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earlier. Leti corrects it in the succeeding French edition which appeared in 1694.)

The rest, then, becomes simple, for having determined beyond cavil the date of the letter (at least to his own satisfaction), Leti saw no harm in replacing Elizabeth's expression "my Lordes lettar" with "the letters of the King, my father," and in altering a later 66 my Lord" to "the King, my father," for according to Leti's information the "Lord" referred to was the King, my father." And, as the true date of the letter according to Leti's knowledge was 1537, he saw not the least harm in adding that to the original expression," this last day of July."

NOTE 4

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WHY POSTERITY IS IGNORANT OF QUEEN'S ILL-HEALTH

One of the principal reasons is quickly seen. It lies in the failure of our predecessors to comprehend the gravity of the complete breakdown in the Princess's fifteenth year, at " about mydsomer" (24th June, 1548). This misapprehension, we take it, is due to the fact that the historians lacked the knowledge of two circumstances: The existence of Items Nos. 1, 2, and 3-all confessions of Mrs. Ashley-and the dates of Nos. 4, 5, 6, 12, and 13, ante, in the Medical Record; 4, 5, and 6 carrying the aforesaid "mydsomer" illness to January, 1549, while 12 and 13 extend the same attack to September, 1552. The failure to discover Nos. 1, 2, and 3—the confessions of Ashley-was due merely to misfortune. Those once read, all writers would have gone on until they had unearthed the whole story. As we are considering the turning-point of Elizabeth's whole life, when almost in a day she changed from a strong girl into a weak, anæmic one, who was never robust again except for short periods, we are under obligation to offer the evidence in the fullest detail, especially as we have produced facts hitherto unknown.

We must first endeavour to make plain the difficulty in which the historians found themselves, not knowing of the existence of these confessions of Mrs. Ashley.

Miss Strickland, Wiesener, Mumby, Wood, etc., etc., had all the 14 first numbers of the Medical Record, except Nos. 1, 2, and 3the three Ashley statements. All of these items bore dates except Nos. 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, and 14-all letters of Elizabeth herself. This left these students only with two dated letters or statements referring to this illness, namely, Nos. 10 and 11, both dated within a week of one another, in September, 1550; and they knew of no other mention of illness thereafter for more than three years, when came No. 14a, December, 1553. This gave them an approximate

date (September, 1550) for the termination of this severe sickness. But what of its beginning? There they despaired. Miss Strickland met the difficulty in this fashion :

"The severe illness which attacked her soon after the execution of the Admiral (He was beheaded 20th March, 1549.-F. C.) was, in all probability, caused by the severe mental sufferings she had undergone at that distressing period. . . . Her malady appears to have been so dangerous as to cause some alarm to the protector Somerset, who not only dispatched all the royal physicians to her aid, but shrewdly suspecting perhaps, that uneasiness about her pecuniary affairs and prospects might have something to do with her indisposition, he expedited the long-delayed sealing of her letters patent, and sent them to her with many kind messages both from himself and his wife. These courtesies elicited the following letter of acknowledgment from the royal invalid (No. 4). . . Elizabeth was removed from Cheshunt to her house at Hatfield for change of air, but continued to languish and droop in pining sickness for many months. The opening of the new year 1550 found her still so much of an invalid as to be precluded from resuming her studies, which she had been compelled to abandon on account of her perilous state of health. She writes to the young king her brother, January 2 (No. 6), a pretty and pathetic letter in Latin, lamenting that she has not been able, according to her usual custom, to prepare some little token of her love as an offering of the season for his highness."

Note that she thus dates No. 6 as 2nd January, 1550. The remainder of the undated letters and the two dated ones in September, 1550 (Nos. 10 and 11), she ignores.

Miss Aikin makes no reference to any illness in 1548–1552.†
Wood says:

"The following letters are inserted as specimens of the epistolary correspondence between the Princess Elizabeth and her brother. They are all translated from the Latin. . . . As they contain no points of internal evidence by which their dates can be clearly identified, they are, for the sake of connection, classed together." ‡

Wood then prints Nos. 6, 5, 12, 13, and 14, dating, however, No. 13 as of 1550, leaving the remaining four with no dates.

Wiesener, coming next in order of time, some thirty years later, in The Youth of Queen Elizabeth, saw the letters, but prints only

* Strickland, ed. 1851, pp. 47, 48.

+ The Court and Times of Queen Elizabeth.

Letters of Roy, and Illust. Ladies, vol. iii. p. 221. Note preliminary to Letter No. CII.

one of them, No. 6, dating it, like Strickland, 2nd January, 1550. All the others he ignores; he neither quotes from them nor refers to them specifically. But his interpretation of them as a whole may be seen in the following:

66 It must be said that if ... she was not shaken by the fall of him whom she loved, yet she received so painful and deep a wound that its effect upon her strength soon became visible. (As the Admiral was beheaded on the 20th of March, 1549, it becomes clear that Wiesener ascribes her illness as after and due to that death.) She nearly died of an illness caused by depression. The Protector sent her the King's physicians; he despatched the letters-patent that had been delayed till then, and had taken so much of the Admiral's attention. (Wiesener here, of course, shows us that he is familiar with No. 4.) But it was not till the end of a year, that at last her youth gained the victory. . . . During the remainder of this terrible year the studies wherein she sought peace and solace were retarded by her want of strength. . . . But the disgrace she laboured under did not yet draw near its conclusion. More than ever did study serve her as a refuge. In proportion to her sensations of returning strength, she threw herself into it with increasing delight. . . . This was also the very time of the cruel trials she encountered, and the depression that followed them. . . . About the month of January, 1550, he (Roger Ascham, her tutor) slightly emancipated himself, as he afterwards stated, and he went to Cambridge to resume his interrupted studies. . . . However, in two years his lessons had completed and matured the lessons of Grindall, and made Elizabeth quite familiar with ancient Greek and Latin."

