“In fighting out her long quarrel with Spain and building her church system out of the broken masonry of popery, her concluding years passed away. The great men who had upheld the throne in the days of her peril dropped one by one into the grave. Walsingham died soon after the defeat of the Armada, ruined in fortune and weary of his ungrateful service. Hunsdon, Knollys, Burleigh, Drake, followed at brief intervals, and their mistress was left by herself, standing as it seemed on the pinnacle of earthly glory, yet in all the loneliness of greatness, and unable to enjoy the honors which Burleigh’s policy had won for her. The first place among the Protestant powers, which had been so often offered her and so often refused, has been forced upon her in spite of herself. She was head of the name, but it gave her no pleasure. She was the last of her race; no Tudor would sit again on the English throne. Her own sad prophecy was fulfilled, and she lived to see those whom she most trusted turning their eyes to the rising sun. “Old age was coming upon her, bringing with it perhaps a consciousness of failing faculties; and solitary in the midst of splendor, and friendless among the circle of adorers, who swore they lived but in her presence, she grew weary of a life which had ceased to interest her. Sickening of a vague disease, she sought no help from medicine, and finally refused to take food. She could not rest in her bed, but sat silent on cushions, staring into vacancy with fixed and stony eyes, and so at last she died. “All questions connected with the virgin queen should be rather studied in her actions than in the opinion of the historian who relates them. _Opinions_ are but forms of cloud created by the prevailing currents of the moral air. _Actions and words are carved upon eternity._” CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI. A.D. 1519-1589. “What mighty ills have not been done by woman? Who was’t betrayed the Capitol? A woman! Who lost Mark Antony the world? A woman! Who was the cause of a long ten years’ war, And laid at last old Troy in ashes? Woman! Destructive,—deceitful woman!”—OTWAY. “Woman may err, woman may give her mind To evil thoughts, and lose her pure estate; But for one woman who affronts her kind By wicked passions and remorseless hate, A thousand make amends in age and youth, By heavenly pity, by sweet sympathy, By patient kindness, by enduring truth, By love, supremest in adversity.”—CHARLES MACKAY. “WOE to thee, O country, that hast a child for king!” exclaimed the Venetian ambassador in France, in 1560, when Charles IX., a child ten years old, ascended the throne; but greater woe to that country because the mother of that child, who held the power of government, as queen-regent, was one of the greatest monsters of crime in the annals of history, and forced that child to become a very fiend of infamy and cruelty. [Illustration: CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI