The queen's business
Steve King
Everyone loves Elizabeth I. Poets, play- wrights and historians have been singing her praises for more than 400 years. The romantic view of Elizabeth's achievements and personality took shape during her own lifetime. It was given definitive form by William Camden in his Annales, published first in Latin and then in English between 1615 and 1629. Camden's account has been hugely influential. Elizabeth is still usually cast as the star performer in a triumphant drama of national regeneration, the inheri- tor of chaos and unruly faction whose beneficent reign ushered in a new golden age of harmony and prosperity, the devot- ed monarch who in return won the devo- tion of her people, the feisty redhead who bloodied the nose of Johnny Spaniard and opened up the seaways to glorious empire. Vivat Regina!
Elizabeth's hold on the public imagina- tion remains strong. Nowadays her myth is perpetuated by film-makers and television producers. Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett as the Queen, was a rollicking bodice- ripper of a movie and a popular hit in 1998. Also successful was this year's Channel 4 television series of the same name, present- ed by a scowling but frankly besotted David Starkey.
So a new edition of Elizabeth's Collected Works, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in September, would seem timely. It brings together Elizabeth's let- ters, speeches, prayers and poems. Her eccentric spelling has been modernised and texts in foreign languages have been trans- lated into English. Elizabeth was a thought- ful editor of her own parliamentary speeches; her early drafts and revisions are here given together with later reported and published versions.
Anyone hoping to find lots of salacious gossip or scintillating details of court intrigues will, however, be disappointed. There is no soul-baring here, not a trace of impropriety, scarcely so much as a hint of intimacy. Even her private letters to suitors It's a marriage of necessity. She drives, he's disqualified.' and probable lovers, such as the Duke of Anjou, are characteristically businesslike.
Nor does Elizabeth speak in one 'true' voice throughout her letters and speeches. Ever the politician, she is by turns cajoling and charming, blunt and decisive, wordy and evasive, as occasion and circumstance dictate. Sometimes she is practically incom- prehensible. Perhaps her most typical voice is what Christopher Haigh, in his excellent 1988 study of Elizabeth's use of political power, identifies as that of the authentic English nanny.
Few of Elizabeth's letters and speeches are inherently exciting or even very read- able, Almost all of them were, of course, written or delivered in response to a partic ular occasion, event or crisis. They come to life off the page only when they are seen in their original context. The famous 'tide' let- ter to Queen Mary is a dramatic example. It was written in 1554 while Elizabeth was effectively imprisoned at Whitehall under suspicion of treason. The letter served as a desperate ploy to delay being taken to the Tower by water. Elizabeth implored her half-sister Mary for just 'one word of answer'. By the time she had finished the letter the tide had turned, making the jour- ney to the Tower impossible. It is not too much to say that Elizabeth's life depended on the additional hours that the letter had bought her.
So it is a pity that the Chicago editors have not made better use of the limited space available for notes. The headnotes to each entry provide almost no background information at all, while too many of the footnotes are glosses of words whose sense is already obvious. That 'cumbered' and `fraid' mean 'encumbered' and 'afraid', for instance, should not need to be spelled out. It would have been far more useful to include even a small amount of additional contextual and interpretative detail instead.
For that kind of detail the general reader must turn to a good biography. In Eliza- beth's case, there is no shortage of biogra- phies to choose from: around 100 have been published since 1890. David Starkey's Elizabeth: Apprenticeship is a valuable addi- tion to this elephantine body of scholar- ship. The book is the basis of the Channel 4 series. One of the book's selling points is that you don't have to put up with Starkey's almost comically hectoring television per- sona while reading it. It combines a relaxed and unfussy style with a thorough knowl- edge of the period and a sharp eye for detail.
Elizabeth's life makes for a compelling story and Starkey tells it well. He says that he hopes his book will read 'like a histori- cal thriller'. Really it is only half a thriller. Starkey is here concerned almost exclusive- ly with the first 25 years of Elizabeth's life. In his introduction, however, he hints that he might tackle the later years of her reign in another book. His version of how this great adventure story ended would be well worth having.
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