Dramatizing Elizabeth I

As must have become clear to readers of this blog, over the last few months I have been making use of my training as a historian in service to a new project. Still sixteenth-century, still connected to Muscovy and the steppe, but branching out to include Queen Elizabeth I of England and her court. I feel like a kid at Christmas, surrounded by “candy” in the shape of events that I certainly had encountered in the abstract but had never explored in depth. In pursuit of my goal—greater knowledge of the Elizabethan court and how it functioned, as well as details of daily life in Tudor London—I have read biographies, overviews, re-enactors’ descriptions of beer and bread making, studies of clothing, printed documents, you name it. But in lighter moments, I also read novels and watch YouTube videos and films, most recently the 1998 Academy-Award-winning Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett. There’s a value to visuals, after all, even if they are twenty-first-century reenactments. So, what can we say about dramatizing Elizabeth I?

First off, let’s be clear. Cate Blanchett is perfect as the lead character. She exactly captures the mixture of intelligence, vulnerability, flirtatiousness, and  survival instinct that over time turned Princess Elizabeth into Gloriana. In fact, all the actors—especially Joseph Fiennes as Lord Robert Dudley and Geoffrey Rush as Sir Francis Walsingham—do a great job of portraying the physical, intellectual, and emotional characteristics of the historical figures they represent. The costumes, the scenery, the music pull viewers into the story. My reasons for watching the film in the first place (as well as my expectations of what I might learn from it) were met.

Still, any piece of fiction, including my own novels, must appeal to the sensibilities of the time in which it is made, not only the reality of the past it portrays. Film scripts, in particular, need to be tightly focused on a relatively simple story that can play out through scenery and costumes as well as acting. And in some ways, the deviations are as revealing as the parts that stay true to the past. At other times, and this is certainly true of Elizabeth, the willingness to mix events that in reality were separated in time by ten or even twenty years not only obscures the historical sequence but undercuts the drama of the real story.

Now, I am not the first person to note both that the movie is a treat and that it, ahem, muddies the timeline a bit by—among other things—moving the duke of Anjou’s courtship forward by a good two decades. (It also, from what I can tell, distorts the duke’s behavior at court; Elizabeth took rather a liking to him, it seems, despite the twenty-plus years between their ages.) Elizabeth’s relationship with Lord Robert Dudley, which was a real thing (if perhaps not exactly as portrayed here), suffers as a result. And in one of the more curious choices by the screenwriters, the mysterious death of Lord Robert’s wife in September 1560 doesn’t merit so much as a passing mention, although it was quite the scandal even at the time. Both then and later, more than a few people believed that he had murdered her to free himself so that he could marry the queen. One would think that possibility had even more dramatic potential than the drunken duke.

At a minimum, the idea that Elizabeth believed Robert to be single is ridiculous. He was married when they met, and Elizabeth was the one who later informed the court of his wife’s death, instructing them all how to react. There are even reasons to believe that she flirted with him because he was married but not living with his wife. That is, she did not want a husband, because in those sexist times any man she married would have tried to usurp her position as ruler. The days of Philip the Prince Consort were well in the future. Her experience with her father’s multiple marriages, including the executions of her own mother and Catherine Howard as well as the divorce imposed on Anne of Cleves, probably also encouraged her to keep potential spouses at a distance, even as she encouraged the idea of marriage for the sake of keeping the hopes of her councilors and Parliament alive.

And that last point is the one that fascinates me. I don’t mean the possibility that Dudley ordered the murder of his wife to enhance his own chances of becoming de facto king. That story may have no more truth to it than other tidbits of salacious gossip that reflected people’s discomfort with a female ruler who, moreover, seemed reluctant to produce an heir to guarantee the succession (precisely because she feared losing her throne as a result).

Rather, what astonishes me is that the reality of Elizabeth’s reign is so dramatic in itself that any invention seems like overkill. She had to battle her own bishops to secure her coronation. She’d barely attained the throne before the French–Scots alliance began maneuvering against her. Catholic plots to place Mary Queen of Scots on the throne abounded even before the pope excommunicated Elizabeth twelve years into her reign, promising absolution to anyone who assassinated her and turning all of Catholic Europe against England and, by extension, its monarch. In later years, Philip of Spain, once her sister’s husband and then a suitor for Elizabeth’s hand, sent his Armada against her and almost succeeded in overwhelming her forces. We haven’t even started on Sir Francis Walsingham and his network of spies.

With all that going on in the background, was there really a need to twist the timeline for dramatic effect? As with Elizabeth’s Russian contemporaries, it seems that truth, in this case, was even stranger than fiction. Or as I have noted repeatedly in my author’s notes to both Legends of the Five Directions and Songs of Steppe & Forest, the most outrageous incidents in the novels are the ones I don’t make up …

Image: Levina Teerlinc, portrait of Elizabeth Tudor at her coronation (January 1559), copy attributed to Nicholas Hilliard of a lost original, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.