QUEEN ELIZABETH

Evening Star, Issue 21518, 16 September 1933, Page 2

QUEEN ELIZABETH

[Written by Panache, for the ‘ Evening Star.’] This month Elizabeth Tudor would have celebrated her 400th birthday, and how she would have thrilled to the pageantry that would rightly celebrate such an occasion! She is one of the few to whom a cake of 400 candles would not appear over-decorated, and she would be as delighted as any child to learn from the radio postio in which corners of- Whitehall she would find the costly gifts showered on her by grateful subjects. Taking stock on her birthday morning of the state of Europe, she would find little to surprise her beyond the lack of princes to be denied her hand. She Would see much that would flatter her own shrewd judgment. That the Pope’s temporal power had diminished and that no descendant of Philip, the Soldier of the Church, sat upon the Spanish throne she would ascribe with some reason to her own policy. The dictator of Italy would command her respect. The troubled state of Ireland she would claim to have predicted when she wrote “ Since brain-sick humour of advised assault hath seized on the hearts of our causeless foes we doubt not that their gain will be their bane.” In the peaceful unity of England and Scotland she would see with complacence the result of her wisdom in the question of the succession.

“ The glory of the age in which she lived and the admiration of posterity,” said one historian. The first point she knew and the second would ixot surprise her. Posterity’s admiration begins in school days, when it is tempered with gratitude to a sovereign whose reign is so individual and easily remembered,. Not only is she one of the few women among many men, but she needs no numeral to distinguish her. She is gratefully remembered because the anecdotes about her are distinctive and refuse to be attached to any other ruler. All Williams are liable to stray in forests and get arrows in their eyes; any Henry may inadvertently make a martyr out of an archbishop. Only Elizabeth could have stepped so magnificently on a courtier’s cloak, and only Elizabeth could have worn that first nightgown of black velvet. Another reason for Elizabeth’s popularity with children is that, unlike most English sovereigns, she did not clutter up her reign with lists of battls. Anne and Victoria were even less considerate than the men, but Elizabeth relied on the one devastating victory over the Spanish Armada. The only confusing point about her reign is that she quarrelled with two relatives, both of the Catholic persuasion, and both named Mary. With those who have outgrown their childhood, Elizabeth retains her popularity, which is remarkable when we realise that material success frequently prejudices .posterity against those who are called famous. Without St. Helena for a curtain the Napoleon drama would not still be playing to full houses.. Had she died in a palace, Marie Antoinette would have been forgotten with other plump Geiman princesses. It is a significant tribute to Elizabeth’s greatness that, neither so beautiful nor so hapless as the Queen of Scots, she has as many admirers. True, she has not had the need of so many melodious tears, her achievements demanding prose rather than verse; but 1 Elizabeth and Essex ’ grows tattered in the hands of readers, while the dust collects on Swinburne’s Mary Stuart trilogy. Without a trace of the Helcn-Cleo-patra touch, with no histrionic assistance from an assassin’s dagger, with no sentimental aid from widow'’s weeds, Elizabeth won the confidence and the adoration of her people, and after four centuries is still “Queen Elizabeth of famous memory.” A stri ~t about Elizabeth’s greatness is that it was attained by her weakness as much as by her strength. Her faults were not royal faults on the grand scale. She was parsimonious, she repudiated her just blame, she assur. t not her oivn, sho told lies, sho procrastinated. By all these unheroic weaki.- ;es did Elizabeth triumph, and especially was she justified of her temporising. Elizabeth tern porised, and the results wore ucueficial to England in church and State, at h: ... and abroad. Moralists regard procrastination as vicious, and the keenest mind in England, the soul of the Elizabethan age, may well have been moved by the Queen’s example to create a character and a situation in which temporising was not successful, but fatal. There are sufficient resemblances between Hamlet and Elizabeth to bolster up the theory that wo owe the Prince to the Queen. Both showed an aversion to marriage, ami just ns some critics account for Hamlet’s attitude to Ophelia by saying he was a woman in love with Horatio, so Elizabeth’s coyness towards the princes of Europe ami the nobility of England is explained by the theory that she was a man. The childhood of the two Royal children shows similar amusements, Hamlet being carried about on the back of Yorick, the king’s jester, while the infant Elizabeth, after the feast celebrating the execution of Katherine of Arragon, was jogged round the banquet hail by Henry VIII. Both Elizabeth and Hamlet were students, and Elizabeth’s tutor comments on her early love of metaphor and antithesis, a well-known Hamlet characteristic. Elizabeth, like Hamlet, suffered from tho machinations of step-relatives and attempts to exclude her from tho throne. Both had mothers whose virtue was questioned and who suffered a violent death, Anne Boleyn on the block and Gertrude by poison. Elizabeth, after alio had signed tho warrant for Essex’s execution, is reported as being quite disfavoured and unattired, suggesting the Hamlet who hurst into Ophelia’s presence, his doublet unbraced and liis hose down-gyved. Finally, it is remarked by one courtier that Elizabeth, in times of stress, was wont to walk much in her privy chamber, even thrusting her rusty sword

at times into the arras in great rage. Hero is the distinctive Hamlet touch, opening up a vast field of research for the curious. Hamlet may point the moral, but Elizabeth continues to adorn the tale. It is the measure of her greatness that her weaknesses do not detract from her splendour, and that, though some of her ways wero niggardly, her days were the spacious days, somehow more spacious than ours, though wo sail seas she did not know of and command an element of whoso conquest she did not dream