T HE reputation of Elizabeth Tudor has experienced nearly as many
vicissitudes as that of her father, Henry, but the depreciatory estimate appears to be rather in the ascendant at the present time, and there is a disposition to deny to her not merely the moral, but the intellectual superiority which was once looked upon as her especial characteristic. No doubt there has been a great deal of undiscriminating and uninformed panegyric of the Protestant Queen, which has provoked, naturally enough, a strong reaction, as facts have been disinterred, and earlier judgments have been brought to light, which are quite inconsistent with this un- qualified praise ; but we are disposed to think that this revulsion of opinion is likely to lead to an equally erroneous estimate of her character. If the more favourable view was wanting in dis- tinctness of delineation, that which is becoming popular seems to be wanting in breadth and comprehensiveness ; if the former was a mere generalization of perfections, the latter appears to us to be wanting in a sense of the real significance and mutual bearing of her specific acts and of the varying phases of her policy.
In her natural character Elizabeth was a true Tudor, but in the manner and degree of the manifestation of the family qualities she differed from both her father and grandfather in so curiously complicated a manner, that it is difficult to say whether we are more assisted or perplexed in the elucidation of her real nature by the alternations of these resemblances and contrasts. There was a coarseness of grain in the mental organization of all the Tudors, but their physical constitution, as we have already said, exercised a considerable influence on the manner of its development. In Henry VIII., the strong physique so predominated that it seems to overlay and obscure the natural vigour and subtlety of his mind on ordinary occasions, and it is only on such questions as the divorce from Catherine of Aragon that we recognize the inherent family tendency to casuistry. In Henry VII., on the contrary, the casuistical element predominated, and the coarseness of grain showed itself rather in a passive insensi- bility to considerations of delicacy and honour, than in any active self-indulgence. Both the Henries had an unusually strong will, but in the son it was too often the master of his actions ; in the father it was tempered and disciplined by the restraints and considerations of a more sustained thoughtfulness. In Elizabeth the headstrong self-will of her father was modified into a feminine wilfulness ; while the patient and hesitating thoughtfulness of her grandfather was intensified into a hampering and tormenting irresolution. In mental capacity, however, it seems to us that she excelled both. She had more vigour and elevation of purpose than her grandfather, she had more self-knowledge, and therefore much more self-mastery than her father. She had deeper insight and a wider range of vision than either of them. Henry VIII. was the nursling of prosperity. He had the self-confidence and frankness inspired by a comparatively assured position, and both the
generosity and the self-indulgent habits which were the natural incidents of an overflowing treasury ; he sustained the position of England, but he wasted her resources, and absorbed the national
in a personal policy. Henry VII. and Elizabeth were both trained in a school of adversity, and both succeeded to a starving exchequer, to an unstable throne, and to a lowered position among the nations of Europe. The former paid his way and accumulated a vast sum of money, laid the foundations of a settled state of property at home, and placed England in a position Of equality abroad. Elizabeth also economized, but she did not ex- tort or hoard ; for the greater part of her reign the taxation was light, while the Treasury was neither bankrupt nor overflowing. Henry VII. never escaped from the influence of his straitened early days, and, except in the fitting magnificence of his Court, was to the last very close-fisted. Elizabeth could scrape for money with as little regard for decency and dignity as her grand- father, and was nearly as reluctant as he in disbursing her money. Both had felt the necessity and appreciated the value and power of money. But in Henry there was an unmixed reluctance to part with it under any circumstances, while in Elizabeth the disinclination seems rather to arise from a doubt as to the possible extent of expenditure to which she was committing herself, and a terror of indefinite drains on a limited exchequer. Where she knew the exact extent, and could estimate the exact significance and efficacy of the payment, she was often even lavish and seemingly heedless, as in her gifts to individuals. By this may be explained what has excited the indigna- tion of later historians, her largesses to men of the Leicester or Hatton stamp, as compared with her stint in the crisis of a great national danger, or in the subsidies necessary to the efficiency of an enlarged international policy. She sub- sidized the former for her own pleasure or peculiar ends, she made them certain benefactions accordingly, and so the matter seemed to end. But when foreign allies or dependents, such as the insurgents of Scotland and the Low Countries, repeatedly asked for money, the quid pro quo was often a little doubtful, and the necessity or expediency of the disbursement fair matter for hesi- tation. Even when the demand for money seems to us one which was imperative for the welfare or even safety of England, we must remember that it presented itself to the mind of the Queen as one among many similar conflicting claims on her purse, and that possibly what now appears to us inexplicable fatuity on her part may have been the result of a decision (perhaps a mistaken one) arrived at after long and anxious consideration.
