them was not extinguished. When, in 1614, James had had a fall from his horse, she begged for leave to see him, but it was thought needless. In return he visited her twice in her illness, two months before her death. At the last he was prevented by a most serious malady from seeing her once more; but he was not unmindful of her death, though the lines which he wrote upon it exhibit no personal feeling of grief (they are cited from the State Papers by Gardiner, ii. 240). The statement that Queen Anne attended the representation of plays in which the king was made ridiculous is uncorroborated, nor is it easy to imagine to what plays it can refer.
The truth seems to be that Queen Anne was possessed of the kind of motherwit which is able to understand character without the aid of caricature. She soon found out that, though extremely jealous of being thought to be really under the control of his wife, the king liked to shelter himself against subsequent complaints on her part by granting her an imaginary influence over his choice of favourites. This rather subtle species of moral obliquity is excellently described by Archbishop Abbot: ‘King James had a fashion that he would never admit any to nearness about himself, but such ane one as the queen should commend unto him, and make some suit on his behalf, that if the queen afterwards being illtreated, should complain of this dear one, he might make his answer: “It is long of yourself, for you were the party that commended him unto us.” Our old master loved things of this nature.’ In this way, as well as by the liveliness of her temperament, the queen was induced to interfere in personal transactions of graver public import than the matrimonial matches to the making of which her energies were largely devoted. She was from the first much interested in Raleigh, and is said to have helped to alleviate his long years of durance by concessions which she obtained for him. Already in 1611 he implored her from prison to represent his hard case to the king, while reminding him of the advantages which might be derived, before it was too late, from the riches of Guiana. Then, in 1612, as the story ran, on the occasion of her eldest son's mortal illness she sent to Raleigh ‘for some of his cordial which she herself had taken in a fever some time before, with remarkable success,’ and which, as the inventor unfortunately assured her, ‘would certainly cure the prince, or any other, of a fever, except in case of poyson;’ so that the queen believed to her dying day that her beloved son had had foul play done him (Wilson, ii. 714, note). Whatever may be the truth of this anecdote, her goodwill towards Raleigh endured to the last. When in 1617 he was starting on his last and fatal expedition across the main, she would have visited his ship, had she not been prevented by Prince Charles. And when after his return his doom was descending upon him, and he had in solemn verse appealed to her to plead his cause, she wrote to Buckingham the letter which has naturally enough been regarded as one of her chief titles to a kindly popular remembrance. Although in her last years Queen Anne became estranged from the Spanish interest, yet it is clear that her efforts on behalf of Raleigh were dictated by personal rather than political sentiment. The fact that Raleigh's legal persecutor, Coke, also solicited the queen's intercession on his own behalf, is explained by the services he had previously rendered to her, and by her liking for his wife (Calendar of State Papers, June 1616; compare March and 6 July 1616). During the earlier part of the reign in England she had shown a predilection for Spain which most strangely contrasted with her birth and connections. Already on her arrival in England the French envoy De Rosni (Sully) reported her Spanish sentiments to his sovereign; and though Buzenval soon afterwards declared that she was wholly for the French alliance (Winwood, i. 31), hope must in this instance have told a flattering tale. In 1605 Salisbury was informed that she was anxious to alienate the king's favour from him, ‘as one who for your owne endes sought to crosse her desires of amitie with Spain’ (Cornwallis to Salisbury, ap. Winwood, i. 159); in the same year, though her brother Ulric was in England urging war with Spain, she refused to see the ambassadors from the States General. In the same way, though her brother King Christian IV was interested in the project of marriage between her daughter Elizabeth and the young elector palatine, it was only gradually that she was herself brought to lend her countenance to the match, to which, according to an apocryphal anecdote, she is moreover said to have objected as below the family dignity, deriding her daughter as ‘goody Palsgrave’ in consequence. A fit of the gout prevented her from taking part in the signing of the marriage contract, but she attended the wedding on February 12, robed ‘all in white, but not very rich, saving in jewels’ (Chamberlain to Mrs. Carleton, 8 Feb. 1613). She was also present at another marriage much talked of at the end of the same year and afterwards—the marriage between the new Earl of Somerset and the divorced Countess of Essex. But though she had favoured the notion of
