Olde England.
Oriel College, Oxford was admitting eighteen year olds in those days. This in itself was not out of the ordinary, as undergraduates in the 16th Century ranged from nine or ten years of age to about twenty-five. Like the others, they drank, roistered, and wenched.
There were Puritans like Dr Humphreys, the President of Magdalen, whose loose gown, Elizabeth had said when he bent to kiss her hand, became him better than his narrow notions.
The lower populace were said to beat the world for disrespect, coarseness, and sheer savagery of nature. Londoners ate well and drank enormously; beer and ale and numerous kinds of wine. There were more alehouses and taverns to the acre than anywhere else in Europe; patronized by women as well as men, respectable women as well as whores.
The authorities took misdemeanours seriously and invariably hanged three hundred people a year. There were also occasions when a few prostitutes were brought up each morning for a public naked beating at Bridewell.
The Queen now aged forty eight was tall, of such state in her carriage as every motion of her seemed to bear majesty; well-favoured but high-nosed; with great dignity of countenance, softened with sweetness; her eyes lively and sweet but short-sighted; her face pale, her hair originally a reddish-gold; her hands, which she took care not to hide, of special beauty; a fair performer on the virginals and lute; a stylish dancer of pavanes and galliards, a lover of English dances; a fluent speaker of Latin, French, and Italian, a reader of Greek; her voice the strident voice of an educated public woman, uncontradictable in its habit of power; a swearer; splendid in repartee; magnificent in public speech and ceremony; divine, or devilish, in power to touch a heart; hierarchical, intolerant of a subject rebelling; masculine in words, feminine in action; devoted utterly to what she conceived to be the welfare of what she conceived to be England; liking to surround herself with men of calibre but keeping them to heel, trusting only her own judgement; to her officers mean, to her favourites generous with other people’s money; a miser, a jewel addict; utterly without principle or honour as understood by men; nor caring about differences of religion, but not prepared to share a subject’s allegiance with the Pope or a Puritan conscience; her love affairs the scandal of Catholic Europe; “incapable of man, though for her delight she tried many”; unwilling to submit to a husband, but unable either as woman or politician to resist thinking of a husband; adoring games in which she was Queen of Beauty and Learning, for whom all men sighed; quick to eye a handsome man or a man of spunk.
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