mother at Baynard's Castle; and Anne's timid spirits were
saddened by the strangeness of the faces round her, and Elizabeth's
habitual silence. There was something in the weak and ill-fated queen
that ever failed to conciliate friends. Though perpetually striving to
form and create a party, she never succeeded in gaining confidence
or respect. And no one raised so high was ever left so friendless as
Elizabeth, when, in her awful widowhood, her dowry home became the
sanctuary. All her power was but the shadow of her husband's royal sun,
and vanished when the orb prematurely set; yet she had all gifts of
person in her favour, and a sleek smoothness of manner that seemed to
the superficial formed to win; but the voice was artificial, and the
eye cold and stealthy. About her formal precision there was an
eternal consciousness of self, a breathing egotism. Her laugh was
displeasing,--cynical, not mirthful; she had none of that forgetfulness
of self, that warmth when gay, that earnestness when sad, which create
sympathy. Her beauty was without loveliness, her character without
charm; every proportion in her form might allure the sensualist; but
there stopped the fascination. The mind was trivial, though cunning
and dissimulating; and the very evenness of her temper seemed but
the clockwork of a heart insensible to its own movements. Vain in
prosperity, what wonder that she was so abject in misfortune? What
wonder that even while, in later and gloomier years, [Grafton, 806]
accusing Richard III. of the murder of her royal sons, and knowing him,
at least, the executioner of her brother and her child by the bridegroom
of her youth, [Anthony Lord Rivers, and Lord Richard Gray. Not the least
instance of the frivolity of Elizabeth's mind is to be found in her
willingness, after all the woes of her second widowhood, and when she
was not very far short of sixty years old, to take a third husband,
James III., of Scotland,--a marriage prevented only by the death of the
Scotch king.] she consented to send her daughters to his custody, though
subjected to the stain of illegitimacy, and herself only recognized as
the harlot?
The king, meanwhile, had ridden out betimes alone, and no other of the
male sex presumed in his absence to invade the female circle. It was
with all a girl's fresh delight that Anne escaped at last to her own
chamber, where she found Sibyll; and, with her guidance, she threaded
the gloomy mazes of the Tower. "Let me
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