y is a history of matrimonial schemes
and negotiations. It seemed as if all the marriageable princes and
potentates of Europe were seized, one after another, with a desire to
share her seat upon the English throne. They tried every possible means
to win her consent. They dispatched embassadors; they opened long
negotiations; they sent her ship-loads of the most expensive presents:
some of the nobles of high rank in her own realm expended their vast
estates, and reduced themselves to poverty, in vain attempts to please
her. Elizabeth, like any other woman, loved these attentions. They
pleased her vanity, and gratified those instinctive impulses of the
female heart by which woman is fitted for happiness and love. Elizabeth
encouraged the hopes of those who addressed her sufficiently to keep
them from giving up in despair and abandoning her. And in one or two
cases she seemed to come very near yielding. But it always happened
that, when the time arrived in which a final decision must be made,
ambition and desire of power proved stronger than love, and she
preferred continuing to occupy her lofty position by herself, alone.

Philip of Spain, the husband of her sister Mary, was the first of these
suitors. He had seen Elizabeth a good deal in England during his
residence there, and had even taken her part in her difficulties with
Mary, and had exerted his influence to have her released from her
confinement. As soon as Mary died and Elizabeth was proclaimed, one of
her first acts was, as was very proper, to send an embassador to
Flanders to inform the bereaved husband of his loss. It is a curious
illustration of the degree and kind of affection that Philip had borne
to his departed wife, that immediately on receiving intelligence of her
death by Elizabeth's embassador, he sent a special dispatch to his own
embassador in London to make a proposal to Elizabeth to take him for
_her_ husband!

Elizabeth decided very soon to decline this proposal. She had ostensible
reasons, and real reasons for this. The chief ostensible reason was,
that Philip was so inveterately hated by all the English people, and
Elizabeth was extremely desirous of being popular. She relied solely on
the loyalty and faithfulness of her Protestant subjects to maintain her
rights to the succession, and she knew that if she displeased them by
such an unpopular Catholic marriage, her reliance upon them must be very
much weakened. They might even abandon her entir