But unquestionably there was a dangerous tendency in the mind of Elizabeth to resist anything forced upon her as a necessity, and not proceeding from her own free and spontaneous will. This is a phase of the wilful side of her character. She could not endure being dictated to, in appearance even, by circumstances. She resisted the fatality of events with the energy of a most persistent advocate of the doctrine of free-will. She appeared almost to think that the only means of self-assertion lay in refusing to acknowledge seemingly inevitable conclusions. She declared herself to be naturally very irresolute, but her irresolution did not, we imagine, arise from real self-distrust, so far as this implies the consciousness of the want of intellectual ability (for her self-esteem was nearly as great as that of her father Henry), but from a curious sense of the inadequacy of any human judgment to cope with the possibili- ties of events, and consequently from an exaggerated estimate of the importance of the element of uncertainty which there must be in every important problem of action presented to our notice. Hesitation and delay were in her not the tokens of an inability to grasp the conditions of the question, but of a mind which saw only too many possible contingencies, and sought in delay for what a modern poet has finely expressed as the great deficiency in times of political storm, "the leisure to grow wise." So far, indeed, was this irresolution from being a mark of want of self-confidence in Elizabeth, that it was fostered to a dangerous extent by this very excess of unconscious self-reliance. Like her great-grandfather, Edward IV., whom she resembled in not a few respects, she often slighted a danger and postponed a remedy or a safe- guard until it was almost too late, from a conviction that, come what might, she should prove herself equal to the occasion. As she said to her last Parliament, "God had given her a heart that did never fear any enemies," and she hesitated and deferred to commit herself to any irretrievable course of policy, from feelings depending partly on a strong sense of possibilities which might render that coarse unnecessary or unwise, and partly on a convic- tion that she could at any stage retrieve, by her own innate capacity, her present hesitation, and preserve her mastery of the situation.
But although Elizabeth's intellect saw difficulties in every course, her imagination temptations in every direction, and though her course was often made unsteady and uncertain by counter-currents of prudence, ambition, and wilful caprice, yet, on the whole, and in the end, taking long periods of Hues and a wide range of policy, she pursued the true course. The very power and subtlety of her mind indeed led her every now and then into grievous blunders, and she often allowed her more ignoble qualities to guide her conduct at the expense of her own peace of mind. But however she might at times shrink back from its own realization, she had a vivid conception of a great, wide, and consistent policy, never entirely lost sight of it, and in the end accomplished it in all material points. She began her rule as the sovereign of a country one-half of whose inhabitants seemed almost bound by the religious tenets which they held to look upon her as illegiti- mate, and as the representative of a great act of national schism, which in their hearts they deplored and reprobated. She found herself in the European Commonwealth a sort of pariah, tolerated as a matter of policy by rival nations, but in danger every day of a combination against her which would prove fatal to her own Crown, if not to the independence of England. In the northern portion of her own island a Queen reigned whose pre- tensions to the English Crown were avowed, And supported by much sympathy among Englishmen themselves, as well by the tie of marriage and the bond of a common religion with the two most powerful Sovereigns of the Continent. Yet in the end she not only secured and consolidated her own throne and baffled every adversary, but even made both France and Spain unwillingly co-operate to this very end, and sorely against their own inclinations remain passive spectators of the downfall of her once formidable Scottish rival. The general result of the struggle in which Elizabeth was engaged from her accession to her death is so evident, that that alone would be sufficient foundation on which to rest her claim to sagacity and consistency in essentials. Her reign was too long, and the circumstances of the time varied too much during this period, for any run of mere luck to be a sufficient interpretation of this success. It was a uniform success, in