middle class _must be friends_. She might
resist and insult her lords and ministers, send great Earls and
favorites ruthlessly to the block, but no slightest cloud must come
between her and her "dear Commons" and people. This it was which made
Spenser's adulation in the "Faerie Queen" but an expression of the
intense loyalty of her meanest subject.

Perhaps it was because she remembered {88} that the whole fabric of the
Church rested upon Parliamentary enactment, and that she herself was
Queen of England by Parliamentary sanction, that she viewed so
complacently the growing power of that body in dealing more and more
with matters supposed to belong exclusively to the Crown, as for
instance in the struggle made by the Commons to suppress monopolies in
trade, granted by royal prerogative. At the first she angrily resisted
the measure. But finding the strength of the popular sentiment, she
gracefully retreated, declaring, with royal scorn for truth, that "she
had not before known of the existence of such an evil."

In fact, lying, in her independent code of morals, was a virtue, and
one to which she owed some of her most brilliant triumphs in diplomacy.
And when the bald, unmitigated lie was at last found out, she felt not
the slightest shame, but only amusement at the simplicity of those who
had believed she was speaking the truth.

Her natural instincts, her thrift, and her love of peace inclined her
to keep aloof {89} from the struggle going on in Europe between
Protestants and Catholics. But while the news of St. Bartholomew's Eve
seemed to give her no thrill of horror, she still sent armies and money
to aid the Huguenots in France, and to stem the persecutions of Philip
in the Netherlands, and committed England fully to a cause for which
she felt no enthusiasm. She encouraged every branch of industry,
commerce, trade, fostered everything which would lead to prosperity.
Listened to Raleigh's plans for colonization in America, permitting the
New Colony to be called "Virginia" in her honor (the Virgin Queen).
She chartered the "Merchant Company," intended to absorb the new trade
with the Indies (1600), and which has expanded into a British Empire in
India.

But amid all this triumph, a sad and solitary woman sat on the throne
of England. The only relation she had in the world was her cousin,
Mary Stuart, who was plotting to undermine and supplant her.

The question of Elizabeth's legitimacy was an ever recurr