LECTURE VII
ATTACK ON CADIZ
I recollect being told when a boy, on sending in a bad translation of
Horace, that I ought to remember that Horace was a man of intelligence
and did not write nonsense. The same caution should be borne in mind by
students of history. They see certain things done by kings and statesmen
which they believe they can interpret by assuming such persons to have
been knaves or idiots. Once an explanation given from the baser side of
human nature, they assume that it is necessarily the right one, and they
make their Horace into a fool without a misgiving that the folly may lie
elsewhere. Remarkable men and women have usually had some rational
motive for their conduct, which may be discovered, if we look for it
with our eyes open.
Nobody has suffered more from bad translators than Elizabeth. The
circumstances of Queen Elizabeth's birth, the traditions of her father,
the interests of England, and the sentiments of the party who had
sustained her claim to the succession, obliged her on coming to the
throne to renew the separation from the Papacy. The Church of England
was re-established on an Anglo-Catholic basis, which the rival factions
might interpret each in their own way.
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