There Wiesener drops the undated letters and their contents. The next important biographer is Bishop Creighton-called by the Encyclopædia Britannica the writer of her "best biography," * and Creighton makes no reference at all to any of these letters or to any illness during the period covered by them. He altogether ignores the letters and the sickness, and says of the Seymour Affair (p. 15)-after stating "On March 20, 1549, Seymour's head fell on the scaffold,"-"This was a crushing experience for a girl of sixteen. It was undoubtedly the great crisis of Elizabeth's life, and did more than anything else to form her character." En passant,

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* All the others are disposed of by these words: others by E. S. Beesly, Lucy Aikin, and T. Wright. (The latter is only a collection of letters-"A Series of Original Letters as the title has it.F.C.). See also A. Jessopp's article in the Dict. Nat. Biog."-Article on Elizabeth in Ency. Brit., 11th ed. Miss Strickland's work, the only one ever written, with the possible exception of Aikin's, that even pretends to be complete, or that by any stretch of the imagination could be so considered, is not mentioned at all !-F.C.

I must also refer to a most significant error on the part of the same author, on p. 18, where he says" before the end of 1550 the Protector's power had fallen before the superior craft of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick." The Protector fell in the autumn of 1549.

Professor Beesly is the next biographer of the Queen (1903). He covers her whole career in 240 duodecimo pages and her entire life as Princess in four. He makes no reference whatever to any ill-health before her accession.

This leaves but one biographer to consider, although, properly speaking, he hardly lays claim to such a designation; for, as his title explains, The Girlhood of Queen Elizabeth, A Narrative in Contemporary Letters, he has merely made up a volume of reprints of letters, here and there accompanied by his observations thereon (1909).

This author, Mr. Mumby, notices the undated letters, and thus treats them on p. 63:

"The following examples of the affectionate correspondence which passed between the young King and his favourite sister are all translated from the Latin, and are here reprinted from Mrs. Everett Green's Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies. Most of the originals are in the Bodleian Library. As they contain no points of internal evidence by which their full date can be determined, they are classed together for the sake of convenience." *

Mr. Mumby thereupon prints Nos. 6, 12, and 8, having previously used No. 4 as though dating from 1549. Like all his predecessors, he ignores the two dated letters, Nos. 11 and 12, which in so many words show that Elizabeth was still in bad health and very weak, in September, 1550, some months after all these authorities concluded that she had recovered-or, to be more exact, some months after the date they decided to state as that of the termination of this illness-for they had before them the two dated letters Nos. 10 and 12, both of September, 1550. Morethey had Roger Ascham's statement that he remained two years

How closely the minds of some historians work together is shown by a comparison of Mr. Mumby's introduction (p. 61) to No. 4, with Miss Strickland's remarks concerning the same letter. Mr. Mumby says: "the Protector also sent the royal physicians to her aid, and forwarded, with many kind messages both from himself and his wife, her long-delayed letters patent, shrewdly suspecting perhaps-as Miss Strickland suggeststhat uneasiness about her pecuniary affairs might have something to do with her indisposition." Strickland wrote, as we have shown: "... Protector Somerset, who not only dispatched all the royal physicians to her aid, but shrewdly suspecting perhaps, that uneasiness about her pecuniary affairs and prospects might have something to do with her indisposition, he expedited the long-delayed sealing of her letters-patent, and sent them to her with many kind messages both from himself and his wife.”

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with Elizabeth, that he left her service as early as January, 1550, and that in those "two years she pursued the study of Greek and Latin under my tuition. . . . She read with me almost the whole of Cicero, and a great part of Livy: . . . They noted, too, that Ascham did not mention that she suffered from ill-health during 1548 and 1549, when he said he had been with her. There was, furthermore, that letter of 2nd January (No. 6), referring to my Lord Protector" and to her learning as "so wasted by the long duration of my illness," etc. They could not, as we have seen, agree on any date for that letter; they all let it severely alone, except Miss Strickland and Wiesener, who date it 1550; this despite the fact which they must have known, that for long before that date there had been no Protector. He had ceased to be in power by the 5th of the preceding October; the next day he was a fugitive; and it is inconceivable that Elizabeth, who, even at that early period, displayed the utmost exactitude in the use of titles, would have called Somerset after his fall by one which he had ceased to bear. And when we add the following extract from Mumby,* it will be seen that all the authorities who have mentioned this illness have placed it as occurring in, and lasting throughout, 1549-" She fell so seriously ill with depression during the ensuing year that her life was in danger."

With their data in this hopeless condition, the historians were in a sad quandary as to how to describe Elizabeth's life from the time she left the roof of Katherine Parr (During the week after Whitsuntide, 1548-say the middle of May.-F. C.) to March, 1551, when the girl came to Court. Miss Strickland was the first to grapple with the difficulty, and all her successors have followed her lead. Her interpretation is purely imaginary; yet without exact knowledge of the duration of Elizabeth's illness, it is probably as good a guess as could be found. It may be illustrated by this quotation :

"The disastrous termination of Elizabeth's first love-affair, appears to have had the salutary effect of inclining her to habits of a studious and reflective character. She was for a time under a cloud, and during the profound retirement in which she was doomed to remain, for at least a year, after the execution of the lord admiral (He was beheaded on 20th March, 1549.-F. C.), the energies of her active mind found employment and solace in the pursuits of learning. She assumed a grave and sedate demeanour. . . . Not in vain did Elizabeth labour to efface the memory of her early indiscretion, by establishing a reputation for learning and piety. . . Elizabeth .. affected extreme simplicity of dress, in conformity to the mode

* P. 61.

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