, that ye will vouchsafe to peruse the considerations which move me, that I dare not minister in your grace's chapel, the lights and cross remaining.§

But although Elizabeth was thus obstinate in favour of these "dregs of Popery," and "relics of the Amorities,” as Jewell termed them, she had not even the semblance of personal religion. Those members of the Church of England who are favourable to Protestantism, and yet feel that their Church is identified with the Church of Elizabeth, may, as a matter of course, be expected to portray her both as Pro

for the matter is come to that pass, that we must either take back those crosses of silver and pewter, which we have broken, or resign our bishopricks."

* In 1570. Strype's Parker, ii. 35, 36.

†Strype, speaking of the year 1565, says, “The queen still, to this year, kept the crucifix in her chapel." Annals, i. ii. 198. Again, "I find the queen's chapel stood in statu quo seven years after." Ibid. 200. Cartwright also mentions the fact in his "Admonition to Parliament," published in 1570. Parker exerted himself strenuously, but in vain, against this nuisance. Strype's Parker, i. 92. The encouragement which this attachment of the queen to some of the grossest errors of their system gave the papists, may be inferred from the fact, that a popish priest, in 1564, dedicated to her a work in defence of the crucifix being retained and worshipped as before. See Strype's An. i. 260-2. Strype's An. i. 259, 260.

§ Strype's An. i. 260, and Ap. Rec. No. 22.

testant and pious; and this has been done to an extent which, in our mind, has rendered every history of Elizabeth, by members of the Anglican Church, altogether unworthy of credit, except simply when they state facts, and give their authority for them. Even Strype, so favourably distinguished for veracity and candour, exerts himself to write a panegyric on Elizabeth, although the facts which he is too honest to conceal, jar oddly enough with his praises; and although also, occasional expressions drop unguardedly from his pen, which show how dissatisfied he was with the personal character and religion of that queen. "And, indeed," he says, speaking of her religious character at her accession, "what to think of the queen at this time as to her religion, one might hesitate somewhat." * She seldom or never attended Church except during Lent, (which she observed, and compelled others to observe, with all the formality of Rome,) when the best pulpit orators from all parts of England were summoned up to preach before her. She, indeed, held the preaching of the gospel not only in contempt, but in something bordering upon detestation, and wished that all her subjects should follow her own example in absenting themselves from hearing sermons. While nine parishes out of every ten throughout the kingdom were destitute of a preaching ministry, she commanded Grindal, in 1576, to diminish still further the number of preachers, declaring that three or four were sufficient for a whole county-that preaching did more harm than good, and that, consequently, "it was good for the Church to have few preachers." And because he would not obey, suppress "the prophesyings," and lessen the number of preachers, she suspended him from his functions, sequestered his revenues, and confined him a prisoner to his own house, and it was with some difficulty she was restrained from proceeding further against him. Grindal's firmness, however, under God, saved England; for had he yielded to her anti-christian tyranny, it is easy to perceive what the result must have been upon the moral and spiritual condition of the kingdom.

Nor were her morals more eminent than her piety. With out giving more attention than they deserve to the scandalous revelations of Lingard, or to the rumours which have

* Annals, i. 2. † Strype's Parker, i. 401. Strype's Grindal, pp. 328, 329, and Appendix B. ii. No. 9, which we recommend to our readers to read throughout.

descended to our own time in secret memoirs, in MSS., and by traditions, it is impossible to question that the "virgin queen" hardly deserved the epithet of which she was so ambitious.* She indulged freely in the pleasures of the table. During her annual "progresses," her prelates and nobles, aware of her taste for magnificent entertainments, rivalled one another in ministering to her gratification. After her return from these more than oriental fetes, she was generally indisposed, nature exacting her usual tribute, not less from the queen, than from more plebeian gourmands. She swore most profanely, not only in her conversation, but also in her letters, and that not only to her profane men, but even to her prelates.‡

As Elizabeth did not often attend church, she had the more time to desecrate the Sabbath; and while the Puritans were persecuted for not honouring saints' days, she, her nobles and her prelates, profaned the day of the Lord. In one of her "progresses," in 1575, she spent three weeks at

*Leicester, in a private letter to Walsingham, while ambassador at Paris, speaking of a mysterious illness, by which she was suddenly seized, says, "That, indeed, she had been troubled with a spice or show of the mother." And although he says that, “indeed, it was not so," he was too good a courtier, as well as too personally implicated, to be a trustworthy witness. Strype's An. iii. 319.

