And yet we should be readier to excuse this impetuous young
princess of three hundred years ago than were even her associates
and enemies. For enemies she had, poor child, envious and
vindictive ones, who sought to work her harm. Varied and unhappy
had her young life already been. Born amid splendid hopes, in the
royal palace of Greenwich; called Elizabeth after that
grandmother, the fair heiress of the House of York, whose
marriage to a prince of the House of Lancaster had ended the long
and cruel War or the Roses; she had been welcomed with the peal
of bells and the boom of cannon, and christened with all the
regal ceremonial of King Henry's regal court. Then, when scarcely
three years old, disgraced by the wicked murder of her mother,
cast off and repudiated by her brutal father, and only received
again to favor at the christening of her baby brother, passing
her childish days in grim old castles and a wicked court, --she
found herself, at thirteen, fatherless as well as motherless, and
at fifteen cast on her own resources, the sport of men's
ambitions and of conspirators' schemes. To-day the girl of
fifteen, tenderly reared, shielded from trouble by a mother's
watchful love and a father's loving care, can know but little of
the dangers that compassed this princess of England, the Lady
Elizabeth.
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