Note 1067 — Chapter I

In his Introduction to the Study of English History (1881) Prof. Gardiner, through a dozen pages, discusses the action of Elizabeth's government solely in terms of her personality, never once mentioning her advisers. On this line he reaches the proposition that "the homage, absurd as it came to be, which was paid to the imaginary beauties of the royal person was in the main only an expression of the consciousness that peace and justice, the punishment of wickedness and vice, and the maintenance of good order and virtue, came primarily from the queen and secondarily from the Church." One is moved to suggest that the nonsense in question was not so bottomless as it is here virtually made out.