the end, against all opponents under nearly every conceivable con- dition under which intellect could be pitted against intellect. And even if we look at shorter periods of time, and confine ourselves more closely to specific questions of policy, the result is in the same direction, if not always quite as marked. Clever historians, who have been displaying their own critical acumen in demon- strating, under the inspiration of the passing impressions of foreign ambassadors, how thoroughly Elizabeth mismanaged affairs, are compelled again and again in their summary of results to acknowledge that, somehow or other, notwithstanding all this bungling, and this wilful disregard of the dictates of wisdom and honour, the catastrophe of the drama is favourable to the mis- guided Queen to a most strange and unexpected extent. It is only when we descend to each separate act, and dwell on the seem- ing or real vacillations of every hour in the mind of the Queen, that we feel any misgivings as to her intellectual capacity. And it was part of the peculiar temperament of Elizabeth that, however subtle and tortuous might be her policy, she seemed to display every step of it to the critical gaze of interested spectators. Never was there an intriguer who worked so apparently in the sight of all men ; never was there a dissimulator who threw so little appearance of reality over the dissimulation. She cared little, indeed, for giving a passing impression of weakness and irresolution, and she blinded her adversaries quite as much by this candid display of her difficulties as by any more overt act of deception. She even worked out her own fancies of possibilities, in the possibility of which she never herself really believed, before the bewildered eyes of the Spaniard and the French, until at last they knew not what was real and what was delusive, and effectually secured the pur- poses of Elizabeth by keeping their own Courts in an equal state of uncertain perplexity. She thus played even with her own weaknesses, and made her own irresolution play the part of a piece of clever diplomacy. Much of her dissimulation may be explained in this manner. She was, as we have said, a bad actor, for she nearly always overdid her assumed part ; but this arose, to a great extent, from her dissimulation itself generally representing some real, though not predominant feature of her own nature. She was in herself so curious a combination of contrary and seemingly quite inconsistent feelings and opinions, that she had only to give for the time the full rein to any one of these, and without being false to part of herself, though she was really false to herself as a whole, she could speak with the earnest- ness of truth, and left her audience in profound doubt between the impossibility of the fact in the form in which it was presented to them, and the impression of vraisemblance in the substance of the statement which her earnestness was, nevertheless, calculated to
produce. She was from the first placed in so anomalous a position by her birth and her natural associations, that sell-contradiction seemed a necessity of her existence. The most autocratic of natures was tied down by circumstances to become the leader of the great revolt of free thought against authority throughout Europe; mind most jealous of the rights and most peculiarly alive to the immunities of Sovereigns was compelled to become the in- stigator, or, at any rate, the countenancer, of rebellion in half the States of Europe, and to give a terrible illustration in her own kingdom of the responsibility of kings to the tribunal of public opinion, if not of justice ; one whose tastes and sympa- thies, as distinguished from her intellectual convictions, were cer- tainly with the great community of Rome, was compelled to become its most deadly enemy, and to countenance, if not a system, at any rate the favourers of a system against which her own nature revolted, as a standard of rebellion, and, in its hard Calvinistic type, as an intellectual dictator. Is it surprising, then, that she often hesitated in her path, and often looked back with longing and doubting eyes to the flesh-pots of Egypt, and indulged sometimes in dreams—but only dreams—of an elysium of repose in which Rome should be her guardian angel and Philip of Spain her natural ally ? But, in the end, and looking at her course as a whole, she restrained her own political and religious inclinations as effectually as she did her private feelings, when the vision of the clever, courtly, but reckless Leicester, the playmate of her youth, and the assiduous flatterer of her weaker nature, presented itself to her imagination as her future husband.
