Elizabeth Read Online Free PDF

to be reported to him every day.
    Philip of Spain’s ambassador to England was a remarkably astute diplomat. Don José María Jesús de Córdoba Duke de Feria and hidalgo of Spain, was one of the handsomest and most ambitious of men, who had entered England in the entourage of Mary Tudor’s husband. He combined all the courage and courtesy of his nation with a pleasing wit and an observant mind, unlike most of Philip’s courtiers who were universally loathed for their stiffness and unfriendliness. He had fallen in love with the prettiest of the Court ladies, Jane Dormer, and married her. He thus had a link with England which won him the post of ambassador, and he continued in it after Elizabeth’s accession.
    He had been granted a long audience with the new Queen, in which she spoke of Philip in the warmest terms, and held out promises of undying friendship with Spain. As he wrote to his Master afterwards, she was at such pains to be agreeable to him that her affability increased his suspicion of her motives. This was a remarkably shrewd assessment; he had come under the full force of her charm and her verbal gifts and remained unconvinced of her sincerity. Elizabeth did not dupe him, as she was apparently duping Philip himself. Feria was alarmed when his King’s despatches mentioned an affectionate letter from her, full of gratitude for his kindness in the past; he wrote off and begged Philip not to attach too much importance to anything she wrote or said, as he was convinced that she was lying. Everything would depend upon her choice of husband just as everything depended upon the first laws promulgated after her Coronation.
    At one point it seemed unlikely that she would be crowned. The Catholic Bishops, scenting a Protestant revival, refused to officiate. Then, no one knew by what means, either by bribery or threats or in the hope of effecting a compromise, the Bishop of Carlisle agreed to crown her. The clergy had made the first protest against Elizabeth, and it had failed. On January 15th she was crowned Queen at Westminster Abbey, with enough pomp and magnificence for a Pope’s Coronation and ten days later she opened her first Parliament. At last Feria’s warnings were justified. He had watched the ceremony that day, and he sat in his room in the Spanish Embassy, writing a bitter, detailed account of the Queen’s perfidy to King Philip. The Abbot and monks of Westminster had met her in procession, carrying candles. Elizabeth had stopped her carriage and ordered them to get out of her way; she had no need of torches, she said at the top of her voice, she could see well enough.…
    The incident outside Parliament was only a foretaste of what was to happen within.
    King Philip’s affectionate sister-in-law, the self-styled friend of Catholic Spain, had proclaimed herself Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a euphemism which deceived only those determined to escape the truth: for it was the same heretical claim as her father’s title in the Act of Supremacy which had cost so many noble lives. She had destroyed her sister’s work for a Catholic restoration by establishing an official form of worship which combined all the worst tenets of Protestantism and, at the same time, she had been cunning enough to delete the more offensive passages in the standard Prayer Book which referred to the Pope.
    The Bishops who had attempted to stop her Coronation were now paying for their defiance in prison. It was a further instance of the heretical tendencies of her people that, instead of rising in defence of their priests, the commonalty approved the outrage.
    In Feria’s opinion, the new Queen had no religion in her soul; her assault on the Catholic religion was committed in cold blood, dictated by expediency and without any saving grace of personal conviction behind it. She made a public show of repudiating the monks and their tapers while using candles in her private