prince, it is decent to go slow, and to march with leisure and with a certain grandity rather than gravity, as our sovereign lady and mistress, the very image of majesty and magnificence, is accustomed to go generally; unless it be when she walketh apace for her pleasure, or to catch her a heat in the cold mornings. Nevertheless, it is not so decent in a meaner person, as I have discerned in some counterfeit ladies in the country, which use it much to their own derision. This comeliness was wanting in Queen Mary, otherwise a very good and honourable princess.” It was a “comeliness” which, when enforced, weighed heavily; and when it vanished, the heart enjoyed its own impulses, and was no longer attracted by the fool and his “marottes.” It is certain, that with all Elizabeth’s refinement and taste, she had coarser men about her, as jesters, than her sister Mary. The uses to which some of them were put, is sufficiently remarkable. If Catholic Mary had her orthodox jester, the Reformed court of Elizabeth was not without its ultra-Protestant fool. As we shall find a French jester employed to laugh down the Reformed religion and its professors in France, so in England, Pace, “the bitter fool,” is said to have been engaged in a particular way to support it, in England, by destroying certain outward and visible signs supposed to savour too strongly of Popery. According to this story, Pace was employed by Sir Francis Knollys, to break down a crucifix and remove the lighted tapers which Queen Elizabeth persisted in having in her private chapel, in spite even of the friendly and urgent remonstrance of Archbishop Parker, offered repeatedly, but without success. I do not know that there is any reliable authority for this story. Certainly, a jester might dare to do what a Lord Primate would only respectfully insinuate; and, perhaps, Parker remembers the improvement effected in the Queen’s chapel by the court fool, Pace, when, in his letter to Sir William Cecil (October, 1560), after recommending certain personages for church preferment, he says: “Now, if either of them, or any of us all, should be feared to hurt the state of our churches, by exercising any extraordinary _patesing_, for packing and purchasing, this fear might sure be prevented. We have old precedents in law, practised in times past for such parties suspected, to be bound at their entry, to _have the churches in no worse case, by their defaults, than they found them_; and then what would you have more of us?” Now Pace, if he destroyed the cross and tapers in the Queen’s chapel, may be said to have left the edifice in a worse condition than it was in when he entered it. It is quite certain that Sir Francis Knollys was violently eager for the destruction of these ornaments. Just a year previous to Parker alluding to “patesing” in churches, Knollys writes to that prelate: “Wishing you prosperity in all godliness, namely in your good