“By this, sire, your majesty may perceive that this queen is every day trying new inventions to escape from this passage (that is, on fixing her marriage, or the succession).  She thinks that the Duke of Norfolk is principally the cause of this insisting,[91] which one person and the other stand to; and is so angried against him, that, if she can find any decent pretext to arrest him, I think she will not fail to do it; and he himself, as I understand, has already very little doubt of this.[92] The duke told the earl of Northumberland, that the queen remained steadfast to her own opinion, and would take no other advice than her own, and would do everything herself.”

The storms in our parliament do not necessarily end in political shipwrecks, whenever the head of the government is an Elizabeth.  She, indeed, sent down a prohibition to the house from all debate on the subject.  But when she discovered a spirit in the commons, and language as bold as her own royal style, she knew how to revoke the exasperating prohibition.  She even charmed them by the manner; for the commons returned her “prayers and thanks,” and accompanied them with a subsidy.  Her majesty found by experience, that the present, like other passions, was more easily calmed and quieted by following than resisting, observes Sir Symonds D’Ewes.

The wisdom of Elizabeth, however, did not weaken her intrepidity.  The struggle was glorious for both parties; but how she escaped through the storm which her mysterious conduct had at once raised and quelled, the sweetness and the sharpness, the commendation and the reprimand of her noble speech in closing the parliament, are told by Hume with the usual felicity of his narrative.[93]

ANECDOTES OF PRINCE HENRY, THE SON OF JAMES I., WHEN A CHILD.

Prince Henry, the son of James I., whose premature death was lamented by the people, as well as by poets and historians, unquestionably would have proved an heroic and military character.  Had he ascended the throne, the whole face of our history might have been changed; the days of Agincourt and Cressy had been revived, and Henry IX. had rivalled Henry V. It is remarkable that Prince Henry resembled that monarch in his features, as Ben Jonson has truly recorded, though in a complimentary verse, and as we may see by his picture, among the ancient English ones at Dulwich College.  Merlin, in a masque by Jonson, addresses Prince Henry,

    Yet rests that other thunderbolt of war,
    Harry the Fifth; to whom in face you are
    So like, as fate would have you so in worth.