poultry yonder, so red and ruffled of feather do you seem. There, see now, I do repent me of my discourtesy. You, Sir Robert, shall squire me to the hall, and Lord Seymour must even content himself with playing the gallant to good Mistress Ashley"; and, leaning on the arm of the now pacified Dudley, the self-willed girl tripped lightly up the entrance-steps.
Self-willed and thoughtless—even rude and hoydenish—we may think her in these days of gentler manners and more guarded speech. But those were less refined and cultured times than these in which we live; and the rough, uncurbed nature of "Kinge Henrye the viii. of Most Famous Memorye," as the old chronicles term the "bluff King Hal," reappeared to a noticeable extent in the person of his second child, the daughter of ill-fated Anne Boleyn—"my ladye's grace" the Princess Elizabeth of England.
And yet we should be readier to excuse this impetuous young princess of three hundred years ago than were even her associates and enemies. For enemies she had, poor child, envious and vindictive ones, who sought to work her harm. Varied and unhappy had her young life already been. Born amid splendid hopes, in the royal palace of Greenwich; called Elizabeth after that grandmother, the fair heiress of the House of York, whose marriage
