her presence, he wrote to her to send him her portrait. Elizabeth, in her reverential and somewhat pedantic epistle in reply, certainly gives abundant evidence of the taste for metaphors to which Ascham adverts in his letters to Sturmius.

THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH TO KING EDWARD VI.

With a Present of her Portrait.1

"Like as the rich man that daily gathereth riches to riches, and to one bag of money layeth a great sort till it come to infinite, so methinks your majesty, not being sufficed with many benefits and gentlenesses showed to me afore this time, doth now increase them in asking and desiring where you may bid and command, requiring a thing not worthy the desiring for itself, but made worthy for your highness' request,-my picture, I mean, in which, if the inward good mind toward your grace might as well be declared as the outward face and countenance shall be seen, I would not have tarried the commandment but prevented it, nor have been the last to grant, but the first to offer it. For the face I grant I might well blush to offer, but the mind I shall never be ashamed to present; for though from the grace of the picture the colours may fade by time, may give by weather, may be spotted by chance, yet the other nor time with her swift wings shall overtake, nor the misty clouds with their lowerings may darken, nor chance with her slippery foot may overthrow.

"Of this, although yet the proof could not be great, because the occasions hath been but small, notwithstanding, as a dog hath a day, so may I perchance have time to declare it in deeds, where now I do write them but in words. And further, I shall most humbly beseech your majesty, that when you shall look on my picture, you will vouchsafe to think that, as you have but the outward shadow of the body afore you, so my inward mind wisheth that the body itself were oftener in your presence; howbeit, because both my so being I think I could do your majesty little pleasure, though myself great good, and again, because I see as yet not the time agreeing thereunto, I shall learn to follow this saying of Orace, [Horace,] Feras non culpes, quod vitari non potest.' And thus I will (troubling your majesty, I fear,) end with my most humble thanks, beseeching God long to preserve you to his honour, to your comfort, to the realm's profit, and to my joy. From Hatfield, this 15th day of May. "Your majesty's most humble sister,

"ELIZABETH."

In the summer of 1550, Elizabeth had succeeded in reinstating her trusty cofferer, Thomas Parry, in his old office, and she employed him to write to the newly appointed secretary of state, William Cecil, afterwards lord Burleigh, to solicit him to bestow the parsonage of Harptree, in the county of Somerset, on John Kenyon, the yeoman of her robes. A lamentable instance of an unqualified layman, through the patronage of the great, devouring that pro1 Cotton. MS., Vesp., F. iii. fol. 20.

perty which was destined for the support of efficient ministers of the church. Such persons employed incompetent curates as their substitutes, at a starving salary, to the great injury and dissatisfaction of the congregation. Parry's letter is dated September 22nd, from Ashridge.1 "Her grace," he says, "hath been long troubled with rheums, [rheumatism,]' but now, thanks be to the Lord, is nearly well again, and shortly ye shall hear from her grace again." A good understanding appears to have been early established between Elizabeth and Cecil, which possibly might be one of the under-currents that led to her recall to court, where, however, she did not return till after the first disgrace of the duke of Somerset.

ვ

On the 17th of March, 1551, she emerged from the profound retirement in which she had remained since her disgrace in 1549, and came in state to visit the king her brother. "She rode on horseback through London to St. James'spalace, attended by a great company of lords, knights, and gentlemen, and about two hundred ladies. Two days later she came from St. James's, through the park, to the court. The way from the park-gate to the court was spread with fine sand. She was attended by a very honourable confluence of noble and worshipful persons of both sexes, and was received with much ceremony at the court-gate." That wily politician the earl of Warwick, afterwards duke of Northumberland, had considered Elizabeth, young and neglected as she was, of sufficient political importance to send her a duplicate of the curious letter addressed by the new council jointly to her and her sister the lady Mary, in which a statement is given of the asserted misdemeanours of Somerset, and their proceedings against him. The council were now at issue with Mary on the grounds of her adherence to the ancient doctrines, and as a conference had been appointed between her and her opponents on the 18th of March, it might be to divert popular attention from her and her cause, that the 1 Tytler's Edward and Mary, vol. i.

? Or catarrh, 'cold,' the word rheums being used indifferently at that era for both maladies.

3

Strype's Memorials.

Tytler's Edward and Mary, vol. i.

younger and fairer sister of the sovereign was permitted to make her public entrance into London on the preceding day, and that she was treated with so many marks of unwonted respect. Thus we see Mary makes her public entry into London on the 18th, with her train all decorated with black rosaries and crosses,1 and on the 19th Elizabeth is again shown to the people, as if to obliterate any interest that might have been excited by the appearance of the elder princess.

