OF QUEEN ELIZABETH

BY FREDERICK [CHAMBERLIN

LL.B., M.R.I., F.R.H.S., F.S.A., F.R.G.S., F.R.A.S.

AUTHOR OF "THE PHILIPPINE PROBLEM," ETC., ETC.
WITH 8 ILLUSTRATIONS AND

NUMEROUS FACSIMILES

DA356
C5

1925

H

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,

LONDON AND BECCLES.

INTRODUCTION

HEN, eight years ago, I set aside all other affairs to write a biography of Queen Elizabeth, I planned the usual chronological work that, volume by volume, would unfold her career from her birth to her death-this despite the warning of Sir Anthony Weldon, who, in A Brief History of the Kings of England (1652), omitted all particulars of the reign of Elizabeth with this cryptic explanation: "If why I omit Elizabeth, I answer I have nothing to do with women, and I wish I never had."

Queen

I have, however, never been able to control the MS. of this publication. The material for it, as it gradually came to light, demanded a treatment other than that provided by the original scheme; and in the end I have had to submit to the most radical alterations of it. The same will probably be said of the succeeding volume.

At the outset I was led to a most critical reading of Froude and Lingard a comparison of their more important statements with the facts, and a weighing of their interpretation and treatment of them.

In this I made the usual error of approaching Froude's twelve volumes from the standpoint of the ordinary reader—that is, as a continuous story of the Reformation period. Taken in this fashion, Froude is irresistible. He has had few equals as a writer of attractive English prose, and as an alluring historian none at all, except Macaulay. His many thousand pages are as fascinating as the best of romances. But even his one biographer admits that if history be the story of things as they were, Froude was not an

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historian.* His basic theme-the attempted sanctification of Henry VIII., probably the most despised monarch of all the ages -is grotesque; and when he is driven by his task to demonstrate that Anne Boleyn was destroyed by an equitable, justifiable, civilized process, at a time when the Government selected the juries, when Prime Ministers of England—although then under other title-left in their own handwriting minutes ordering the "trial and execution" of inconvenient gentlemen, when heads were falling by mere Act of Parliament whose members were Government minions, he involves himself in a very morass of illusion; and when Froude's erroneous characterization of the mother was employed by him, and others, to attack the daughter Elizabeth, even fantasy was carried too far.

Moreover, I could not admit a solid basis for Froude's unique theory that Elizabeth was not to be credited with her successes, but only with her failures; that Cecil was the Great Queen, and Elizabeth merely a figurehead. The fact that everybody the world over among her contemporaries had gathered an exactly contrary impression had not the slightest influence upon Froude. His reasoning powers were as unable to save him from this as from applauding the decapitation of Anne Boleyn mainly, if not wholly, for adultery committed while married to Henry VIII. by a ceremony which he had declared void ab initio !

I am of the opinion that what misled Froude was his inherent belief that—just because she was such—no woman could possibly do what all her contemporaries and all posterity had always said Elizabeth accomplished. When she did the right thing against Burghley's advice and intense, prolonged opposition, as she did in her Scottish policy, which made Great Britain and was one of the greatest glories of her career-and time acknowledges she was indubitably and always correct and Burghley mistaken-Froude,

"It has not yet become superfluous to insist,' said the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge 'that history is a science, no less and no more,' If this view is correct and exclusive, Froude was no historian. A mere chronicler of events he would hardly have cared to be. He had a doctrine to propound, a gospel to preach."-Life of Froude, Herbert Paul, p. 72.

To the same effect is the dictum of Prof. A. F. Pollard: "Froude . . . has failed to convince students of the fidelity of his pictures or the truth of his conclusions; . he compares the facts of history to the letters of the alphabet, which by selection and arrangement can be made to spell anything. He derided the claims of history to be treated as a science, and concerned himself exclusively with its dramatic aspect. Froude himself admits that the dramatic poet is not bound when it is inconvenient to what may be called the accidents of facts."-D.N.B., Suppl. vol. ii. p. 261.

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