WAS QUEEN BESS A MAN?

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1080, 20 March 1911, Page 9

WAS QUEEN BESS A MAN?

'A PARADOXICAL LEGEND. The "Daily Telegraph," in reviewing "Famous linpostors,' r by Mr. Bram Stoker, refers to what that author has to say in his chapter on the "Bisley Boy," who is asserted to have been .substituted for the Princess Elizabeth, when she was ten years old. Bisley is a village in Gloucestershire, high upon the eastern side of the C'otswold Hills, and the most interesting snot in the district is the house "Overcourt," which was once the Manor House of Bisley, and part of the dower of Queen Elizabeth. The tradition in this neighbourhood is startling enough, but wo are assured that the secret has been well kept, even from the jealous eyes of historians and archaeologists. According to local gossip, the little Princess Elizabeth was sent with her governess for a change of air—owing, probably, to an invasion of the plague in the metropolis—to Bisley, .where she contracted acute fever, and died. The governess, alarmed at the possible consequences to herself—especially as King Henry Till had announced his intention of coming to visit his daughter—substituted for the-Royal child a boy named Neville, found in the neighbourhood, who was sufficiently like her to deceive all but the ■ most practised eye. This boy took upon himself the duties and responsibilities of royalty from about 1543 on'wards, when the Princess Elizabeth should have been ten years old. And tho personage known to history, the great Queen Bess, the Virgin Queen, the adored lady of all the poets and' courtiers of the time, was, according to this story, a youtli masquerading in the largo collars and voluminous Skirts of Tudor Royalty! According to Mr. Stoker, this hitherto unknown fact explains a good deal that otherwise remains mysterious in Elizabeth's nature and , temperament. We know that she Was coy and cold to her various suitors; that she had an immense dislike of being seen by doctors; that she had a masculine understanding, and an imperious temper. But we ("Daily Telegraph") confess that the story is a little toO strange and paradoxical for the ordinary reader to swallow, and we can imagino what any recent historian of the courtships of Queen Elizabeth, such as. the late Major Martin Hume, would have said if confronted with so startling a theory. That Elizabeth was in reality a man absolutely perverts the whole idea of that literature, nootic and dramatic, which was dedicated*to her virgin fame. If it accounts for a certain austerity and coldness in her disposition, it assuredly does not explain her relations to men like Essex, Edward Courtney, Pembroke, Southampton, and Walter Raleigh, or with Leicester. Nevertheless, the story as told by Mr. Bram Stoker is well worth perusal, and in an age in which ,we are sometimes inclined, to reverse our historical verdicts and change the common appreciation of noted historical characters it ought to attract a good deal of attention. But we do not think that the great figure of tho Tudor Queen, the patroness of the arts, the' idol of her courtiers, and the long-wooed bride of many foreign, monarchs, is likely to be displaced in the imagination of Englishmen.