The world was confounded by such unparalleled conduct. It was not as if an icy chastity possessed the heart of Elizabeth. Far from it; the very opposite seemed to be the case. Nature had implanted in her an amorousness so irrepressible as to be always obvious and sometimes scandalous. She was filled with delicious agitation by the glorious figures of men. Her passion for Leicester dominated her existence from the moment when her sister's tyranny had brought them together in the Tower of London till the last hour of his life; and Leicester had virile beauty, and only virile beauty, to recommend him. Nor was Leicester alone in her firmament: there were other stars which, at moments, almost outshone him. There was the stately Hatton, so comely in a galliard; there was handsome Heneage; there was De Vere, the dashing king of the tiltyard; there was young Blount, with "his brown hair, a sweet face, a most neat composure, and tall in his person," and the colour that, when the eye of Majesty was fixed upon him, came and went so beautifully in his cheeks.

 

She loved them all; so it might be said by friends and enemies; for love is a word of questionable import; and over the doings of Elizabeth there hovered indeed a vast interrogation. Her Catholic adversaries roundly declared that she was Leicester's mistress, and had had by him a child, who had been smuggled away into hiding - a story that is certainly untrue. But there were also entirely contrary rumours afloat. Ben Jonson told Drummond, at Hawthornden, after dinner, that "she had a membrana on her, which made her uncapable of man, though for her delight she tryed many." Ben's loose talk, of course, has no authority; it merely indicates the gossip of the time; what is more important is the considered opinion of one who had good means of discovering the truth - Feria, the Spanish ambassador. After making careful inquiries, Feria had come to the conclusion, he told King Philip, that Elizabeth would have no children: "entiendo que ella no terna hijos," were his words. If this was the case, or if Elizabeth believed it to be so, her refusal to marry becomes at once comprehensible. To have a husband and no child would be merely to lose her personal preponderance and gain no counter-balancing advantages; the Protestant succession would be no nearer safety, and she herself would be eternally vexed by a master. The crude story of a physical malformation may well have had its origin in a subtler, and yet no less vital, fact. In such matters the mind is as potent as the body. A deeply seated repugnance to the crucial act of intercourse may produce, when the possibility of it approaches, a condition of hysterical convulsion, accompanied, in certain cases, by intense pain. Everything points to the conclusion that such - the result of the profound psychological disturbances of her childhood - was the state of Elizabeth. "I hate the idea of marriage," she told Lord Sussex, "for reasons that I would not divulge to a twin soul." Yes; she hated it; but she would play with it nevertheless. Her intellectual detachment and her supreme instinct for the opportunities of political chicanery led her on to dangle the promise of her marriage before the eyes of the coveting world. Spain, France, and the Empire - for years she held them, lured by that impossible bait, in the meshes of her diplomacy. For years she made her mysterious organism the pivot upon which the fate of Europe turned. And it so happened that a contributing circumstance enabled her to give a remarkable verisimilitude to her game. Though, at the centre of her being, desire had turned to repulsion, it had not vanished altogether; on the contrary, the compensating forces of nature had redoubled its vigour elsewhere. Though the precious citadel itself was never to be violated, there were surrounding territories, there were outworks and bastions over which exciting battles might be fought, and which might even, at moments, be allowed to fall into the bold hands of an assailant. Inevitably, strange rumours flew. The princely suitors multiplied their assiduities; and the Virgin Queen alternately frowned and smiled over her secret.

 

The ambiguous years passed, and the time came at length when there could be no longer a purpose in marriage. But the Queen's curious temperament remained. With the approach of old age, her emotional excitements did not diminish. Perhaps, indeed, they actually increased; though here too there was a mystification.