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Preface

IN HIS Napoleon Monsieur Bainville wrote: “Each generation believes that the world began with it, and yet whoever broods over the past sees that many things were much as they are today.”

This is particularly true of the Elizabethan age. The differences between then and now are in the main superficial–differences of dress, of entertainments, of transport, of government, of machinery. But in the deeper circumstances of character and opinion, and the conduct which springs from them, these two turbulent epochs have much in common which they manifest in the same way. Youth takes to the new element of the air in the same eager and adventurous spirit in which it then took to the new element of the sea. Fear of the introduction of papistical practices rouses Protestant England to the same fervour of refusal as it did then. The same passion for peace is accompanied by the same quiet and staunch belief that if war must come the nation cannot be beaten. There is the same reluctance to meddle with the entanglements of the Continent. And the freedom of the Low Countries is still the chief principle of foreign policy.

Even in minor matters the resemblance stands. The swift and wide expansion of Walsingham’s secret service and its swift contraction when the need was past find a parallel in the history of our late war. At so many other points, such as the love of sport, the revival of music, and the friendly country life, the two ages touch so closely that in writing this book I seemed to be writing a book of our own times–and so have been led to break the reticence of a lifetime and begin it with a preface.

A preface, however, gives me the opportunity of acknowledging a special debt to Mr Conyers Read for his Mr. Secretary Walsingham and to Professor J. E. Neale for his enthralling Queen Elizabeth.

A. E. W. Mason.