mistress. For although Elizabeth loved magnificence, she loved economy more. The repair of a ruined exchequer was one of the primary objects and triumphs of her statecraft. Her household, although stately, was by no means on her father's, or even her sister's, scale of expenditure. The splendours of her jewel-house and even of her wardrobe largely owed their origin to the strenae of successive New Years. A similar policy governed the ordering of her amusements. Her Christmas annals afford no parallels to the costly masks, with their marvels of architectural decoration, which had glorified the court of Henry and were to glorify that of James. Her masks, at least those she paid for, were dances, not pageants. The great spectacles of the reign were liturgies, undertaken by her gallants, or by the nobles whose country houses she visited in the course of her annual progresses. The most famous of all, the 'Princely Pleasures of Kenilworth' in 1575, was at the expense of Dudley, to whom the ancient royal castle had long been alienated. Gradually, no doubt, the financial stringency was relaxed. Camden notes a growing tendency to luxury about 1574; others trace the change to the coming of the Duke of Alençon in 1581.[1] Elizabeth had found the way to evoke a national spirit, and at the same time to fill her coffers, by the encouragement of piratical enterprise, and the sumptuous entertainments prepared for the welcome of Monsieur were paid for out of the spoils brought back by Drake in the Golden Hind.[2] The Alençon negotiations, whether seriously intended or not, represent Elizabeth's last dalliance with the idea of matrimony. They gave way to that historic pose of unapproachable virginity, whereby an elderly Cynthia, without complete loss of dignity, was enabled to the end to maintain a sentimental claim upon the attentions, and the purses, of her youthful servants. The strenuous years, which led up to the final triumph over the Armada in 1588, spared but little room for revels and for progresses. They left Elizabeth an old woman. But with the removal of the strain the spirit of gaiety awoke. The entertainments during the progresses of 1591 and 1592 hardly yield to those of 1575 in the cost and ingenuity of their symbolical devices. Essex, the darling of these later years, perhaps found it easier to keep the court alive with tilts and masks, than to play his required part in the sentimental comedy. The love of the dance endured with Elizabeth
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ELIZABETH AND JAMES
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