On February 10 1586, Elizabeth I wrote one among her most famed letters: a livid rebuke to her favorite, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. She sharply reprimanded him for disobeying her.
“How contemptuously we conceive ourself to have been used by you,” Elizabeth rages. “We could never have imagined that a man […] extraordinarily favoured by us would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment.” She calls for that Leicester obey her instructions, and warns him: “Fail you not as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.”
The queen’s fury jumps off the web page. But the one surviving replica of this letter is written within the hand of a secretary: Francis Mylles, servant to Elizabeth’s foremost secretary, Francis Walsingham. Have been Mylles and Walsingham inquisitive about penning this it seems that non-public verbal exchange of the queen’s?
With out the unique replica of this letter, we can’t say for positive. On the other hand, thru cautious research of over 500 different letters of Elizabeth’s, I’ve found out that the expression of emotion in her letters was once incessantly moderately built by way of her secretaries.
Round 3,000 of Elizabeth’s letters live on, of which the vast majority had been penned by way of scribes. Those so-called “scribal letters” had been seriously omitted by way of historians, with precedence given to these written in Elizabeth’s personal hand.
Elizabeth indicators Mary Stuart’s condemnation to dying. Engraving after a portray from the German artist Alexander von Liezen-Mayer (1876).
Prisma Archivo
Paintings on Elizabeth’s letters has interested by figuring out the queen’s “voice” inside of them. But they had been incessantly the goods of collaboration between Elizabeth and her secretariat.
Disentangling those collaborations, and recuperating the contributions of Elizabeth’s secretaries, was once the point of interest of my PhD analysis – a part of the Feathers mission. Led by way of Nadine Akkerman, professor of early trendy literature at Leiden College, Feathers sought to differentiate between authorial and scribal voices in collaboratively produced manuscripts from the early trendy duration (round 1500-1800).
Discovering Elizabeth’s voice
How are we able to distinguish between Elizabeth’s voice and that of her secretaries? It may well be assumed that the extra non-public parts of her letters, together with the expression of emotion, may also be safely attributed to Elizabeth herself.
Sir Francis Walsingham by way of John de Critz (1589).
Nationwide Portrait Gallery
That is logical sufficient: bold to be in contact or presume to understand the queen’s feeling with out her prior instruction would had been daring certainly. Additional, early trendy secretaries had been anticipated to make use of formal and emotionless language and exert a tempering affect, moderating emotion to verify the goodwill of the addressee.
On the other hand, as I dug into the archival subject matter, a extra sophisticated truth emerged. Elizabeth’s letters live on in a dizzying array of variations, together with drafts, despatched letters and copies. Throughout the reassembly of those other manuscripts, painstaking handwriting research and shut textual comparability, I discovered proof that the expression of emotion in Elizabeth’s letters was once moderately crafted by way of her secretaries.
One instance is a letter from Elizabeth to the Earl of Shrewsbury, written in Might 1584. Presently, Shrewsbury was once the custodian of Mary, Queen of Scots: claimant to the English throne and thorn in Elizabeth’s aspect.
Within the letter, Elizabeth strongly criticises Mary and her son, James VI of Scotland. Elizabeth writes that Mary “shall never live to see those days that the Crown of England shall depend upon the Crown of Scotland”. She additionally criticises James closely, claiming that he was once “evil counselled when at the first entry into his government the same was seasoned with blood” (a connection with the 1581 execution of his regent James Douglas, Earl of Morton).
Figuring out the draft of this letter, I found out that it was once considerably edited by way of Walsingham, whose handwritten revisions stay at the manuscript.
Walsingham’s edits accentuate, somewhat than mood, Elizabeth’s criticisms of Mary and James. The vocabulary of those revisions bears important overlap with that during Walsingham’s personal writings. It appears that evidently, it’s Walsingham’s voice, now not Elizabeth’s, that speaks on this letter – and most likely his emotion that spills out of it.
In any other letter – written to Ralph Sadler, any other of Mary Stuart’s custodians, and likewise meant for Mary’s eyes – Elizabeth once more criticises Mary, however is extra conciliatory. She describes the “liking we had for a time” of Mary’s friendship, and raises the possibility of “a thorough reconciliation”.
Elizabeth has been assumed to have composed this letter; alternatively, my restoration of a hitherto not noted draft – which is affected by Walsingham’s scribbled emendations – published that those expressions of goodwill weren’t Elizabeth’s, however Walsingham’s.
Queen Elizabeth I; Sir Francis Walsingham; William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, by way of William Faithorne (1655).
Nationwide Portrait Gallery
Walsingham’s alterations to each letters had been made to govern Mary’s affect of her dating with Elizabeth and transfer her to behave in English pursuits.
Via crafting an “angry” Elizabeth within the letter to Shrewsbury, Walsingham was hoping to turn Mary that refusing to cooperate with the English executive would get her nowhere. Via establishing a “nostalgic” Elizabeth within the letter to Sadler, he sought to persuade Mary that Elizabeth’s favour might be regained, within the hope of dissuading the previous from plotting towards the latter.
That Walsingham crafted or even intensified the expression of emotion in Elizabeth’s letters is exceptional, and sheds essential new gentle in this iconic queen. It supplies the most important corrective, as an example, to Elizabeth’s popularity for emotional outburst.
Many anecdotes of Elizabeth’s quick mood live on, and there’s an inherited concept from the early trendy duration that those outbursts had been proof of a feminine irrationality. That the expression of anger in Elizabeth’s letters was once crafted by way of her male secretaries unearths that, a long way from being overly emotional or irrational, Elizabeth strategically deployed emotion to reach specific political objectives.
She did so, crucially, thru collaboration with secretaries reminiscent of Walsingham, who plainly had a a long way better and extra inventive hand in establishing her letters than has been realised.
What does this imply for Elizabeth’s voice? As I unpicked those collaborations together with her secretaries, I started to look that the voice we come across in her letters is a moderately – and collaboratively – built rhetorical efficiency.
Quite than seek for Elizabeth’s original voice, we may as an alternative recognize her political savvy and willingness to include the ideas of her advisors – qualities of a powerful monarch certainly.
