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288Sir Francis Bacon’s Journalsdoubtful. And yet she did not pass suddenly from the prison 85 to the throne, with a mindembittered and swelling with the sense of misfortune, but was fi rst restored to liberty andcomforted with expectation; and so came to her Kingdom at last quietly and prosperously,without tumult or competitor. All which I mention to show how Divine Providence,meaning to produce an excellent Queen, passed her by way of preparation through theseseveral stages of discipline. Nor ought the calamity of her mother to be admitted as anobjection to the dignity of her birth: the rather because it is clear that Henry the Eighthhad fallen in love with another woman before he fell in anger with Anne, and becausehe has not escaped the censure of posterity as a man by nature extremely prone both toloves and suspicions, and violent in both even to the shedding of blood. And besides, thecriminal charge in which she was involved was in itself, if we consider only the person towhom it related, improbable, and rested upon the slenderest conjectures; as was secretlywhispered (as the manner is in such cases) even then, and Anne herself just before her deathwith a high spirit and in memorable words made protestation. For having procured a messengerwhose fi delity and good will she thought she could trust, she sent the King, in thevery hour when she was preparing of the scaffold, a message to his effect: “That he keptconstant to his course of heaping honours upon her; from a gentlewoman without title hehad made her marchioness; he has then raised her to be the partner of his throne and bed;and now at last, because there remained no higher step of earthly honour, he had vouchsafedto crown her innocence with martyrdom.” Which words the messenger durst notindeed carry to the King, who was then in the heat of a new love; but fame, the vindicatorof truth, transmitted them to posterity.Another principal thing, which I cast into Queen Elizabeth’s felicity, was the time andperiod of her reign; not only for that it was long, but also because it fell into that seasonof her life, which was most active and fi ttest for the swaying of a sceptre, for she was fullyfi ve-and-twenty years old (at which age the civil law freeth from a curator) when she sameto the crown, and reigned to the seventieth year of her life; so that she never suffered eitherthe detriments of pupilage, and check of an over-awing power, or the inconveniences of animpotent and unwieldy old age; and old age is not without a competent portion of miser-85Paul Hentzner & Sir Robert Naunton: Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia, 1892: WhileQueen Elizabeth was detained in the Tower she wrote with a piece of charcoal the followingverse (composed by herself) upon a window shutter:—O Fortune! How thy restless wavering stateHath fraught with cares my troubled wit!Witness this present prison whither fateHath borne me, and the joys I quit.Thou causedest the guilty to be loosedFrom bands wherewith are innocents enclosed;Causing the guiltless to be strait reserved,And freeing those that death had well deserved:But by her envy can be nothing wrought,So God send to my foes all they have thought.A.D., M.D.L.V.Elizabeth, Prisoner.