n her usual
fashion "one who minded not to giving up some matter of account." But
death crept on. Her face became haggard, and her frame shrank almost to
a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disappeared, and she refused to
change her dresses for a week together. A strange melancholy settled
down on her. "She held in her hand," says one who saw her in her last
days, "a golden cup, which she often put to her lips: but in truth her
heart seemed too full to need more filling." Gradually her mind gave
way. She lost her memory, the violence of her temper became unbearable,
her very courage seemed to forsake her. She called for a sword to lie
constantly beside her and thrust it from time to time through the arras,
as if she heard murderers stirring there. Food and rest became alike
distasteful. She sate day and night propped up with pillows on a stool,
her finger on her lip, her eyes fixed on the floor, without a word. If
she once broke the silence, it was with a flash of her old queenliness.
When Robert Cecil declared that she "must" go to bed the word roused her
like a trumpet. "Must!" she exclaimed; "is _must_ a word to be addressed
to princes? Little man, little man! thy father, if he had been alive,
durst not have used that word." Then, as her anger spent itself, she
sank into her old dejection. "Thou art so presumptuous," she said,
"because thou knowest I shall die." She rallied once more when the
ministers beside her bed named Lord Beauchamp, the heir to the Suffolk
claim, as a possible successor. "I will have no rogue's son," she cried
hoarsely, "in my seat." But she gave no sign, save a motion of the head,
at the mention of the king of Scots. She was in fact fast becoming
insensible; and early the next morning, on the twenty-fourth of March
1603, the life of Elizabeth, a life so great, so strange and lonely in
its greatness, ebbed quietly away.

BOOK VII

PURITAN ENGLAND

1603-1660

AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK VII

1603-1660

For the reign of James the First we have Camden's "Annals" of that king,
Goodman's "Court of King James I.," Weldon's "Secret History of the
Court of James I.," Roger Coke's "Detection," the correspondence in the
"Cabala," the letters published under the title of "The Court and Times
of James I.," the documents in Winwood's "Memorials of State," and the
reported proceedings of the last two Parliaments. The Camden Society has
published the correspondence of James with Cecil, and