ABSTRACT
THE young woman of twenty-five who ascended the throneof England on 17 November 1558 presented a much moreformidable figure than her devout and blundering halfsister. A naturally imperious, self-willed and selfish character in the best Tudor tradition had been schooled by a hard childhood and adolescence into patience and calculation; even her rages were usually controlled by her mind. Elizabeth's character was of steel, her courage utterly beyond question, her will and understanding of men quite as great as her grandfather's and father's. She was a natural-born queen as her sister had never been-the most masculine of all the female sovereigns of history. At the same time she nourished several supposedly feminine characteristics. She was persistently dilatory, changed her mind as often as chance offered, exasperated everybody by her refusal to come to decisions, and charmed them all back again by some transparent piece ofgraciousness. Determined never to marry-her reasons seem to have been both political and personal-she developed two unpleasingly oldmaidish traits: a show of permanent youthfulness and desirability on the one hand, on the other venomous jealousy of younger women who found husbands. Her parsimony has already been explained as the careful housekeeping of a poor queen faced with ruinous expenses, and it is certainly true that she needed to save all she could. But however justified she \vas in husbanding her resources, the shifts and deceits and broken promises she often resorted to came perilously near to genuine miserliness. She was a great queen and never less than queen: sagacious, brave, tolerant \vhere it was wise, and tenacious of her rights where tolerance would have been weakness. But she fell far short of that standard of angelic perfection-that inability ever to do wrong-which some would like to ascribe to her, explaining even her errors of taste and judgment as superlative examples of political skill. After 350 years, the old spell is still at work.
