Such are the difficulties which meet us in the study of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; but a close study of the contradictions in the character of Elizabeth herself will partly solve the seeming mystery. Elizabeth possessed great and heroic traits of character, but these were joined to such a pitiably weak, jealous, and treacherous nature as to make her an anomaly in the history of the world. She lived in an illustrious age, fraught with some of the most momentous events in the annals of time; in a century star-studded with the lustrous names of genius, whose immortal fame has shed a reflex glory on her reign. Interests vital to the progress of humanity teemed and surged around her throne, and lifted her glory high on the topmost crests of the glistening waves of the on-rushing ocean of enlightened civilization and religious liberty. Hentzner, the German traveller, who visited England in 1599, thus describes Elizabeth’s court four years previous to her death:— “The presence-chamber was hung with rich tapestry, and the floor, after the English fashion, strewn with hay, through which the queen commonly passed on her way to chapel. At the door stood a gentleman dressed in velvet, with a gold chain, whose office was to introduce to the queen any person of distinction who came to wait upon her. It was Sunday, when there was usually the greatest attendance of nobility. In the same hall were the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, a great number of councillors of state, officers of the crown, and gentlemen who waited the queen’s coming out, which she did from her own apartment when it was time to go to prayers, attended in the following manner: first went gentlemen, barons, earls, Knights of the Garter, all richly dressed and bareheaded; next came the chancellor, bearing the seals in a red silk purse, between two, one of which carried the royal sceptre, the other the sword of state in a red scabbard studded with golden _fleur-de-lys_, the point upward.