crown of England, after Mary's death, would pass to Mary of Scotland, who had just married the dauphin of France. And his hatred of France proved stronger than his zeal for his religion. Nevertheless, Elizabeth underwent great sufferings and ill-treatment during her sister's reign.
Elizabeth begin to reign in 1558. She was then twenty-five, and highly accomplished. Her person was graceful, her carriage noble and majestic, and though her features were not regular, yet her fair complexion, her lustrous eyes, and intelligent animated expression, scarcely suffered smaller imperfections to be observed. She was endowed with great talents, enlarged, cultivated, and refined by education. She wrote letters in English and Italian at thrirteen; and, before she was seventeen, was perfect in the Latin, Greek, and French, and not unacquainted with other European languages. She also studied philosophy, rhetoric, history, divinity, poetry, and music, and everything that could improve or adorn the mind. Her first object after her accession, was to restore the Protestant religion; to this she was led by interest as well as principle, for she clearly perceived, if she professed Popery, that she must allow her father's divorce from Catharine of Arragon to be void, and consequently herself illegitimate; and this would have annulled her pretensions to the crown. She has been strongly suspected by some of an inclination to the Roman Catholic religion; but there is no proof of this. Indeed she was the real foundress of the English Episcopal Church, as it now exists. True, she was greatly assisted by her counsellor Cecil, afterwards Lord Burleigh; still Elizabeth herself always held the reins of government over the church, as well as over the state; and what she founded and upheld steadily for fifty years, must have been conformable to her own faith.
The queen, while she was a princess, had a private proposal of marriage from the King of Sweden; but she declared "she could not change her condition," though it was then very disagreeable. Upon her becoming queen, Philip of Spain, her late sister's husband, made an offer of himself to her, which she declined. In the first parliament of her reign, the house of commons addressed her, and represented to her how necessary it was, for the happiness of the nation, that she should think of marrying. She replied, "That by the ceremony of inauguration, she was married to her people, and her subjects were to her instead of children; that they should not want a successor when she died; and that, for her part, she should be very well contented to have her tomb-stone tell posterity, 'Here lies a queen, who reigned so long, and lived and died a virgin.'" Several matches were afterwards proposed to her by her people, and many distinguished personages were desirous of uniting themselves to this illustrious princess, but she maintained her celibacy.
It was not long before Elizabeth, by the advice of her council, began to interfere in the affairs of Scotland. Mary, the young queen of that country, was the next heir in blood to the crown of England; and as the zealous Romanists considered the birth of Elizabeth illegitimate, and her succession as rendered invalid by the papal excommunication she had undergone, they regarded Mary as the true sovereign of England. In accordance with this idea, when Queen Mary died, Mary of Scotland and her husband,
