While she was princess she received a private proposal of marriage from Sweden; but she declared, “she could not change her condition.” On her becoming queen, her brother-in-law, Philip II. of Spain, addressed her; but this match also she declined. In the first parliament of her reign, the house of commons represented it as necessary to the welfare of the nation “to move her grace to marriage.” She answered, that by the ceremony of her inauguration she was married to her people, and her subjects were to her instead of children; that they would not want a successor when she died; adding, “And in the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare, that a queen having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.” Several great personages proposed a matrimonial union with this illustrious princess; but she maintained her celibacy to the last. The Duke of Anjou seems to have been the most acceptable of her suitors. On his visit to England in 1581, not only was he received with much public parade, but she vouchsafed him strong tokens of personal attachment, and even suffered the marriage articles to be drawn up. But the strong remonstrances of her ministers and favourites finally prevailed, and the intended marriage was broken off. The compilers of memoirs have racked their brains for some plausible explanation of Elizabeth’s repugnance to matrimony. When overtures were first made to her she was young, and had a good person, which she spared no art in setting off to advantage: she was notoriously fond of admiration, and was no less jealous of the personal beauty of Mary, Queen of Scots, than of her competition as a rival sovereign, or as a claimant of the crown of England. Neither prudery nor coldness could be imputed to her. Her gaiety extorted a sarcastic exclamation from an ambassador: “I have seen the head of the English church dancing!” She chose her favourites, Leicester, Essex, Raleigh, and others, from among the most comely, as well as the most valiant and accomplished of her subjects. Melvil, who had been sent by Mary of Scotland to the court of Elizabeth, relates in his Memoirs, that on creating Lord Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester and Baron of Denbigh, at Westminster, with much solemnity, the queen assisted at the ceremonial, and he knelt before her with great gravity: “but,” he says, “she could not refrain from putting her hand to his neck, smilingly tickling him, the French ambassador and I standing by.” In relating his diplomatic transactions, he furnishes other proofs of the queen’s partiality for the Earl of Leicester. He had occasion to name before her “my Lord of Bedford and my Lord Robert Dudley. She answered, it appeared I made but small account of my Lord Robert, seeing I named the Earl of Bedford before him; but that ere long she would make him a far greater Earl; and that I should see it done before my return home. For she esteemed him as her brother and best