Burleigh’s counsels,—­unwillingly at times, but firmly when she perceived the necessity; for she was, with all her pertinacity, open to conviction of reason.  I cannot deny that she sometimes headed off her prime-minister and deceived him, and otherwise complicated the difficulties that beset her reign; but this was only when she felt a strong personal repugnance to the state measures which he found it imperative to pursue.  After all, Elizabeth was a woman, and the woman was not utterly lost in the Queen.  It is greatly to her credit, however, that she retained the services of this old statesman for forty years, and that she filled the great offices in the State and Church with men of experience, genius, and wisdom.  She made Parker the Archbishop of Canterbury,—­a man of remarkable moderation and breadth of mind, whose reforms were carried on without exciting hostilities, and have survived the fanaticisms and hostile attacks of generations.  Walsingham, her ambassador at Paris, and afterwards her secretary of state, ferreted out the plots of the Jesuits and the intrigues of hostile courts, and rendered priceless service by his acuteness and diligence.  Lord Effingham, one of the Howards, defeated the “Invincible Armada.”  Sir Thomas Gresham managed her finances so ably that she was never without money.  Coke was her attorney.  Sir Nicholas Bacon—­the ablest lawyer in the realm, and a stanch Protestant—­was her lord-keeper; while his illustrious son, the immortal Francis Bacon, though not adequately rewarded, was always consulted by the Queen in great legal difficulties.  I say nothing of those elegant and gallant men who were the ornaments of her court, and in some instances the generals of her armies and admirals of her navies,—­Sackville, Raleigh, Sidney, not to mention Essex and Leicester, all of whom were distinguished for talents and services; men who had no equals in their respective provinces; so gifted that it is difficult to determine whether the greatness of her reign was more owing to the talents of the ministers or to the wisdom of the Queen herself.  Unless she had been a great woman, I doubt whether she would have discerned the merits of these men, and employed them in her service and kept them so long in office.

It was by these great men that Elizabeth was ruled,—­so far as she was ruled at all,—­not by favorites, like her successors, James and Charles.  The favorites at the court of Elizabeth were rarely trusted with great powers unless they were men of signal abilities, and regarded as such by the nation itself.  While she lavished favors upon them,—­sometimes to the disgust of the old nobility,—­she was never ruled by them, as James was by Buckingham, and Louis XV. by Madame de Pompadour.  Elizabeth was not above coquetry, it is true; but after toying with Leicester and Raleigh,—­never, though, to the serious injury of her reputation as a woman,—­she would retire to the cabinet of her ministers and yield to the sage suggestions of Burleigh and Walsingham.  At her council-board she was an entirely different woman from what she was among her courtiers:  there she would tolerate no flattery, and was controlled only by reason and good sense,—­as practical as Burleigh himself, and as hard-working and business-like; cold, intellectual, and clear-headed, utterly without enthusiasm.