This article titled “Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years by John Guy – review” was written by John Gallagher, for The Guardian on Tuesday 27th December 2016 07.30 UTCIn 1601, Elizabeth I was poring over old royal records with the lawyer and antiquarian William Lambarde. When their conversation fell to the reign of Richard II, Elizabeth turned to Lambarde, saying “I am Richard II. Know ye not that?” Late in her reign, suffering from ill-health and melancholy, with most of her oldest friends and advisers dead and many of her subjects (and her councillors) seemingly waiting for her to make way for a successor, Elizabeth identified herself with the deposed medieval king who starved to death as a prisoner in Pontefract Castle. In Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years, Tudor historian John Guy focuses on the final two decades of Elizabeth’s life, the period often referred to as her “second reign”, to offer a more nuanced portrait: not “a triumphant Gloriana, a Hollywood heroine who saved her country singlehandedly from the might of Spain”, not the “sexually frustrated spinster” imagined by Lytton Strachey nor the “affable prince” of John Neale, but a woman – and a queen – in full.
For Guy, 1584 marks “a clear turning-point” in Elizabeth’s life. It’s the year that witnesses the assassination of William the Silent, the Prince of Orange, and “the onset of the great pan-European and Atlantic crisis” that dogged the queen’s final two decades. She would spend nearly the next 20 years at war, with English military and naval engagements in (among others) Ireland, France, Iberia, the Netherlands and Guyana. At home, the queen would face plots against her life both real and imagined. The conspiracy known as the Babington Plot was dreamed up by Catholic nobles eager to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, carefully stoked by agents provocateurs, and monitored by Elizabeth’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, who waited for the conspirators to thoroughly incriminate both themselves and Mary before making a move – liquidating its leaders and, soon afterwards, the Queen of Scots herself.
By the mid-1580s, Elizabeth was ageing and definitively childless. Her cousin’s head, once removed, left the question of the succession wide open. Mary’s son (later James VI and I) was a Protestant and a king in his own right, but Guy shows how Elizabeth’s ambivalence – even dislike – towards him continued until the end of her life. In Spain, Philip II mulled the practicalities of putting his daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, on the English throne: the defeat of his armada in 1588 had been a setback, but his forces continued to harry British and Irish coasts and shipping, with new armadas being dispatched in 1596, 1597 and 1601.
The queen’s unwillingness to name an heir prompted speculation in print and among the wider population about who would succeed the “Virgin Queen”. These anxieties were particularly pressing in a time characterised by economic strain, when high prices, royal monopolies, the fear of plague and mistrust of immigrants kept popular urban politics at a steady simmer. For many in England these were ill years.
Guy is a master of the early modern archive: few historians are better equipped to navigate the tangled skein of Elizabethan records, to judge their claims and counter-claims, and to make their silences speak. He proves adept at unpicking Elizabeth’s often difficult relationships with those around her. A queen at the heart of interlocking economies of information, status and access, she needed to know how to weigh trust and truth.
In William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth found a devoted adviser who would nonetheless seek to circumvent the queen’s wishes in matters as crucial as the succession or her foreign policy. The documents reveal Burghley’s attempts to go behind the queen’s back in negotiations with Philip II of Spain, while his son and successor, Robert Cecil, communicated secretly with James VI as Elizabeth’s health waned. The younger Cecil once wrote that “the queen would have her ministers do that she will not avow,” giving voice to the fear of those around her that the queen would find a way to blame them for actions that she had willed but not made explicit, as she had in the case of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
Guy’s careful reading of newly unearthed materials allows him to challenge old ideas. This is where the real excitement is – when the historian steps in to interrogate the sources – and the reader might wish for more of this document-driven narrative in place of the more traditional biographical structure that guides much of the book.
As Elizabeth grew older, so the people who had surrounded her – Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester and her “sweet Robin”; the suave courtier-councillor Christopher Hatton; and the austere agent-runner Walsingham – began to die. The queen “found it increasingly difficult to appoint new men to important positions”. Guy attributes this to two factors: it was partly “because she could not bring herself to face up to the prospect of her own mortality”, while it also reflected her “distaste for change and for forging new working relationships”.
These may have featured among her reasons. But it’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that the experienced queen took a dim view of the preening and histrionics that accompanied many of the ventures of the Earl of Essex, who rose to prominence during the “second reign”. Elizabeth tolerated him, probably more than he deserved, but her advice to the earl in 1597 betrays her deeper feelings: she wrote that “Eyes of youth have sharp sights, but commonly not so deep as those of elder age.” Essex, rash to the last, would be executed in 1601 for treason, having led an ill-conceived action that smelt strongly of a coup d’état. When he and his partisans had retreated to a heavily fortified Essex House following their failed attempt, Elizabeth sent word that those inside were to surrender, saying she would not go to bed until they did.
At the centre of all the court’s interlocking circles was Elizabeth herself. She was not, Guy argues, the “warrior queen” beloved of the Victorians. But in emphasising the important roles played by those around the queen, he perhaps goes too far. His suggestion that the Earl of Leicester choreographed her famous appearance before her soldiers at Tilbury risks removing Elizabeth’s desire to take the heroic role almost entirely. Similarly, a description of one queenly scheme as “the silliest notion Elizabeth ever had” comes close to reproducing the attitudes to female rule that characterised Elizabeth’s time. The queen could certainly exhibit a Trumpian pettiness, as she showed in her dislike for a couple who hosted her during a royal progress by ensuring every one of their stags was slaughtered when she rode out hunting. And she was not shy of inflicting pain on her enemies, as her approval of some of the worst excesses of the sadistic torturer Richard Topcliffe reveals.
The myth-making that created our imagined Elizabeths began during her lifetime. Just like her councillors, she seems to have destroyed or removed from the archives some items that she feared would show her in a bad light. After her death, competing accounts of her final days spread across Europe, with one to suit every political or religious position. But where in all of this is the woman who thought, late in life, that she was Richard II? Guy’s careful work with documents known and unknown, scattered throughout Europe’s archives, allows him to paint a novel portrait of a complex – maybe even unknowable – queen. Nearing the end of her life and influence, struggling to maintain her position at home and abroad, ruler of an island unsure of its place in the world, perhaps this is an Elizabeth for our times.
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