The Tudor's Dynasty podcast.

The disposition of Elizabeth was originally deficient in benevolence and sympathy, and prone to suspicion, pride, and anger.

And we observe with pain in the progress of her history,

how much influences to which her high station and the peculiar circumstances of her reign

inevitably exposed her, tended in various modes, to exasperate these radical evils of her nature.

The extravagant flattery administered to her daily and hourly

was of most pernicious effect.

It not only fostered in her an absurd excess of personal vanity,

but what was worse, by filling her with exaggerated notions, both of her own wisdom and of her

sovereign power and prerogative. It contributed to render her rule more stern and despotic,

and her mind of many points incapable of sober counsel. This effect was remarked by one of her clergy, who in a sermon preached in her presence,

had the boldness to tell her that she who had been meek as lamb was become an untamable

heifer, for which reproof he was in his turn reprehended by her majesty on his quitting the

pulpit, as, quote,

an overconfident man who dishonored his sovereign.

The decay of her beauty was an unwelcome truth, which all the artifices of adulation

were unable to hide from her secret consciousness, since she could never behold her

image in a mirror during the latter years of her life without transports of impotent anger.

And this circumstance contributed not a little to sour her temper, while it rendered the young

and lovely, the chosen objects of her malignity.

On this head, the following striking anecdote is furnished by Sir John Harrington.

She did off ask the ladies around her chamber if they love to think of marriage.

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