If the great Queen, whose memory is still held in just veneration by Englishmen, had possessed sufficient virtue and sufficient enlargement of mind to adopt those principles which More, wiser in speculation than in action, had avowed in the preceding generation, and by which the excellent L’Hospital regulated his conduct in her own time, how different would be the colour of the whole history of the last two hundred and fifty years!  She had the happiest opportunity ever vouchsafed to any sovereign of establishing perfect freedom of conscience throughout her dominions, without danger to her government, without scandal to any large party among her subjects.  The nation, as it was clearly ready to profess either religion, would, beyond all doubt, have been ready to tolerate both.  Unhappily for her own glory and for the public peace, she adopted a policy from the effects of which the empire is still suffering.  The yoke of the Established Church was pressed down on the people till they would bear it no longer.  Then a reaction came.  Another reaction followed.  To the tyranny of the establishment succeeded the tumultuous conflict of sects, infuriated by manifold wrongs, and drunk with unwonted freedom.  To the conflict of sects succeeded again the cruel domination of one persecuting church.  At length oppression put off its most horrible form, and took a milder aspect.  The penal laws which had been framed for the protection of the established church were abolished.  But exclusions and disabilities still remained.  These exclusions and disabilities, after having generated the most fearful discontents, after having rendered all government in one part of the kingdom impossible, after having brought the state to the very brink of ruin, have, in our times, been removed, but, though removed have left behind them a rankling which may last for many years.  It is melancholy to think with what case Elizabeth might have united all conflicting sects under the shelter of the same impartial laws and the same paternal throne, and thus have placed the nation in the same situation, as far as the rights of conscience are concerned, in which we at last stand, after all the heart-burnings, the persecutions, the conspiracies, the seditions, the revolutions, the judicial murders, the civil wars, of ten generations.

This is the dark side of her character.  Yet she surely was a great woman.  Of all the sovereigns who exercised a power which was seemingly absolute, but which in fact depended for support on the love and confidence of their subjects, she was by far the most illustrious.  It has often been alleged as an excuse for the misgovernment of her successors that they only followed her example, that precedents might be found in the transactions of her reign for persecuting the Puritans, for levying money without the sanction of the House of Commons, for confining men without bringing them to trial, for interfering with the liberty of parliamentary debate.  All