Thus, in 1571, after her return from one of these "progresses," "she was taken suddenly sick at her stomach, and as suddenly relieved by a vomit." Strype's An. iii. 175.

Sir John Harrington, giving a description of an interview he had with her in 1601, a year or two before her death, says, "She swears much at those that cause her griefs in such wise, to the no small discomfiture of all about her." Nugae Antiquae, i. 319. We owe the following anecdote to the same amusing gossip. Cox of Ely having refused to alienate some of the best houses and manors of his see to some of her courtiers, notwithstanding of a personal command from the queen, received from the indignant Elizabeth the following characteristic epistle. "Proud prelate, you know what you were before I made you what you are; if you do not immediately comply with my request, by G-d, I will unfrock you. ELIZABETH." However ludicrous to us, such a mandate must have been anything but laughable to the poor bishop of Ely. With a pertinacity, however, which would have been sublime, had it been displayed in a better cause, Cox preserved to the last the revenues of his see. After his death, however, Elizabeth was revenged. She kept the diocese vacant for eighteen years, (as she kept Oxford for twenty-two years,) and before a succession was appointed, she stripped it so bare, that from having been one of the richest, it is now one of the poorest dioceses in England.

Kenilworth, one of the seats of her favourite, the Earl of Leicester. A contemporary chronicler gives the following account of the manner in which two of the Sabbaths spent there were desecrated. In the forenoon she went to the parish church. But "the afternoon" was spent "in excellent music of sundry sweet instruments, and in dancing of lords and ladies, and other worshipful degrees, with lively agility and commendable grace. At night, late after a warning or two," such as Jupiter's respects to the queen and other heathen masques and mummeries, there" were blazes of burning darts flying to and fro, beams of stars, coruscant streams, and hail of fiery sparks, lightning of wild-fire, in water and land, flight and shot of thunder-bolts-all with continuance, terror and vehemence, as though the heavens thundered, the water scourged, and the earth shook. This lasted till after midnight." Next Sabbath the same scene was repeated with sundry alterations. But, in addition, "this, by the kalendar," being "St. Kenelme's day," the genius or tutelary god of the place, there was a solemn country bridal, with running at quintal, in honour of this Kenilworth Castle, and of God and St. Kenelme !"* When we bear in mind the manner in which the Sabbath has been desecrated in England down from the Reformation, by princes, peers, and prelates, by the " Book of Sports," by acts of parliament and convocation, and that the only friends

* Apud Strype's An. ii. i. 584, 585. It may be said in palliation of Elizabeth's desecration of the Sabbath, that she only followed the example set before her by the primate of all England. Parker having finished a princely dining hall in his palace at Canterbury, in 1565, gave several magnificent entertainments there. "The first," says his biographer," was at Whitsuntide, and lasted three days, that is, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday." "His second feast was on Trinity Sunday, following. The hall was set

forth with much plate of silver and gold, adorned with rich tapestry of Flanders.... There were dainties of all sorts, both meats and drinks, and in great plenty, and all things served in excellent order by none but the archbishop's servants." Strype's Parker, i. 376-380. It was Parker's ambition upon these occasions to rival the fetes given by his predecessor Warham to the Emperor Charles V. and Henry VIII., and that such important matters might not be lost to posterity, he became their historian himself. Ibid. ii. 296, 297. Even when he retired to his smallest country residence, Parker's domestic establishment consisted of about a hundred retainers. Ibid. i. 277. Parker, however, was completely outshone by Whitgift, who rivalled Wolsey himself. See his Life by "Sir George Paule, comptroller of his Grace's household," in Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Biography, iv. 387-389.