ments assembled. There was for a while a flash of indignation which cannot be called loyalty or patriotism. The persecution still went on fiercely and remorselessly, and the people sullenly submitted to what seemed the inevitable. The one hope for a land that God had ceased to guard was the death of the reigning sovereign.
On 17 Nov. 1558, in the grey twilight before sunrise, Mary died. Parliament was sitting. At eight in the morning both houses, as if in expectation of the event, were assembled. A message was sent down from the peers to the lower house requiring the immediate attendance of the commons. Heath, archbishop of York, as chancellor, announced that 'our late sovereign lady Queen Mary' had passed away, and that the lords had determined to proclaim the Lady Elizabeth queen 'without further tract of time.' The thing was done with all due form and ceremony, Sir William Cecil having already prepared the draft of the proclamation which was usual on such occasions. At last it had come!
The nation breathed once more the breath of hope and life. But the outlook and the retrospect as men looked back upon the last six years were enough to fill them with dismay. Death had been striding through the land as if to show he was king indeed. Of late the persecution had fallen upon the lowly, but in the upper ranks what havoc there had been! Cardinal Pole died a few hours after Queen Mary. Nine bishoprics were vacant. Within a month of Mary's decease three more bishops were dead. There was only one duke in England now — Thomas Howard of Norfolk, he too doomed to perish on the block before the new reign was half over. In January 1552 Edward Seymour, duke of Suffolk; in August 1553 John Dudley, duke of Northumberland; in February 1554 Henry Grey, duke of Suffolk, had severally perished upon the scaffold. There was not a woman in England more lonely than Queen Elizabeth when she ascended the throne. Her very enemies had died. Gardiner was dead, the Emperor Charles V had died in September, and now Cardinal Pole lay waiting for his obsecquies. Her friends and old suitors had died off; Catherine Parr and Anne of Cleves, Seymour and Courtenay, and within six months of her accession Henry II of France and Pope Paul IV, had gone also. Her nearest blood relation was Henry Carey, afterwards Lord Hunsdon, the only child of her mother's sister. The next heir to the throne was Mary Stuart, nine years her junior, now queen of Scotland, and soon to be queen-consort of France. England had just suffered the deepest humiliation which she had known for centuries. She no longer possessed a yard of land upon the continent: the finances of the country were in a condition which might almost be described as desperate. War and famine and pestilence had brought the people to the lowest point of shame and despondency. Meanwhile men seemed absorbed by their religious differences, though for the most part they knew not what they believed. The hideous facts of the Marian persecution, fresh in the memory of the townsmen, wrung from them deep curses against the pope and his supporters; but the wild plunder of the churches and the furious rapacity of the destroyers in King Edward's days were not yet forgotten, nor likely to be for a while.
Elizabeth had completed her twenty-fifth year. Never had royal maiden more need of wisdom, caution, decision and courage. Never had one in her station received a severer schooling in the arts of dissimulation, reticence, and self-control. Of the domestic affections she had scarcely had experience from her childhood. In her third year her mother had been slain on infamous charges, her father had been always a name of terror, her sister had watched her with the dark suspicion of dislike. Her brother is said to have had some love for her, but in such matters a very little evidence often goes a very long way. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to show that Elizabeth had a heart, nothing to indicate that she ever for a moment knew the thrill of sentiment, the storms of passion, or the throbs of tenderness. The key to much that is perplexing in her conduct as queen may be found in a careful study of her experiences and her discipline as princess and presumptive heir to the throne.
Elizabeth was at Hatfield when her sister died. On 20 Nov. the council met there for the first time: Sir William Cecil was at once appointed chief secretary; his brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bacon, his kinsman. Sir Thomas Parry, and Ambrose Carr, who probably was also akin to him (for he too was a Stafford man), were made members of the council; so too were Francis, earl Russell, whose father had been lord-admiral in Queen Mary's time, and William, marquis of Northampton, brother of queen Catherine Parr, and others, whose sentiments favoured the reformers. The queen's utterances on this memorable day have been preserved; they may be authentic, and they may have been strictly her own. The gift of speech she always had, and she always rose to an occasion. On the 23rd the queen commenced her progress to London. On the way the bishops met her, and were permitted to kiss hands, all except Bonner — from him she turned away
