she hastened to restore to her too amiable
kinsman the title of earl of Devonshire, long hereditary in the
illustrious house of Courtney, to which she added the whole of those
patrimonial estates which the forfeiture of his father had vested in the
crown. She went further; she lent a propitious ear to the whispered
suggestion of her people, still secretly partial to the house of York,
that an English prince of the blood was most worthy to share the throne
of an English queen. It is even affirmed that hints were designedly
thrown out to the young man himself of the impression which he had made
upon her heart. But Courtney generously disdained, as it appears, to
barter his affections for a crown. The youth, the talents, the graces
of Elizabeth had inspired him with a preference which he was either
unwilling or unable to conceal; Mary was left to vent her disappointment
in resentment against the ill-fated object of her preference, and in
every demonstration of a malignant jealousy towards her innocent and
unprotected rival.

By the first act of a parliament summoned immediately after the
coronation, Mary's birth had been pronounced legitimate, the marriage of
her father and mother valid, and their divorce null and void. A stigma
was thus unavoidably cast on the offspring of Henry's second marriage;
and no sooner had Elizabeth incurred the displeasure of her sister, than
she was made to feel how far the consequences of this new declaration of
the legislature might be made to extend. Notwithstanding the unrevoked
succession act which rendered her next heir to the crown, she was
forbidden to take place of the countess of Lenox, or the duchess of
Suffolk, in the presence-chamber, and her friends were discountenanced
or affronted obviously on her account. Her merit, her accomplishments,
her insinuating manners, which attracted to her the admiration and
attendance of the young nobility, and the favor of the nation, were so
many crimes in the eyes of a sovereign who already began to feel her own
unpopularity; and Elizabeth, who was not of a spirit to endure public
and unmerited slights with tameness, found it at once the most dignified
and the safest course, to seek, before the end of the year, the peaceful
retirement of her house of Ashridge in Buckinghamshire. It was however
made a condition of the leave of absence from court which she was
obliged to solicit, that she should take with her sir Thomas Pope and
sir John Gage, who