Kindle Notes & Highlights
He was an unprincipled and cruel tyrant, and the chief business of his life seemed to be selecting and marrying new queens, making room for each succeeding one by discarding, divorcing, or beheading her predecessor.
Notwithstanding her sex, however, she was a personage of great distinction from her very birth, as all the realm looked upon her as heir to the crown.
They, in the ceremony, are considered as presenting the infant for consecration to Christ, and as becoming responsible for its future initiation into the Christian faith.
ermine, a very costly kind of fur, used in England as a badge of authority.
what a restless and unsatisfying life all this pageantry and splendor were ushering her.
though her life was one perpetual scene of matrimonial schemes and negotiations, she lived and died a maiden lady—she
an act of Parliament passed, solemnly recognizing and confirming her claim as heir to the crown, and the title of Princess of Wales was formally conferred upon her.
when she was only about two years of age, he offered her to the King of France as the future wife of one of his sons,
she prayed that God would forgive him and all her enemies for so great a sin, and not call him to account for it at the last day.
strange mixture of state and splendor with discomfort and destitution, which prevailed very extensively in royal households in those early times.
She was not pretty, but was a very lively and sprightly child, altogether different in her cast of character and in her manners from her sister Mary.
He was a sort of uncle, for he was the brother of one of her father's wives. He was a sort of father, for he was the husband of another of them.
it was agreed that Mary should be married to his son Edward as soon as the two children should have grown to maturity;
war upon Scotland, and compel the Scots to fulfill the contract of marriage.
People accused Seymour, her husband, of having poisoned her, in order to make way for the Princess Elizabeth to be his wife.
How far it is true that Elizabeth loved the unfortunate Seymour can now never be known.
"I am an old man, and have but few teeth to lose; but come, draw this one, and let her majesty see how light a matter it is."
Both these decrees of annulment had afterward been revoked,
What right the king had thus to disinherit the children of his sister Margaret was a great question.
though the court of Paris was the most brilliant, Spain, being at that time possessed of the gold and silver mines of its American colonies, was at least the richest country in the world.
The House of Commons appointed a committee of twenty members, and sent them to the queen, with a humble petition that she would not marry a foreigner. The queen was much displeased at receiving such a petition, and she dissolved the Parliament. The members dispersed, carrying with them every where expressions of their dissatisfaction and fear. England, they said, was about to become a province of Spain,
The bribery was certainly on a very respectable scale.
He drew his sword when he landed, and walked about with it, for a time, in a very pompous manner, holding the sword unsheathed in his hand,
"Here lands as true and faithful a subject as ever landed a prisoner at these stairs. Before thee, O God, I speak it, having now no friends but thee alone."
"Better sitting here than in a worse place," she replied, "for God knoweth whither you are bringing me."
"Lady, I can not bring you any more flowers."
They say that one day, as she sat at her window, she heard a milk-maid singing in the fields, in a blithe and merry strain, and said, with a sigh, that she wished she was a milk-maid too.
Of all the terrible convulsions to which the human soul is subject, there is not one which agitates it more deeply than the tumult of feeling produced by the mingling of resentment and love.
Queen Mary, in one of these paroxysms, seized a portrait of her husband and tore it into shreds.
We do not tear the portraits of those who are indifferent to us.
At one time she received proposals from the King of Sweden that she would accept of his son as her husband.
Elizabeth had always accompanied Mary to mass whenever occasion required; she had always spoken respectfully of the Catholic faith; and once she asked Mary to lend her some Catholic books, in order that she might inform herself more fully on the subject of the principles of the Roman faith.
"It is the Lord's doing, and it is wonderful in our eyes."
Elizabeth placed a wedding ring upon her finger with great formality, to denote that she considered the occasion as the celebration of her espousal to the realm of England; she was that day a bride, and should never have, she said, any other husband. She kept this, the only wedding ring she ever wore, upon her finger, without once removing it, for more than forty years.
With Elizabeth, ambition was the ruling principle, and the ruling passion too.
There is often thus a great difference in the comparative interest we take in persons or scenes, when, on the one hand, they are realities before our eyes, and when, on the other, they are only imaginings which are brought to our minds by pictures or descriptions.
It seemed as if all the marriageable princes and potentates of Europe were seized, one after another, with a desire to share her seat upon the English throne.
Philip of Spain, the husband of her sister Mary, was the first of these suitors.
Philip was so inveterately hated by all the English people, and Elizabeth was extremely desirous of being popular.
It happened that there was an objection to her marriage with Philip similar to the one urged against that of Henry with Catharine of Aragon.
"Here lies a queen who lived and died a virgin."
In fact, at one time she recommended him to Mary Queen of Scots for a husband.
Elizabeth did not wish to have Mary married at all, and so she always proposed somebody who she knew would be out of the question.
Having one son upon the throne of France, she wanted the throne of England for the other.
"The Discovery of a gaping Gulf wherein England is like to be swallowed up by another French marriage, unless the Lord forbid the Bans by letting her see the Sin and Punishment thereof."
in the management of public affairs she was a woman of extraordinary talent and sagacity, combining, in a very remarkable degree, a certain cautious good sense and prudence with the most determined resolution and energy.
She reigned about forty years, and during almost all that time the whole western part of the Continent of Europe was convulsed with the most terrible conflicts between the Protestant and Catholic parties.
They maintained the position and honor of England, as a Protestant power, with great success; and the country, during the whole period, made great progress in the arts, in commerce, and in improvements of every kind.
What is the ground and nature of the right by which any king or queen succeeds to the power possessed by his ancestors?
This was her character in all things. She was famous for her false pretensions and double dealings, and yet, with all her talents and sagacity, the disguise she assumed was sometimes so thin and transparent that her assuming it was simply ridiculous.
