may call cunning: we have as good a right to say that he was
returning good for evil. There were noble qualities in Essex. All
the world gave him credit for them, and far more than he deserved;
why should not Raleigh have been just to him; even have conceived,
like the rest of the world, high hopes of him, till he himself
destroyed these hopes? For now storms are rising fast. On their
return Cecil is in power. He has been made Secretary of State
instead of Bodley, Essex's pet, and the spoilt child begins to sulk.
On which matter, I am sorry to say, historians talk much unwisdom,
about Essex's being too 'open and generous, etc., for a courtier,'
and 'presuming on his mistress's passion for him'; and representing
Elizabeth as desiring to be thought beautiful, and 'affecting at
sixty the sighs, loves, tears, and tastes of a girl of sixteen,' and
so forth. It is really time to get rid of some of this fulsome talk,
culled from such triflers as Osborne, if not from the darker and
fouler sources of Parsons and the Jesuit slanderers, which I meet
with a flat denial. There is simply no proof. She in love with
Essex or Cecil? Yes, as a mother with a son. Were they not the
children of her dearest and most faithful servants, men who had lived
heroic lives for her sake? What wonder if she fancied that she saw
the fathers in the sons? They had been trained under her eye. What
wonder if she fancied that they could work as their fathers worked
before them? And what shame if her childless heart yearned over them
with unspeakable affection, and longed in her old age to lay her
hands upon the shoulders of those two young men, and say to England,
'Behold the children which God, and not the flesh, has given me!'
Most strange it is, too, that women, who ought at least to know a
woman's heart, have been especially forward in publishing these
scandals, and sullying their pages by retailing pruriences against
such a one as Queen Elizabeth.