sses, the people, whose applause she
courted, remained cold and silent. The temper of the age, in fact, was
changing and isolating her as it changed. Her own England, the England
which had grown up around her, serious, moral, prosaic, shrank coldly
from this child of earth, and the renascence, brilliant, fanciful,
unscrupulous, irreligious. She had enjoyed life as the men of her day
enjoyed it, and now that they were gone she clung to it with a fierce
tenacity. She hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favourites,
she coquetted, and scolded, and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had
done at thirty. "The queen," wrote a courtier, a few months before her
death, "was never so gallant these many years, nor so set upon jollity."
She persisted, in spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses from
country-house to country-house. She clung to business as of old, and
rated in 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. Cecil asserted that she "must" go to bed,
and 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 m