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Chap. XVIII. QUEEN ELIZABETH’S EMBASSY.
283
English history which have taken place within these
walls. Among the first is the embassy sent by Queen
Elizabeth to King Frederic II. In the sixteenth
century resident ambassadors at the court of Denmark
were unknown; and although a good feeling was
entertained between England and that country, still no
regular treaty of alliance can be said to have existed.
In the year 1579 Queen Elizabeth, somewhat alarmed
at the hostility of the King of Spain, the intrigues
of Catherine de Medicis, and of the partisans of
the imprisoned Mary, determined to strengthen her
relations with the Northern powers, and, by way of
conciliation, announced to King Frederic II. in a Latin
letter, penned by her own hand, that on the 24th April
of that year he had been elected a member of the
Chapter of the Order of the Garter, 363rd Knight from the
period of its institution.
For various reasons, which Queen Elizabeth explains
to the satisfaction of King Frederic,* it was not until the
year 1582 that Lord Willoughby d’Eresby (son of the
Duchess of Suffolk), accompanied by Garter King of
Arms, the Somerset Herald, and a numerous suite of
attendants, was despatched from England as
ambassador extraordinary to invest the King of Denmark with
the insignia of the order, and endeavour at the same
time to adjust sundry little commercial grievances;
but Elizabeth, with a good taste and delicacy of feeling
I should hardly have given her credit for, in her letter
of instructions to Lord Willoughby, desires him not to
* He it was who discovered and forwarded the letter from Erik
XIV. of Sweden to Philip IL, by which it was brought to light that
Erik was at the same time soliciting the hand of Queen Elizabeth
and of her ill-fated cousin Mary Stuart.
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