The Project Gutenberg eBook, In the Days of Queen Elizabeth, by Eva March Tappan

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Title: In the Days of Queen Elizabeth

Author: Eva March Tappan

Release Date: September 29, 2014 [eBook #47006]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE DAYS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH***

E-text prepared by David Edwards, Charlie Howard,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)
from page images generously made available by
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(https://archive.org)

Elizabeth, Queen of England.

Makers of England Series

IN THE DAYS
OF
QUEEN ELIZABETH

BY
EVA MARCH TAPPAN, Ph.D.

Author of “In the Days of Alfred the Great”
“In the Days of William the Conqueror” etc.

ILLUSTRATED FROM FAMOUS PAINTINGS

BOSTON:
LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.

Copyright, 1902, by Lee and Shepard
Published August, 1902

All rights reserved

In the Days of Queen Elizabeth

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood, Mass. U. S. A.

PREFACE

Of all the sovereigns that have worn the crown of England, Queen Elizabeth is the most puzzling, the most fascinating, the most blindly praised, and the most unjustly blamed. To make lists of her faults and virtues is easy. One may say with little fear of contradiction that her intellect was magnificent and her vanity almost incredibly childish; that she was at one time the most outspoken of women, at another the most untruthful; that on one occasion she would manifest a dignity that was truly sovereign, while on another the rudeness of her manners was unworthy of even the age in which she lived. Sometimes she was the strongest of the strong, sometimes the weakest of the weak.

At a distance of three hundred years it is not easy to balance these claims to censure and to admiration, but at least no one should forget that the little white hand of which she was so vain guided the ship of state with most consummate skill in its perilous passage through the troubled waters of the latter half of the sixteenth century.

Eva March Tappan.

Worcester, March, 1902.

CONTENTS