s actual statesmanship,
it was seen in the simplicity and tenacity of purpose that often
underlies a woman's fluctuations of feeling. It was the directness and
steadiness of her aims which gave her her marked superiority over the
statesmen of her time. No nobler group of ministers ever gathered round
a council-board than those who gathered round the council-board of
Elizabeth. But she was the instrument of none. She listened, she
weighed, she used or put by the counsels of each in turn, but her policy
as a whole was her own. It was a policy, not of genius, but of good
sense. Her aims were simple and obvious: to preserve her throne, to keep
England out of war, to restore civil and religious order. Something of
womanly caution and timidity perhaps backed the passionless indifference
with which she set aside the larger schemes of ambition which were ever
opening before her eyes. In later days she was resolute in her refusal
of the Low Countries. She rejected with a laugh the offers of the
Protestants to make her "head of the religion" and "mistress of the
seas." But her amazing success in the end sprang mainly from this wise
limitation of her aims. She had a finer sense than any of her
counsellors of her real resources; she knew instinctively how far she
could go and what she could do. Her cold, critical intellect was never
swayed by enthusiasm or by panic either to exaggerate or to
underestimate her risks or her power. Of political wisdom indeed in its
larger and more generous sense Elizabeth had little or none; but her
political tact was unerring. She seldom saw her course at a glance, but
she played with a hundred courses, fitfully and discursively, as a
musician runs his fingers over the keyboard, till she hit suddenly upon
the right one. Her nature was essentially practical and of the present.
She distrusted a plan in fact just in proportion to its speculative
range or its outlook into the future. Her notion of statesmanship lay in
watching how things turned out around her, and in seizing the moment for
making the best of them.

Such a policy as this, limited, practical, tentative as it always was,
had little of grandeur and originality about it; it was apt indeed to
degenerate into mere trickery and finesse. But it was a policy suited to
the England of her day, to its small resources and the transitional
character of its religious and political belief, and it was eminently
suited to Elizabeth's peculiar powers. It wa