ys. Her
vanity and affectation, her womanly fickleness and caprice, all had
their part in the diplomatic comedies she played with the successive
candidates for her hand. If political necessities made her life a lonely
one, she had at any rate the satisfaction of averting war and
conspiracies by love sonnets and romantic interviews, or of gaining a
year of tranquillity by the dexterous spinning out of a flirtation.

As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of lying and intrigue,
the sense of her greatness is almost lost in a sense of contempt. But,
wrapped as they were in a cloud of mystery, the aims of her policy were
throughout temperate and simple, and they were pursued with a rare
tenacity. The sudden acts of energy which from time to time broke her
habitual hesitation proved that it was no hesitation of weakness.
Elizabeth could wait and finesse; but when the hour was come she could
strike, and strike hard. Her natural temper indeed tended to a rash
self-confidence rather than to self-distrust. "I have the heart of a
King," she cried at a moment of utter peril, and it was with a kingly
unconsciousness of the dangers about her that she fronted them for fifty
years. She had, as strong natures always have, an unbounded confidence
in her luck. "Her Majesty counts much on Fortune," Walsingham wrote
bitterly; "I wish she would trust more in Almighty God." The
diplomatists who censured at one moment her irresolution, her delay, her
changes of front, censure at the next her "obstinacy," her iron will,
her defiance of what seemed to them inevitable ruin. "This woman,"
Philip's envoy wrote after a wasted remonstrance, "this woman is
possessed by a hundred thousand devils." To her own subjects, who knew
nothing of her manoeuvres and flirtations, of her "bye-ways" and
"crooked ways," she seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution. Brave
as they were, the men who swept the Spanish Main or glided between the
icebergs of Baffin's Bay never doubted that the palm of bravery lay with
their Queen.

[Sidenote: Catharine of Medicis.]

It was this dauntless courage which backed Elizabeth's good luck in the
Scottish war. The issue of the war wholly changed her position at home
and abroad. Not only had she liberated herself from the control of
Philip and successfully defied the threats of the Guises, but at a
single blow she had freed England from what had been its sorest danger
for two hundred years. She had broken the depen