Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I is probably the most famous Englishwoman ever to have lived. She has been celebrated as a great stateswoman, during whose reign England acquired some degree of security in the troubled European arena and at the same time began to lay the foundations for its future empire. She presided over a country undergoing a cultural renaissance previously unimagined. By the time of her death at the age of seventy in 1603, she was being heralded as rival to the Virgin Mary, as a second Queen of Earth and Heaven, as a woman more than mortal women. Yet in the centuries since her death large numbers of historians, writers and musicians have been fascinated not so much by her divine attributes as by her earthly ones. She has provided subject-matter for innumerable books: seventy biographies have appeared since 1890 and it is impossible to list the enormous number of historical novels based on some part of her life. Her epic conflict with Mary Queen of Scots provided inspiration to Romantic writers from Schiller to Donizetti, who dramatised the struggle between what they perceived as two completely different female types, and made Elizabeth I a familiar figure on the stage of both tragic and operatic theatre. In the twentieth century there have been film biographies ad nauseam, along with television biographies and plays, so that the image of a red-haired, white-faced woman in lavish gowns and a wide ruff has come to symbolise Elizabeth I for millions of people who may never have actually read one of the many books about her.

What is still fascinating about Elizabeth I is that all the writing and rewriting of her history, the multi-faceted depictions of a long-dead woman who reigned for forty-five years (a length of time that defeated all possible predictions when she first ascended the throne in 1558 after her sister Mary) nevertheless refuse to yield a coherent, consistent picture of her. We have portraits, some of her letters, some poems known to be hers and others attributed to her, some of her translations, and beyond that we have a collection of intriguing and intensely biased eyewitness accounts of life close to her in at court.

Even during her lifetime there were several Elizabeths, from the pure, chaste supporter of the Protestant cause who remedied the miseries wrought upon the English people during the reign of her bloody Catholic sister Mary to the diabolically motivated bastard daughter of Henry VIII whose lewd behaviour with her court favourites resulted in such portraits as the one described in a letter from Stafford to Walsingham in 1583, showing her on horseback 'with her right hande pullinge upp her clothes shewing her hindparte . . .'. Between these two extreme views is a host of alternative perspectives, from which it is interesting to see how often assessments of Elizabeth are made by comparing her with Mary Queen of Scots. The crude line of argument presents Elizabeth as a shrewd, calculating, passionless figure, jealous of Mary's beauty and sensuous appeal. The apocryphal story about Elizabeth's reaction to the news of the birth of Mary's son, James, has it that she cried out: 'The Queen of Scots is delivered of a fair son, and I am but barren stock'.

The counter-argument depicts Mary as a silly, immature woman unable to handle the responsibilities of statecraft who lost both her throne and her head as a direct result of her incapacity for reasoned behaviour. This attitude is typified by G. B. Harrison, editor of Elizabeth's letters, who compares the handwriting of the two women, and ranks Elizabeth I well above Mary: 'The Queen's handwriting in youth was beautiful, but in middle age it degenerated into a scrawl, very difficult to read, especially when she was writing French in a hurry, but a bold, resolute script nevertheless, running straight across the page, very different from the downhill schoolgirl hand of Mary Queen of Scots'.