The love of Edward VI. for Elizabeth was so very great, according to Camden, that he never spoke of her by any other title than his "dearest sister," or his "sweet sister Temperance." Elizabeth at that period affected extreme simplicity of dress, in conformity to the mode which the rigid rules of the Calvinistic church of Geneva was rendering general among the stricter portion of those noble ladies who professed the doctrines of the Reformation. "The king her father," says Dr. Aylmer,3" left her rich clothes and jewels, and I know it to be true that in seven years after his death she never, in all that time, looked upon that rich attire and precious jewels but once, and that against her will; and that there never came gold or stone upon her head, till her sister forced her to lay off her former soberness, and bear her company in her glittering gayness; and then she so wore it, that all men might see that her body carried that which her heart misliked. I am sure that her maidenly apparel which she used in king Edward's time, made the noblemen's wives and daughters ashamed to be dressed and painted like peacocks, being more moved with her most virtuous example than with all that ever Paul or Peter wrote touching that matter." 994 The first opening charms of youth Elizabeth well knew required no extraneous adornments, and her classic tastes taught her that the elaborate magnificence of the cos

1 Life of Queen Mary, vol. iii. p. 408.

2 Camden's Introduction to Elizabeth's Life. The learned tutor of lady Jane Gray, in an encomium which he wrote on Elizabeth, after her accession to the throne, entitled The Harbour for Faithful Subjects.

4 Aylmer's Harbour for Faithful Subjects.

tumes of her brother's court tended to obscure, rather than enhance, those graces which belonged to the morning bloom of life. The plainness and modesty of the princess Elizabeth's costume was particularly noticed during the splendid festivities that took place on the occasion of the visit of the queen-dowager of Scotland, Mary of Lorraine, to the court of Edward VI., in October 1551. The advent of the fair regent of the sister kingdom and her French ladies of honour produced no slight excitement among the noble belles of king Edward's court, and it seems that a sudden and complete revolution in dress took place, in consequence of the new fashions that were then imported by the Scottish queen and her brilliant cortège; "so that all the ladies went with their hair frounsed, curled, and double curled, except the princess Elizabeth, who altered nothing," says Aylmer, "but kept her old maiden shamefacedness."1

At a later period of life, Elizabeth made up, in the exuberance of her ornaments and the fantastic extravagance of her dress, for the simplicity of her attire when in the bloom of sweet seventeen. What would her reverend eulogist have said if, while penning these passages in her honour, the vision of her three thousand gowns, and the eighty wigs of divers coloured hair, in which his royal heroine finally rejoiced, could have risen in array before his mental eye, to mark the difference between the Elizabeth of seventeen and the Elizabeth of seventy? The Elizabeth of seventeen had, however, a purpose to answer and a part to play, neither of which were compatible with the indulgence of her natural vanity, and that inordinate love of dress which the popular preachers of her brother's court were perpetually denouncing from the pulpit. Her purpose was the re-establishment of that fair fame, which had been sullied by the cruel implication of her name by the protector Somerset and his creatures in the proceedings against the lord admiral; and in this she had, by the circumspection of her conduct, the unremitting manner in which, since that mortifying period, she devoted herself to the pursuits of learning and theology, so fully succeeded, Aylmer's Harbour for Faithful Subjects.

that she was now regarded as a pattern for all the youthful ladies of the court. The part which she was ambitious of performing, was that of the heroine of the reformed party in England. That Elizabeth was already so considered, and that the royal sisters were early placed in incipient rivalry to each other by the respective partisans of the warring creeds which divided the land, may be gathered from the observations of their youthful cousin, lady Jane Gray, when urged to wear the costly dress that had been presented to her by Mary; "Nay, that were a shame, to follow my lady Mary, who leaveth God's word, and leave my lady Elizabeth, who followeth God's word."

Elizabeth wisely took no visible part in the struggle between the Dudley and Seymour factions, though there is reason to believe that Somerset tried to enlist her on his side. The following interrogatory was put to him on one of his examinations:- "Whether he did not consent that Vane should labour the lady Elizabeth to be offended with the duke of Northumberland, then earl of Warwick, the earl of Pembroke, and others of his council?" 1 The answer to this query has not been found, or it might possibly throw some light on the history of Elizabeth at that period. She certainly had no cause to cherish the slightest friendship for Somerset, who, by bringing all the particulars of the indiscretions that had taken place between her and the admiral before the council, had cast a blight on her morning flower of life. Somerset sent a piteous supplication to Elizabeth from the Tower, imploring her to go to the king, and exert her powerful influence to obtain his pardon; and she wrote to him in reply, "that being so young a woman, she had no power to do any thing in his behalf," and assured him "that the king was surrounded by those who took good care to prevent her from approaching too near the court, and she had no more opportunity of access to his majesty than himself."2

The fall of Somerset made, at first, no other difference to Elizabeth than the transfer of her applications for the restora

Tytler's Edward and Mary, vol. ii. p. 49.

2 Leti's Life of Elizabeth.