translators were Elizabethans, as their dedication to King James, still
printed with every copy, gratefully acknowledges in its reference to
'the setting of that bright Occidental Star, Queen Elizabeth of most
happy memory.'

These words of the reverend scholars contain no empty compliment.
Elizabeth was a great sovereign and in some essential particulars, a
very great national leader. This daughter of Henry VIII and his second
wife, Anne Boleyn the debonair, was born a heretic in 1533. Her father
was then defying both Spain and the Pope. Within three years after her
birth her mother was beheaded; and by Act of Parliament Elizabeth
herself was declared illegitimate. She was fourteen when her father
died, leaving the kingdom to his three children in succession, Elizabeth
being the third. Then followed the Protestant reign of the boy-king
Edward VI, during which Elizabeth enjoyed security; then the Catholic
reign of her Spanish half-sister, 'Bloody Mary,' during which her life
hung by the merest thread.

At first, however, Mary concealed her hostility to Elizabeth because she
thought the two daughters of Henry VIII ought to appear together in her
triumphal entry into London. From one point of view--and a feminine one
at that--this was a fatal mistake on Mary's part: for never did
Elizabeth show to more advantage. She was just under twenty, while Mary
was nearly twice her age. Mary had, indeed, provided herself with one
good foil in the person of Anne of Cleves, the 'Flemish mare' whose flat
coarse face and lumbering body had disgusted King Henry thirteen years
before, when Cromwell had foisted her upon him as his fourth wife. But
with poor, fat, straw-colored Anne on one side, and black-and-sallow,
foreign-looking, man-voiced Mary on the other, the thoroughly English
Princess Elizabeth took London by storm on the spot. Tall and majestic,