Note 77 — DIALOGUE III. ON THE AGE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH.

This romantic spirit of the Queen may be seen as well in her amours, as military achievements. “Ambiri, coli ob formam, et AMORIBUS, etiam inclinatâ jam ætate, videri voluit; de FABULOSIS INSULIS per illam relaxationem renovatâ quasi memoriâ in quibus EQUITES AC STRENUI HOMINES ERRABANT, et AMORES, fœditate omni prohibitâ, generosè per VIRTUTEM exercebant.”

Thuani Hist. tom. vi. p. 172.

The observation of the great historian is confirmed by Francis Osborne, Esq., who, speaking of a contrivance of the Cecilian party to ruin the earl of Essex, by giving him a rival in the good graces of the queen, observes—“But the whole result concluding in a duel, did rather inflame than abate the former account she made of him: the opinion of a CHAMPION being more splendid (in the weak and romantic sense of women, that admit of nothing fit to be made the object of a quarrel but themselves) and far above that of a captain or general. So as Sir Edmund Cary, brother to the Lord Hunsdon, then chamberlain and near kinsman to the Queen, told me, that though she chid them both, nothing pleased her better than a conceit she had, that her beauty was the subject of this quarrel, when, God knows, it grew from the stock of honour, of which then they were very tender.”—Mem. of Q. Elizabeth, p. 456.

But nothing shews the romantic disposition of the Queen, and indeed of her times, more evidently than the TRIUMPH, as it was called; devised and performed with great solemnity, in honour of the French commissioners in 1581. The contrivance was for four of her principal courtiers, under the quaint appellation of “four foster-children of DESIRE,” to besiege and carry, by dint of arms, “the fortress of Beauty;” intending, by this courtly ænigma, nothing less than the queen’s majesty’s own person.—The actors in this famous triumph were, the Earl of Arundel, the Lord Windsor, Master Philip Sidney, and Master Fulk Grevil. And the whole was conducted so entirely in the spirit and language of knight errantry, that nothing in the Arcadia itself is more romantic. See the account at large in Stow’s continuation of Holinshed’s Chronicles, p. 1316-1321.

To see the drift and propriety of this triumph, it is to be observed that the business which brought the French commissioners into England was, the great affair of the queen’s marriage with the duke of Alançon.