ates and enemies. For
enemies she had, poor child, envious and vindictive ones, who sought to
work her harm. Varied and unhappy had her young life already been. Born
amid splendid hopes, in the royal palace of Greenwich; called Elizabeth
after that grandmother, the fair heiress of the House of York, whose
marriage to a prince of the House of Lancaster had ended the long and
cruel War or the Roses; she had been welcomed with the peal of bells and
the boom of cannon, and christened with all the regal ceremonial of King
Henry's regal court. Then, when scarcely three years old, disgraced by
the wicked murder of her mother, cast off and repudiated by her brutal
father, and only received again to favor at the christening of her baby
brother, passing her childish days in grim old castles and a wicked
court,--she found herself, at thirteen, fatherless as well as
motherless, and at fifteen cast on her own resources, the sport of men's
ambitions and of conspirators' schemes. To-day the girl of fifteen,
tenderly reared, shielded from trouble by a mother's watchful love and a
father's loving care, can know but little of the dangers that compassed
this princess of England, the Lady Elizabeth. Deliberately separated
from her younger brother, the king, by his unwise and selfish
counsellors, hated by her elder sister, the Lady Mary, as the daughter
of the woman who had made HER mother's life so miserable, she was, even
in her manor-home of Hatfield, where she should have been most secure,
in still greater jeopardy. For this same Lord Seymour of Sudleye, who
was at once Lord High Admiral of England, uncle to the king, and brother
of Somerset the Lord Protector, had by fair promises and lavish gifts
bound to his purpose this defenceless girl's only protectors, Master
Parry, her cofferer, or steward, and Mistress Katherine Ashley, her
governess. And that purpose was to force the young princess into a
marriage with himself, so as to help his schemes of treason against the
Lord Protector, and get into his own hands the care of the boy king and
the government of the realm. It was a bold plot, and, if unsuccessful,
meant attainder and death for high treason; but Seymour, ambitious,
reckless, and unprincipled, thought only of his own desires, and cared
little for the possible ruin into which he was dragging the unsuspecting
and orphaned daughter of the king who had been his ready friend and
patron.

So matters stood at the period of our store,