222 ONE THOUSAND FAMOUS THINGS
The Shadows Close About the Queen
THE triumph of Mount joy flung its lustre over the last days of
Elizabeth, but no outer triumph could break the gloom which
gathered round the dying queen. Lonely as she had always been,
her loneliness deepened as she drew towards the grave.
The statesmen and warriors of her earlier days had dropped one
by one from her Council-board ; and their successors were watching
her last moments, and intriguing for favour in the coming reign.
Her favourite, Lord Essex, was led into an insane outbreak of revolt
which brought him to the block. The old splendour of her court
waned and disappeared.
As she passed along in her progresses the people whose applause
she courted remained cold and silent. The temper of the age, in
fact, was changing, and isolating her as it changed. Her own
England, the England which had grown up around her, serious,
moral, prosaic, shrank coldly from this brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous
child of earth and the Renascence. She had enjoyed life as the men
of her day enjoyed it, and now that they were gone she clung to it
with a fierce tenacity.
She hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favourites, she
coquetted and scolded and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had done at
thirty. " The Queen," wrote a courtier a few months before her
death, " was never so gallant these many years, nor so set upon
jollity.95 She persisted in her gorgeous progresses from country-
house to country-house. She clung to business as of old.
But death crept on. Her face became haggard, and her frame
shrank almost to a skeleton. At last her taste for finery disappeared,
and she refused to change her dresses for a week together. A strange
melancholy settled down on her: " she held in her hand," says one
who saw her in her last days, " a golden cup, which she often put to
her lips : but in truth her heart seemed too full to need more filling."
Gradually her mind gave way. She lost her memory, the violence of
her temper became unbearable, her very courage seemed to forsake
her. She called for a sword to lie constantly beside her, and thrust it
from time to time through the arras, as if she heard murderers stirring
there. Food and rest became alike distasteful. She sate day and
night propped up with pillows on a stool, her finger on her lip, her
eyes fixed on the floor, without a word. If she once broke the silence
it was with a flash of her old queenliness. When Robert Cecil
asserted that she must go to bed, the word roused her like a trumpet.
" Must 1 " she exclaimed; " is Must a word to be addressed to
princes ? Little man, little man, thy father, if he had been alive,
durst not have used that word."
Then as her anger spent itself, she sank into her old dejection.
" Thou art so presumptuous," she said, " because thou knowest I
shall die.5- She rallied once more when the ministers beside her bed