The latest publication of the Historical Manuscript Com- mission, dealing
with the Hatfield papers, sheds a very curious light upon some of the events in the history of Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps the most extraordinary of all the Queen's love-affairs, and they were many, was her virtual engagement to the Duo d'Alencon, which began when the Duke was twenty and Elizabeth thirty-seven, and lasted for nearly eleven years. Those of the letters which passed between them preserved at Hatfield, and now for the first time printed, show the air of reality with which Elizabeth chose to invest this mock-courtship,—for on her aide it was certainly never meant to be real. After eight years of epistolary flirtation, the Queen addresses her sham-lover as "My dearest," assures him that "the honour you do me is very great in sending your letters so often," and thanks him "very humbly for the sweet flowers gathered by the hand with the small fingers." It seems that 'Ali zabeth's pet-name for her lover was "the frog with the little fingers."
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