of the "husband" she had beguiled to disaster and to death. "Your sorrow," she wrote to his mother, "cannot exceed mine, although you were his mother. You have another son, but I can find no other consolation than death, which I hope will soon enable me to rejoin him. If you could see a picture of my heart, you would see a body without a soul." And yet at this very time Elizabeth was driving her lover Hatton frantic with jealousy, because of her ostentatious philandering with a more brilliant favorite still, Walter Raleigh, upon whom she was piling favors and grants unparalleled, and would hardly allow out of her sight. So far from dying for Alençon, who had truly died for her, she continued for well-nigh twenty years yet to feed her vanity by ogling and trifling with mere lads, like Essex and Blount, until her very courtiers blushed for shame. In truth, her avidity for male admiration, which her position enabled her to command, was without limit, and she was especially fortunate in being so constituted as to be able, whilst enjoying it to the full, to make her weakness subserve her ambition and her great political objects. But in all probability she was, so far as active immorality is concerned, less blame-worthy than she is usually believed to have been.
The evidence which leads me to this conclusion can hardly be stated at length here, but an almost sufficient surface reason may be found in the egotistical personal vanity which obviously inspired her—as much as her political ambition. So long as her lovers were simply pursuers she was always mistress of the situation: the moment she had surrendered herself to any one of them her supreme domination and attraction, at least so far as he was concerned, would have been destroyed. It was because her cold-heartedness, which shows so clearly in her lean, proud face, enabled her to curb her passions before they overcame her that she could keep herself, as she did, in the position of being always sought and never entirely won, which was the secret of her success.
That everybody at court was expected to keep up to the last the tradition of the Queen's supreme beauty and goodness is evident from the testimony of courtiers and diplomatists innumerable, and to the end of her life much of her conversation was framed with the object of extorting compliments from her interlocutors, Essex alone, to his ruin, being sometimes bold enough to refuse to play the courtly game when it suited the Queen to begin it. When she was nearly sixty-five years of age, in 1597, De Maisse, the French ambassador, described the extraordinary magnificence of her dress and the calculatedly immodest way in which the garments were worn—all opening down the front, and held together at the waist by a simple girdle. The advice of a long-headed judge to Hatton with regard to his bearing towards the Queen shows also how thoroughly understood it was that the pretence of her goodness was to be kept up by those who surrounded her—the pretence of which we still see the result in the general tradition of her character. "Never," wrote Dyer to Hatton, "seem deeply to condemn her frailties, but rather joyfully to commend such things as should be in her, as if they were in her indeed."
But a far blacker record stands against Elizabeth's name than that of a domineering love of adulation and personal worship. She was doubtless right in regarding Mary Stuart as her enemy, who would stick at nothing to destroy her; and the duplicity, the heartlessness, and the cruelty she used toward the Scottish Queen may on these grounds, and considering the ethics of the time, perhaps be justified. But what can never be excused or pardoned is the cowardly treachery by which Elizabeth sought to avoid the odium of her cousin's death, and to ruin her instrument for doing her bidding. The Queen's Council and the English Parliament were unanimously of opinion that Mary's execution alone could secure Elizabeth's safety, and they had more than once officially represented this to the Queen. Elizabeth, after the discovery of the Babington conspiracy and the Spanish complicity in it, was of the same opinion. If the action of Mary and her friends was such as to constitute a standing peril to the English state, as I, for one, believe that it was, then the sacrifice of the Scottish Queen, who had been legally condemned and sentenced, was
