As the exhibition shows, there were signs that Elizabeth’s reign would be a turning point in English history right from the start. The rule of her father, Henry VIII, had been characterized by violence and brutality. But, in an unprepossessing manuscript, a copy of her first speech as queen, Elizabeth vowed to rule “by good advice and counsel.” During her reign, Parliament became more powerful than battlefield politics, and reasoning and rhetoric trumped bloodshed. “The language of Tudor authority had [previously] been that it was the monarch’s duty to command and the subject’s duty to obey,” says the exhibit’s curator, professor David Starkey. “[Elizabeth] says this will be a government that recognizes limits and constraints and the need to carry people with it.”
Her mythic stature was already being formed in her own day, as Elizabeth’s court fostered playwrights Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, poets like Edmund Spenser and composers including William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. Paintings heavy with symbolism–like Nicholas Hilliard’s “Pelican” portrait, in which the bird, plucking blood from its breast to feed its young, underscores the queen’s deep self-sacrifice for her country–infused Elizabethan rule with powerful, timeless images. Some of Shakespeare’s wittiest and most loquacious heroines–Isabella in “Measure for Measure,” Rosalind in “As You Like It”–drew to some extent on Elizabeth. Not all were so flattering: Edmund Spenser’s epic poem “The Faerie Queen” includes a veiled critique of her unsuccessful policy in Ireland.
Elizabeth’s traumatic and insecure early years, though, make up the most compelling section of the Maritime Museum’s exhibit. Key experiences during the reigns of her brother Edward, who succeeded Henry VIII in 1547, and sister Mary, who came to the throne in 1555, cast an intriguing new light on decisions she made in later life. Imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1554 after she was suspected of involvement in a plot to overthrow Mary, she kept a cool head and defended herself clearly in a letter to her sister, scoring lines across the remainder of the paper to ensure that no fraudulent postscript could be added. She later showed herself unwilling to execute rivals to her own throne, perhaps remembering the experience, and the pleading letters are an interesting counterweight to the more familiar image of Elizabeth at the height of her power.
These intimate glimpses flesh out the personality concealed by her white mask and stiff, bejeweled wigs. Rare personal items paint a fresh, intriguing portrait of the monarch. A locket with twin miniatures of herself and her mother, Anne Boleyn, whom Henry VIII had executed on trumped-up charges when Elizabeth was 2 years old, suggests that though she never mentioned Boleyn again, she did not forget this early lesson in the cruelty of Tudor politics. “The Tudors are the Greek myths of the English-speaking world,” Starkey says. “They are the subject of great and familiar stories, and every generation reinvents them.” Though the mythical Elizabeth has been a source of fascination for centuries, discovering the historical queen in this show is a thrilling privilege. History rarely gets as close and tangible as this.
