The Ifs of History/Chapter 5
NEVER did greater events hinge upon a woman's caprice against marriage than those which were poised on the will of Elizabeth, Queen of England, in the long years that lay between the time when, as a young queen, it was proposed to marry her to the Duke of Anjou, and the sere and yellow leaf of her womanhood, when her potential maternity was past.
If Elizabeth had married, as her people often implored her to do, and if her progeny had sat upon the throne and continued the sway of the Tudors, half a century of turmoil and bloodshed, under the essentially foreign rule of the Stuarts, might have been spared to England. The Revolution doubtless would never have taken place. The material and intellectual advance of England and all Britain would have been steady and sure upon the splendid foundation of the Elizabethan structure.
But, on the other hand, as good is often evolved from evil, much that is sacred and vital to the whole Anglo-Saxon race might have been missed. The Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus Act and other guarantees that were obtained through the Revolution or the Commonwealth would have been wanting in the English Constitution. Oliver Cromwell and John Hampden would probably have remained in rustic obscurity. All modern Europe would have lacked the political incentive, the revolutionary impulse, the constructive audacity, which it has derived from the Grand Remonstrance, from the battlefields of Marston Moor and Naseby, where royalty was overthrown by the arm of the common people, and from the eternal menace that lay in the death-block of King Charles.
It was not because of any aversion to the society of men that Elizabeth remained unmarried. Very far from this; it is likely that her extreme liking for male society cut a considerable figure in her refusal. She did not propose to give any man a public right to interfere with her liberty of choice in this regard. History agrees that there was a sting of truth in the words of Mary, Queen of Scots, in a letter which she once sent to Elizabeth: "Your aversion to marriage proceeds from your not wishing to lose the liberty of compelling people to make love to you." The queen was fickle and passionate. She had little fear of the royal Mrs. Grundy. At the tender age of sixteen scandal linked her name with that of the Lord Admiral Seymour in such a way that an investigation by the council was necessary. She baffled the lawyers in the examination by her "very good wit."
From the time of her accession, at the age of twenty-five, to the time of her death, Elizabeth was certainly never without a favorite. She had small conscience, and there can be little doubt that she required the assassination of poor Amy Robsart in order that her favorite, Dudley, might be free from his young wife; and when, after the age of sixty, her young cavalier of that time, the fascinating Essex, wearying of dancing attendance upon her at court, joined the expedition of Drake against Portugal, the Queen bade him return instantly at his "uttermost peril." In the end she signed the unhappy Essex's death warrant for an alleged rebellion against her.
But her motive in refusing matrimony was not altogether—perhaps not even chiefly—one of coquetry. She was avid of power, and could brook no rival in its exercise. It is probable that considerations of real patriotism restrained her from marrying a continental prince. She shrank from introducing foreign influence as instinctively as Americans have at all times. She shrank from bowing to any yoke of Europe. But there were also objections to her marrying an Englishman. If she had chosen one she would have aroused the jealousy of all Englishmen not of his party or following. She regarded it as the better policy to keep them all hoping.
The unmarried state suited her arrogant and domineering nature well. She had none of the docility which made Queen Victoria a model house-wife and mother, and also a model constitutional sovereign. It was her purpose to have undivided power or none. To the deputation of the House of Commons which visited her with a petition that she marry, she answered: "For me it shall be sufficient that a marble stone declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin."
The Commons who uttered the petition must have felt a premonition of what would actually take place if there were no heir of Elizabeth's body. The next heir to the throne was Mary, Queen of Scots. She was a zealous Catholic, and England had just fully established its religious independence. It is true that Mary's son and heir, James, who afterward became King of England, as well as of Scotland, was a Protestant, but the loyalty of the adhesion of his house to the new confession might well have been distrusted. There was no promise of happiness for England in the accession of a prince or princess of this house to its throne.
But the Stuarts came—and the troubles of England began in real earnest. Elizabeth's reign had been, as it then seemed to all Englishmen, and as in very many respects it was, the golden age of Britain. Never had art, and literature, and material prosperity, risen to so high a level. The world seemed opening to a new and glorious life, like a rose bursting into bloom. In literature it had been the age of Shakespeare and Bacon. But with the Stuarts, literature and art passed into a long eclipse. Shakespeare's light may be said to have gone out for a hundred years, to be lighted again only from the borrowed torch of German culture.
Let us suppose that Elizabeth had been able to find a consort as wise and as harmless as was Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. Let us suppose that the pair had left behind them a thoroughly English prince, their own son, a man who would have been capable of continuing Elizabeth's prudent rule and of holding England to its traditions while maintaining the extraordinary advance that had marked her splendid reign. Without James's mingled poltroonery and tyranny to nurse and stimulate it, it is doubtful if Puritanism would have had its spasm of ascendency. English history would have been spared an epoch of chaos, of wild experimentation, of political empirics.
At the same time it would have been deprived of a form of political genius which was hammered out of the fire of rebellion. English Whiggism, English liberalism, English nonconformity have made the world over anew. America, in particular, would have been infinitely poorer without the Puritan ferment. Should we have had the New England migration at all, if England had continued its calm and homogeneous development under Elizabethan influences? Would not rather all America have been like Virginia, and the new world organized on a roast-beef, plum-pudding and distinctly Anglican and conformist basis?
If we can imagine Massachusetts a purely Episcopal colony to-day, ruled by parochial vestries instead of by town-meeting-parliaments and the village Gladstone and his responsible cabinet in every hamlet, and the whole province presided over by some self-sufficient Sir Alexander Swettenham as the representative of British royalty, we may perhaps imagine England without the cataclysm of the Stuarts.