But there was an advantage for Elizabeth even in the self-con- tradiction of her nature and her position. If she was divided within herself, she represented all the more faithfully the divided state of opinion and feeling within the nation which she governed. She might and did persecute Puritans, but they felt that much of her intellect and the very existence of her queenly position were bound up with her allegiance to the cause of the Reformation. She might and did persecute the Roman Catholics as much as her sister Mary had persecuted the Protestants, though her motive was scarcely so much of a religious as of a political character. Yet the Catholics felt in their hearts that Elizabeth little liked Protestants as such, and still less Protestantism as an ecclesiastical system, and that her heart, though not her head, were with the old faith. So that neither Puritans nor Catholics felt themselves en- tirely cut off from sympathy with their Sovereign, and alike felt that she was not merely the Queen of one section or one faction of her subjects. And this independent position Elizabeth maintained to the last. She had strong sympathies with the elder Cecil on many points; their natures were in some respects similar, but their different positions necessarily made a difference in their mode of looking at public affairs, and Elizabeth, though she listened to and trusted Wil- liam Cecil as she never listened to or trusted any other man, always preserved her own policy as distinct from his, and however she might allow it to be modified by, never permitted it to be super- seded by him. It was her great merit to find out, and to main- tain at her side, great and capable men, and not to be unworthily jealous of any intellectual comparison between herself and them. But she never allowed them to become the arbiters of the national policy ; this ultimate arbitration she kept in her own hands, and she maintained certain checks to their growing influence, and often mortified their self-esteem by lavishing, at the same time, even exaggerated marks of favour on a set of rivals wholly inferior to them in ability and character, but at the same time the representatives of feelings and prejudices which had no little hold on a part of the nation; and which were kept in order and satisfied by this specious representation in Court circles. And although Burghley was in the main a sagacious and right-minded statesman, it was well for England that Elizabeth never dropped the reins of power into his hands, for, with all his merits, he was still the head of a party and the representative of fixed ideas, and party spirit was then the great internal danger of England, and a too stereotyped policy almost as great an external disability. It was not Cecil, but Elizabeth, who, by her subtle and delusive policy, held Philip in her leading-strings, until the time bad come when he was com- pelled to make his great effort against her, under circumstances which, if still very encouraging, were infinitely less so than they had been at any epoch since her accession to the English throne.
Of the better known qualities of Elizabeth we have little need and little space to speak in detail. Her personal vanity, —so open as to be more like a curious affectation than a real
weakness—with its amusing and characteristic preference of praise for the youth and beauty which she had not, to a just meed of admiration for the dignity and grace which she really possessed. Her royal bearing, which was so greatly aided by a stately person, a keen, piercing eye, and an aquiline nose in full harmony with her imperial cast of features. Her urbanity to all classes, the spell which she threw over such spirits as Raleigh and Sidney, and the somewhat rough and boisterous greetings with which she encountered the coarser mother-wit and propitiated. the good-will of the lower orders. Her woman's nature so complete and so conspicuous in itself, and yet married to a mind so masculine and so sardonic ! The Parliamentary records tell how she could manage a House of Commons nearly as easily as an individual Minister, recognizing its place in the Consti- tution, but ruling its insurrectional energies with a skilful alterna- tion of the curb and the loose rein. But, as in her foreign and general policy, the result is the best proof of the judgment and tact of the means employed. What Sovereign, except one of great intellectual assendancy, could have evoked at the close of so long a reign, from representative men who felt and thought so differently from her on so many delicate points, that outburst of enthusiastic loyalty and grateful confidence which crowned the last session of her last Parliament ?
Elizabeth presents a character against which much may be said with justice in particulars, and against which, as a whole, the verdict in respect of strict morality can scarcely be a favourable one. But the main lines of the picture are firm and not unpleasing, and if virtue is to be measured by greatness of intention —if immorality of practice can be mitigated in our judgment by the necessities of an almost unparalleled position of perplexity and danger,—and if the disposition to good or to evil is measured by the opportunities offered and the temptations to the latter deliberately overcome, perhaps it will be considered that few Sovereigns have passed through such an ordeal, under such original disadvantages of education and peculiar disposition, with so little dishonour to themselves, and so much advantage to the country whose interests they were called upon to consult. But it is only through her intellectual greatness that we can understand and appreciate Elizabeth's morality such as it was ; and it is only on an intellectual basis, using the term in its widest sense, that her reputation as one of the very greatest of English Sovereigns must, after all, be built up and established.
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