s a policy of detail, and in
details her wonderful readiness and ingenuity found scope for their
exercise. "No War, my Lords," the Queen used to cry imperiously at the
council-board, "No War!" but her hatred of war sprang not so much from
aversion to blood or to expense, real as was her aversion to both, as
from the fact that peace left the field open to the diplomatic
manoeuvres and intrigues in which she excelled. Her delight in the
consciousness of her ingenuity broke out in a thousand puckish freaks,
freaks in which one can hardly see any purpose beyond the purpose of
sheer mystification. She revelled in "bye-ways" and "crooked ways." She
played with grave cabinets as a cat plays with a mouse, and with much of
the same feline delight in the mere embarrassment of her victims. When
she was weary of mystifying foreign statesmen she turned to find fresh
sport in mystifying her own ministers. Had Elizabeth written the story
of her reign she would have prided herself, not on the triumph of
England or the ruin of Spain, but on the skill with which she had
hoodwinked and outwitted every statesman in Europe during fifty years.
Nothing is more revolting, but nothing is more characteristic of the
Queen, than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying,
but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood
without a peer in Christendom. A falsehood was to her simply an
intellectual means of meeting a difficulty; and the ease with which she
asserted or denied whatever suited her purpose was only equalled by the
cynical indifference with which she met the exposure of her lies as soon
as their purpose was answered. Her trickery in fact had its political
value. Ignoble and wearisome as the Queen's diplomacy seems to us now,
tracking it as we do through a thousand despatches, it succeeded in its
main end, for it gained time, and every year that was gained doubled
Elizabeth's strength. She made as dexterous a use of the foibles of her
temper. Her levity carried her gaily over moments of detection and
embarrassment where better women would have died of shame. She screened
her tentative and hesitating statesmanship under the natural timidity
and vacillation of her sex. She turned her very luxury and sports to
good account. There were moments of grave danger in her reign when the
country remained indifferent to its perils, as it saw the Queen give her
days to hawking and hunting, and her nights to dancing and pla