Queen Elizabeth … a studious intellectual who would spend three hours a day reading history books if she could … she could also spit and swear ’round, mouth-filling oaths’ as was the habit of most great ladies of the age. Cecil once spirited away a book presented to the Queen by a Puritan, Mr Fuller, in which ‘Her Gracious Majesty’ was censured for sreading ‘sometimes by that abdominable idol, the mass, and often and grievously by God and by Christ, and by many parts of His glorified body, or by saints, faith and other forbidden things, and by Your Majesty’s evil example and sufferencance, the most part of your subjects do commonly swear and blaspheme…”
Yeah, go Liz!
So what happened? As so often, Cecil fixed things… “Elizabeth demanded to see the book, but with the connivance of one of her ladies it had fortunately been ‘lost’.”
Possibly very luckily for Mr Fuller…
(From Elizabeth the Queen
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