IN SHAKSPERE'S ENGLAND

CHAPTER I

QUEEN ELIZABETH

THE England of Shakspere was the England of Elizabeth, and though in the great dramatist we have one whose genius has never been repeated, it is round the figure of the Queen that the life and literature of the time revolves.

She was Spenser's Faery Queene, she was Raleigh's Gracious Lady, she was the centre of the Court where Leicester and Essex played their part she shared the work of Burghley, Parker, and Gresham.

Probably no woman, since the world began, had ever so difficult a part to play, or played it with such complete success; throughout her life she held her people's heart, and she lives in history as one of the ablest rulers England has ever known: we must study her character and her life, if we would gain any idea of the England of Shakspere's day.

A

"The child that is born on the Sabbath Day,
Is merry and bonny and wise and gay,"

so runs the old rhyme, and it was on a Sunday, the 17th of September 1533, at Greenwich Palace, that the little Princess made her entry into a world where she had need of all her Sunday attributes. Motherless at three years old, and worse than fatherless, hers was indeed a tragic childhood.

First came her welcome, hardly less enthusiastic outwardly than if she had been the muchlonged for son, and her gorgeous christening as a babe of four days old, in the then standing church of the Grey Friars at Greenwich.

The magnificent ceremony which attended the rite of baptism was well fitted to the after-life of Elizabeth, to whom all pageants were dear, and in whose reign they played so large a part.

Could anything have been more appropriate to the future of the great Queen than the stately procession which heralded her christening?

First marched citizens, two by two, then aldermen, and my Lord Mayor, all clad in their civic robes of office; following them came a gallant array of peers and prelates, and then, bearing the gold-covered basin, walked the Earl of Essex, a fitting figure in this first public appearance of

Elizabeth, as his later namesake was to be the chief favourite of her declining years.

The royal babe, wrapped in a mantle of purple velvet, was carried in the arms of her great-grandmother, the Dowager-Duchess of Norfolk, and her long ermine - trimmed train was borne by the Countess of Kent, and the Earls of Wiltshire and Derby.

At the door of the church she was welcomed by the chief clergy of the land, and was carried to the centre of the church, where stood a silver font beneath a gold-fringed canopy, and there she was baptized by the Bishop of London.

Then onwards, to the altar, moved the stately procession, and the babe was there solemnly confirmed by Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, according to the ritual of the Catholic Church; and the proclamation, above her head, of GarterKing-at-Arms, might well sound forth as a prophecy, "God, of His infinite goodness, send a properous life and long, to the high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth."

Such was her first public greeting by her future subjects, and what could be more appropriate to her after-life than this opening scene of crimson and gold, of costly gifts, and obsequious

courtiers ?

But the rapid changes, to which the members of Henry VIII.'s Court were forced to accustom themselves, affected the tiny Princess before her babyhood was well over.

She was but three years old when her ill-fated mother, Anne Boleyn, was condemned to death upon the scaffold, leaving her daughter a heritage of vanity even greater than that which had cost her own life.

Elizabeth's childhood was marked by many changes. Her position was naturally somewhat affected by the attitude towards her of her constantly varying stepmothers: gentle Lady Jane Seymour only lived a few months after the birth of her son Edward; between Elizabeth and Anne of Cleves there existed kindly relations throughout their lives; while Katherine Howard, the third lady within four years who filled the position of stepmother to the young Princess, was related to her own mother, Anne Boleyn, and so treated Elizabeth with marked courtesy and consideration during the two years that she retained the favour of her fickle husband.

With her father's last wife, Katherine Parr, Elizabeth was on friendly terms until some time after the king's death, when the unwise conduct, and boisterous behaviour, of Admiral Seymour,