Gloriana

Yesterday, Kathy, rozk and self visited Greenwich to see the anniversary exhibition about Elizabeth I. Kathy had booked the tickets at 2:30 so we might escape the school kids, but no such luck - some of them were still around. Not enough to really annoy, but it did lead me to reflect why one dislikes children when travelling (Airplanes! Children! Nightmare!), visiting museums or movies When They Talk Too Damm Much. Must be my inner Snape, I presume.
The exhibition was good, with some minor quibbles (they had the letter in which James pleaded with Elizabeth for his mother Mary Stuart's life but not the simultanous letter to Leicester where he asked please not to take this official plea too seriously). Elizabeth is one of my favourite characters in English history, but I saw some stuff which none of the biographies had shown me before: a miniature where she plays the lute which Kathy pointed out to me, which is one of the few not-iconic representations of Elizabeth as queen. Two paintings which actually show her with signs of age, which again goes against the iconic presentation. Two pairs of her gloves, which prove she really had those elegant hands with long, slender fingers often described (and seen in the paintings). Most touchingly, the ring she always wore which, as only recently had been discovered, had two hidden miniatures in it. One of herself, and one of her mother, Anne Boleyn.
Elizabeth never spoke of her mother, yet she always favoured her Boleyn relations. It's one of the many puzzles about her - whether she coped with her admired father having killed her mother by believing her mother to be truly having been guilty. So this discovery - that she carried the image of her lost mother, whom she never truly knew, with her all her life, where it would be with her own so that mother and daughter finally were together - speaks volumes of a need she never allowed herself to show.
Seeing the letter Elizabeth wrote to her sister, Mary Tudor, when Mary had ordered her to be imprisoned in the Tower (this document I actually had seen before, in the British Museum), reminded me of another possibility of coping. In this letter, Elizabeth alludes to another beheading which haunted her:
"I have heard in my time of many cast away for want of coming to the presence of their prince, and in late days I heard my lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him, he had never suffered. But the persuarsions were made to im so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the admiral lived, and that made him give his consent to his death. Thoug these persons are not to be compared to your majesty, yet I pray God as evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other, and all for that they have heard false report and not hearken to the truth known."
The case Elizabeth mentions had almost cost her her own life, due to the advances Thomas Seymour (the admiral) had made to her. She might also have thought of her stepmother Katherine Howard who tried to reach Henry VIII in vein the day she was arrested. And finally, this might have been how she explained to herself her mother's fate: that it was Anne's enemies who had brought her down and that if only Anne had been permitted to speak to Henry things might have been different.
This letter to Mary, written in haste before the tide of the Thames turned again, ends on the top of one page, but Elizabeth covered the page with lines so that a forger could not add any distorting post script. The fact she thought of this, even when in a panic, is, in short, the quintessential difference between Elizabeth Tudor at any point in her life and Mary Stuart.
Speaking of letters, the exhibition also had Leicester's last letter, written a few days before his death, which Elizabeth kept with her. Pondering his portrait and later Essex', the three of us were in agreement that for all the bad press Robin Dudley, Earl of Leicester, got during his lifetime, one could see the appeal of Leicester through the ages, but not that of Essex.
"What did she see in him?"
"He was so stupid."
"Well, supposedly he was good looking."
We looked at the portrait of Essex and couldn't see it.
"Maybe it was personal charm", I said. "As with Josephine, Napoleon's Josephine, I mean. You can't see it in her portraits, either, but everybody describing her felt it."
"Well," said Kathy, "he does look somewhat like Thomas Seymour, so perhaps this…"
Thomas Seymour not having been the brightest guy in the universe, either. ("A man of much wit and very little judgement", Elizabeth supposedly said of him.) And yet he managed to make three smart women - Katherine Parr, Henry VIII widow whom he married, Kat Ashley, Elizabeth's governess, who was taken enough with him that she encouraged Elizabeth to consider him as a suitor once Katherine had died, and Elizabeth herself - behave recklessly and at times foolish. Ah well. Seymour and Essex, the male bimbos of the Tudor age.