Part of Elizabeth's gain in power was due to the improved condition of England. The country was at peace, taxes were not large; ways of living were becoming more comfortable; all subjects were required to attend the Protestant church, but fines and loss of office were small matters when compared with the axe and the stake; bold sailors were taking English ships to distant harbors; a great exchange had been built in London where merchants from any part of the world might come to buy and sell; and the thing that made all these advantages possible was the fact that the government was firm and sure. That the queen was the vainest woman who ever lived, that she would say one thing one day and quite another thing the next morning was perhaps not known outside of her court, and in any case, her subjects would have forgiven her faults, for they felt that she was ever a friend to them, that she believed in them and trusted them. At one time a gun went off by accident and the bullet came very near the queen. Elizabeth straightway issued a proclamation, "I will believe nothing against my subjects," said she, "that loving parents would not believe of their children." Elizabeth refused positively to stand at the head of any one party; she was determined to be, as she said, "a good queen" to all her subjects. It must be admitted that she was sometimes unjust to the "great folk," but nothing else aroused her wrath so surely and so dangerously as a wrong done to her people, to the masses of her subjects, with whom she felt sympathy and to whom she turned for support. It was an ancient custom in the land that whenever the sovereign went from one part of the kingdom to another, the people of whatever district he might chance to be in should furnish him with food for his attendants, often numbered by hundreds. "Purveyors," or officers whose business it was to attend to the providing of food, went ahead of the royal party and took what they chose to declare would be needed. Sometimes they paid for it--whatever price they chose--sometimes they did not, but in any case the purveyor was sorely tempted to seize larger quantities of supplies than would be needed and sell them elsewhere. When Elizabeth discovered that one of her officers had been behaving in this manner, she was most indignant. "My people shall suffer by no such abuses," she declared. One article that the cheating purveyor had seized and sold for the advantage of his own pocket was a quantity of smelts. "Take him to the pillory," bade the angry queen. "Hang the smelts about his neck, and see you to it that there shall he sit for three full days. Let him who steals from my people keep in his account that he has to reckon not with them but with me; they are _my_ people, and I am their queen."