Probably the solution of the riddle - suggested at the time by various onlookers, and accepted by learned authorities since - was that most of her ailments were of an hysterical origin. That iron structure was a prey to nerves. The hazards and anxieties in which she passed her life would have been enough in themselves to shake the health of the most vigorous; but it so happened that, in Elizabeth's case, there was a special cause for a neurotic condition: her sexual organisation was seriously warped.

 

From its very beginning her emotional life had been subjected to extraordinary strains. The intensely impressionable years of her early childhood had been for her a period of excitement, terror, and tragedy. It is possible that she could just remember the day when, to celebrate the death of Catherine of Aragon, her father, dressed from top to toe in yellow, save for one white plume in his bonnet, led her to mass in a triumph of trumpets, and then, taking her in his arms, showed her to one after another of his courtiers, in high delight. But it is also possible that her very earliest memory was of a different kind: when she was two years and eight months old, her father cut off her mother's head. Whether remembered or no, the reactions of such an event upon her infant spirit must have been profound. The years that followed were full of trouble and dubiety. Her fate varied incessantly with the complex changes of her father's politics and marriages; alternately caressed and neglected, she was the heir to England at one moment and a bastard outcast the next. And then, when the old King was dead, a new and dangerous agitation almost overwhelmed her. She was not yet fifteen, and was living in the house of her stepmother, Catherine Parr, who had married the Lord Admiral Seymour, brother of Somerset, the Protector. The Admiral was handsome, fascinating and reckless; he amused himself with the Princess. Bounding into her room in the early morning, he would fall upon her, while she was in her bed or just out of it, with peals of laughter, would seize her in his arms and tickle her, and slap her buttocks, and crack a ribald joke. These proceedings continued for several weeks, when Catherine Parr, getting wind of them, sent Elizabeth to live elsewhere. A few months later Catherine died, and the Admiral proposed marriage to Elizabeth. The ambitious charmer, aiming at the supreme power, hoped to strengthen himself against his brother by a union with the royal blood. His plots were discovered; he was flung into the Tower, and the Protector sought to inculpate Elizabeth in the conspiracy. The agonised girl kept her head. The looks and the ways of Thomas Seymour had delighted her; but she firmly denied that she had ever contemplated marriage without the Protector's consent. In a masterly letter, written in an exquisite hand, she rebutted Somerset's charges. It was rumoured, she told him, that she was "with child by my Lord Admiral"; this was a "shameful schandler"; and she begged to be allowed to go to court, where all would see that it was so. The Protector found that he could do nothing with his fifteen-year-old antagonist; but he ordered the Admiral to be beheaded.

 

Such were the circumstances - both horrible and singular - in which her childhood and her puberty were passed. Who can wonder that her maturity should have been marked by signs of nervous infirmity? No sooner was she on the throne than a strange temperamental anomaly declared itself. Since the Catholic Mary Stuart was the next heir, the Protestant cause in England hung suspended, so long as Elizabeth remained unmarried, by the feeble thread of her life. The obvious, the natural, the inevitable conclusion was that the Queen's marriage must immediately take place. But the Queen was of a different opinion. Marriage was distasteful to her, and marry she would not. For more than twenty years, until age freed her from the controversy, she resisted, through an incredible series of delays, ambiguities, perfidies, and tergiversations, the incessant pressure of her ministers, her parliaments, and her people. Considerations of her own personal safety were of no weight with her. Her childlessness put a premium upon her murder; she knew it, and she smiled.