QUEEN ELIZABETH

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 April 1934, Page 5

QUEEN ELIZABETH

HER INTRICATE SOVEREIGNTY. Rebecca AVest writes in the Loudon “Daily Telegraph”:— “Only the incurably light-minded will wish that Professor J. E. Neale’s “Queen Elizabeth’’ (Cape, 9/6) was a word less than its 390 pages. The book is an ample, detailed' and most admirably readable work, the most pleasing amalgam of scholarship and literary brilliance. It avoids the prime error of most biographies of Elizabeth, and does not make a mystery where there is none simply because she was a woman. Professor Neale shows her as a complex of characteristics quite logically assembled by an exceptionally lively germ to meet, the demands of her environment.

She was a Renaissance woman; she answered as did every ardent, spirit, to the call of learning which rang through Europe in that day; and’ she had that other Renaissance characteristic, of seeing life as infinitely malleable, as material to be hammered into all sorts of strange shapes, by all sorts of instruments, of which craft and lying were not. particularly discredited. She was a woman born and bred in danger. Professor Neale’s early chapters describe how uneasily this poor child of a beheaded mother lay in the lap of her step-sister’s displeasure; how the romping companionship of her step-mother, Catherine Parr, and her new husband, the Admiral Seymour, was doubled with the darker stuff of danger; how, Catherine being dead in childbirth, Seymour declared himself Elizabeth’s suitor and was immediately killed. Fear and its anti-body courage determined Elizabeth’s character; the rhythm of their succession ran though her moods till her dying day. This was, perhaps, the cause of her love of dress, her wardrobe of 3,000 costumes; for it may be remarked that the women most famous for extravagance have been those, like the Empress Josephine, who have lived for long in peril of their bodies. It was certainly the cause of her abundant possession of irony, that laughing sister of affliction sent from above to comfort the brave. That salted her whole life. It made her able to convert the lying letters princes must need write into comic masterpieces of humbug, and diplomatic conversations into wild “rags.” That she might have been a dramatist of the first order is hinted by the comedy, played not with imagined characters, but with real people out of the Spanish Courtship.

Phlip of Spain, widower of her dead step-sister Mary, kindly proposed to marry Elizabeth, both because he would' thereby bring back England to tho Papacy as a service to God, and because he had found her exceedingly attractive when he came over to artend gloomily on his bride. Elizabeth had not the slightest intention of marrying him, but she wanted him as an ally, so she played a subtle and maddening game with his Ambassadors.

Among those who came to England after Philip had, in despair, married the King of Franco’s daughter, and there was only the political alliance to arrange, was Archbiship Quadra. He wrote:

“Your Lordship will see what a pretty business it is to have to treat with this woman, who I think must have a hundred thousand devils in her body, notwithstanding that she is for ever telling me that she yearns to be a nun and to pass her time in a cell praying.”

The dilemma in which Elizabeth found herself regarding marriage is often spoken of as if it existed only because she was a woman; as if it were only because she was a female Sovereign that, should she choose a spouse abroad, her country might fall under foreign influence, and, should she choose one at home, civil wars might start among the great families

she had slighted or honoured by her choice.

I Yet that was a danger constantly ; arising in the case of kings, that had led among the French to the estab- '' lishment of the convention that their king must have a wife from a foreign i Royal house, but a mistress who was born and bred in France. The French •'Monarchy never fell'till Louis XVL i disregarded this convention. t The only thing peculiar to Elizaj beth’s dilemma was that, as Professor j Neale points out, each of the horns of this dilemma meant a further horror than itself. It meant that she had to submit to political impotence, while handing over her power to someone who would, almost certainly be inferior in intelligence to herself, and she would have to deal with financial problems that, drove even her genius nearly demented. “No national debt; no long-term loans: annual income a quarter of a million, increasing under stress by a further 60 per cent.; only with this in mind can the story of the war period be appreciated.” Her advisers were of little help. When she tried to balance her Budget, Walsingham sighed: “I would she did build and depend on God.” Cecil was sometimes as unhelpful, and Leicester, sent abroad with an army, raised his own and his officers’ pay to an extent that wrecked' her schemes for financing the campaign. Her suitors, from Philip of Spain and the Archduke Charles down to Arundel and Pickering, were even less promising aids. MARRIAGE REFUSALS. Elizabeth’s reluctance to marry had, therefore, Professor Neale holds, a largely political explanation; and there is not much sense in writing as if Elizabeth’s constant willingness to consider marriage plans, and her invariable custom of baulking at their fulfilment, were signs of a neurotic disposition that was particularly unbalanced on the subject of sex. For every time she chose to announce her willingness to marry it had the same effect on the Courts of Europe as a herring thrown to a flock of gulls, and so long as she did not marry she still had the herring for next time. Surely Professor Neale goes a little too far when he likens Elizabeth’s supervision of the morals of her Court to that of Queen Victoria. Without doubt we must allow that in Elizabeth there was a burning fire of most peculiar flame. But it is Professor Neale’s particular virtue that he shows how she kept this fire damped', how her genius usually had the upper hand of her oddities. He shows special shrewdness in the case of Leicester and Essex, who are known, beyond all shadow of .doubt, to have been Elizabeth’s favourites.. We will never know which sense of the word can be fitly applied to them; and it is possible that Elizabeth herself! hardly knew from day to day. Here it may be we are dealing with a situation that falls under no usual categories. For Elizabeth must have thought masculinity a very odd thing. She was herself a most, truly feminine woman; she was one of the very few women who have been born in a position where they could determine their own lives, and look in their own hearts for feminine standards, and who have the brains to use that opportunity.

Masculinity was her opposite. It was bound to be the thing which she could least understand, to which she was most attracted.

All her life it presented itself to her in a most lethal guise. Her father had beheaded her mother; she knew that Jane Seymour had pin.ee! away after the birth of a Prince, and’ Katherine Howard had given her head to the block; she had seen her stepmother, Catherine Parr, die in childbirth, and had seen her step-sister Mary pushed down a slope to craziness and death by her husband Philip. LEICESTER and ESSEX. And her relations with men after she grew up have been summarised

by Mr Milton AValdman, another admirable biographer, in the concise and startling sentence: “The number of men who tried to assassinate Elizabeth in the decade preceding the Armada exceeded the number of those who wanted to marry her during the previous two.” It was small wonder that she preferred her relationship with men to be one of firm government. But just sometimes she seems to have reflected that this masculinity must play some useful part in life, and that she must give it its chance to show its merits, and for this nurpose she seems to have chosen Leicester and Essex, who, though not intelligent men, were conspicuously masculine. Some of the most interesting passages in Professor Neale’s “Elizabeth” remain his demonstrations that her dealings with both these nobles were very often just what one would have expected from an efficient, monarch of cither sex who was faced with imprudence and incompetence. One hates to say anything against Lytton Strachey in these days when he is insolently attacked by persons who are hardly fit to type his manuscripts; but it must, he admitted that Professor Neale makes one doubt his view of Elizabeth in her relations with Essex as a demented semi-spinster incarnadined with sunset passions. It is mote as if she hastily.put back masculinity in its box and slammed.the lid, seeing’ again that in her world it would not do.

This is, indeed, a most fascinating hook, particularly in its disclosures of Elizabeth’s financial genius and her steady pursuit of civilised end's. It shows us that if there is any peculiar grace about English life we owe it to her ,to the forty-five years she gave to the suppression of civil wars, the evasion of international dispute, the discouragement of torture by such ruses as giving prisoners money to escape. A complete pagan, she nevertheless had the religious hope that if one rooted up murder and riot out of life it would develop a lovelier content. Her lies were curious prayers for England _____