ge have been, when at her Coronation she came by water to the Abbey!

{48}

She often stayed in her palace called Plaisance; how grandly she lived
there! One who saw her there tells of the "gentlemen, barons, earls,
Knights of the Garter, all richly-dressed and bareheaded," who went
before her; one of them carried the sceptre, another the sword of
state. The ladies of her Court followed her, and she was guarded on
each side by fifty gentlemen who carried gilt battle-axes. She was
herself magnificently dressed, and "wherever she turned her face as she
passed along, everybody fell down on their knees."

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[Illustration: NO. 13. GREENWICH AS IT IS NOW.]

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Sometimes, when she wanted to be amused, plays were acted in the great
hall of the palace, and she sat in her chair of state with her ladies
about her and looked on. I wonder if any of these plays were written
by Shakespeare? Perhaps they were; it is even possible that
Shakespeare himself may have acted before her, for he had come to
London from his country home two years before the Spanish Armada sailed
up the English Channel to conquer England; and during the last five
years of her reign, whenever Elizabeth went up the river in her barge,
she passed the round wooden theatre, called the Globe, where his plays
were acted, for it was in Southwark on the south bank. There is no
sign of it now; a great brewery has been built over the place where
once it stood.

These were the days when English sailors fought the Spanish on the high
seas, because they claimed all the New World as their own and strove to
keep everyone else out of it. From the windows or the terrace of her
palace did the Queen ever watch ships sailing down the river to take
part in this struggle, or in another,--a struggle with winds and waves,
ice and {49} snow, as the sailors tried to explore the unknown coasts
of America? Once at least we know she did, for Admiral Frobisher's two
little ships fired a salute to her as they dropped down the river. He
was going to search for gold and for the North-West Passage round the
north of America to the Pacific. He found no passage and no gold
though he went again and yet again to the cold North. How often
Englishmen searched for that passage; how hard they found it to believe
that there is no way for ships throug