The People’s Queen

If you could choose to live in any period of history, which would it be? For me there was only ever one answer: the Elizabethan. The writers were a major part of it – Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson, those supreme wizards with words. Then there were the splendid soldiers, sailors and adventurers – Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh. I may even have fancied myself in a doublet and ruff. But the crucial factor was Elizabeth herself, the extraordinarily wise and courageous Virgin Queen.

I must have studied her reign over several years at prep school, because our eccentric curriculum began again each autumn term at 55 BC and generally got as far as the Civil War. But it was only as an adult that I found her truly brought to life, in Elizabeth Jenkins’s 1958 biography Elizabeth the Great. The cover of my battered paperback copy, with George Gower’s portrait of the queen beneath her gorgeously elaborate signature, still brings a thrill. I bought it as research for a novel I wrote in my late twenties called The Rags of Time. Each chapter was set in a different era, from the Anglo-Saxon to the twentieth century, and written in a style appropriate to the period. It was obvious that the sixteenth-century chapter should take the form of a play in Elizabethan blank verse: but which aspect of that age should I focus on? Elizabeth Jenkins, herself a novelist as well as a historian, opened my eyes to a rich array of opportunities. In her telling, the sixty-nine years of the queen’s life brimmed with drama from start to finish. Elizabeth’s very birth precipitated a crisis, disappointing Henry VIII who had desperately hoped for a son, and hastening the downfall of her mother, Anne Boleyn. What Jenkins at once makes clear is the danger of life as a royal child. Cast into a game of snakes and ladders with the highest possible stakes, you could reach the throne if things went well but you could also end up with your head on the block if they didn’t. Elizabeth was 13 and her brother Edward VI only 9 when their father died, making them tempting prey for ambitious adults such as Thomas Seymour, who tried to seduce Elizabeth and kidnap the child king – a plot only foiled by the barking of a royal spaniel. The power play around Elizabeth became more intense with the accession of her sister Mary. Up to that point their relationship had been affectionate, but Mary’s bloodthirsty brand of Catholicism made Elizabeth the hope of rebellious Protestants, undermining her sister’s trust in her. Elizabeth the Great is punctuated with haunting set pieces, among them a description of her arrival at the Tower of London after Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion, in which she had played no part:

When the barge stayed, she came out of the cabin and saw she had landed at Traitor’s Gate. She cried that such a gate was not fit for her to enter, that she would not use it. One of the nobles told her she could not choose. As it was still raining he offered her his cloak, but she dashed it impatiently aside. Stepping out . . . she exclaimed, ‘Here lands as true a subject as ever landed at these stairs. Before thee, O God, do I speak it, having no other friend but thee alone!’ She mounted the stairs, and the arch yawned above her head. Like an animal that smells the blood of the slaughterhouse, she made a last, demented effort at resistance; she sat down on a damp stone and declared she would go no further.

Elizabeth finally relents when one of her followers bursts into tears. A recurrent theme is the devotion she inspires: even at the Tower, several of the Beefeaters sent to guard her sink to their knees with a cry of ‘God preserve your Grace!’ When Mary banishes her from London, the villages through which she passes defy the authorities by ringing their bells in greeting. And when Mary dies after a final burst of Protestant executions, the author of a list of martyrs writes in simple verse:

Six days after these were burned to death God sent us our Elizabeth.

Jenkins explains the diplomatic challenges facing the new queen with admirable clarity. The great Catholic powers of France and Spain, locked in a power struggle, saw England as both a potential ally and a potential conquest. The Dutch – fellow Protestants already fighting Spain – were important allies, but Elizabeth knew that giving them too much support would goad the Spanish into declaring war. The French, meanwhile, saw Scotland as a promising base for an invasion, with Mary, Queen of Scots as a figurehead. Playing these two countries off against each other was the chief consideration as Elizabeth sought a husband – or rather, had one sought for her by advisers desperate to secure the succession. Her suitors included Philip II of Spain and the Duke of Alençon, but the Queen knew that as long as she remained single, she held a trump card. Complicating things further was her affection for the Earl of Leicester. Jenkins’s pen portraits are one of the book’s particular delights. Of Elizabeth’s mother she writes, ‘Thin, black-eyed, excitable, tart and witty, Anne Boleyn made gentleness and amiability appear insipid.’ As for Leicester, ‘His face, with its round, hard eyes and short, beak like nose, was that of a handsome and not unamiable bird of prey.’ Elizabeth was deeply attached to Leicester, and on his death locked herself away for so long that her chief adviser Lord Burleigh finally ordered the door of her chamber to be broken down. But Jenkins believes that the execution of her mother and then her stepmother Catherine Howard had given her a horror of marriage that nothing could overcome: deep in her subconscious, ‘she knew that if you gave yourself to men, they cut your head off with an axe’. Jenkins has the gift of a resounding phrase, and there is one passage in Elizabeth the Great that I know almost by heart:

At the end of this month, September 1580, there occurred one of the great events in the history of the world. Drake, whose companion Winter had separated from him eighteen months before and who had been given up for lost, brought the Golden Hind into Plymouth after a voyage of three years in which he had sailed round the world. The story of genius and heroism, which reads like legend rather than fact, seemed as wonderful then as it does now, and amazes our century as it did his own. The effect of his achievement on national confidence and public imagination was indescribable.

While Jenkins underlines the Queen’s own role in revitalizing the nation, she never ignores her faults. Her tight-fistedness sometimes drove her ministers to despair, as did her indecisiveness. Nowhere was this more marked than in her dealings with Mary, Queen of Scots, whose execution she put off for as long as possible and then denied having authorized. Not until her own life was immediately threatened by the Babington Plot did she concede that the deed had to be done. She was right, however, to fear the consequences. Beheading a monarch set a dangerous precedent, and Mary’s decision to name Philip of Spain as her heir gave him a claim to the English throne which led to the Armada. Defiance comes across as one of Elizabeth’s greatest qualities. One line from her address to the army at Tilbury is famous: ‘I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.’ But the words that follow are more stirring still: ‘And a king of England too – and think foul scorn that Parma, or Spain, or any prince in Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm!’ Throughout the book Jenkins evinces an eye for telling detail: the Battle of Gravelines was so fierce that ‘as one ship heeled over, blood was seen pouring from its lee scuppers’. She is particularly good on clothes and jewellery, arguing that Elizabeth’s passion for them sprang from the neglect she had suffered after her mother’s death. Above all, Jenkins emphasizes Elizabeth’s devotion to her subjects. ‘Have a care over my people,’ she told the judges of the Queen’s Bench on her accession. ‘Every man oppresseth them and spoileth them without mercy. They cannot revenge their quarrel nor help themselves. See unto them, see unto them, for they are my charge.’ In this she differed markedly from Mary, Queen of Scots, for whom Scotland was just a stepping stone to England. Had they changed places, Jenkins writes, ‘the Scots would have known that they had a Queen who was as proud of them as they were proud of themselves’. A biography can truly be said to have succeeded if its subject’s death brings a tear to the reader’s eye, and this is invariably the effect that Elizabeth the Great has on me. As the Queen lay dying, a strange silence is said to have fallen on the whole of London, with not a bell ringing out:

Midnight came and then it was 24th March, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. At a quarter to three the watchers again approached the great bed. Elizabeth was lying with her head in her right arm. Her war fare was accomplished.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Anthony Gardner 2026