rmed, not excepting the
offering at the altar of money, originally designed, without doubt, for
the purchase of masses for the dead. The herald, however, was ordered to
substitute other words in place of the ancient request to all present to
pray for the soul of the departed; and several reformations were made in
the service, and in the communion with which this stately piece of
pageantry concluded.

In the month of December was interred with much ceremony in Westminster
Abbey Frances duchess-dowager of Suffolk, grandaughter to Henry VII.
After the tragical catastrophe of her misguided husband and of lady Jane
Grey her eldest daughter, the duchess was suffered to remain in
unmolested privacy, and she had since rendered herself utterly
insignificant, not to say contemptible, by an obscure marriage with one
Stoke, a young man who was her master of the horse. There is a
tradition, that on Elizabeth's exclaiming with surprise and indignation
when the news of this connexion reached her ears, "What, hath she
married her horse keeper?" Cecil replied, "Yes, madam, and she says
your majesty would like to do so too;" lord Robert Dudley then filling
the office of master of the horse to the queen.

The impolicy or inutility of sumptuary laws was not in this age
acknowledged. A proclamation therefore was issued in October 1559 to
check that prevalent excess in apparel which was felt as a serious evil
at this period, when the manufactures of England were in so rude a state
that almost every article for the use of the higher classes was imported
from Flanders, France, or Italy, in exchange for the raw commodities of
the country, or perhaps for money.

The invectives of divines, in various ages of the Christian church, have
placed upon lasting record some transient follies which would otherwise
have sunk into oblivion, and the sermons of bishop Pilkington, a warm
polemic of this time, may be quoted as a kind of commentary on the
proclamation. He reproves "fine-fingered rufflers, with their sables
about their necks, corked slippers, trimmed buskins, and warm
mittons."--"These tender Parnels," he says, "must have one gown for the
day, another for the night; one long, another short; one for winter,
another for summer. One furred through, another but faced: one for the
work-day, another for the holiday. One of this color, another of that.
One of cloth, another of silk, or damask. Change of apparel; one afore
dinner, another at after: on