The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power

The Heart and Stomach of a King

Nicholas Hilliard, drawing of Elizabeth I. By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.

The Heart and Stomach of a King

ELIZABETH I AND THE POLITICS OF SEX AND POWER

Carole Levin

SECOND EDITION

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8122-2240-1

To

Rohana, Sean, Milena, and Caleb;

Tristan, Carolynn, and Mina;

Leon, Wendy, Isaac, Millea, David, and Chanah

and to

Joe, Desirée, and Debbie, dear former students,

dear always friends, also my family.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface to the Second Edition

1. Introduction

2. Elizabeth as Sacred Monarch

3. The Official Courtships of the Queen

4. Wanton and Whore

5. The Return of the King

6. Elizabeth as King and Queen

7. Dreaming the Queen

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Nicholas Hilliard, drawing of Elizabeth I.

  1. Elizabeth holding the Bible.

  2. Elizabeth in her coronation robes.

  3. Elizabeth praying.

  4. Elizabeth being presented with a book.

  5. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

  6. Tudor family group, 1597.

  7. Thomas Cecil, Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance.

  8. Elizabeth in procession.

  9. Sir Christopher Hatton holding a jewel of Elizabeth I.

10. Queen Elizabeth and the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

11. Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex.

12. Posthumous portrait of Elizabeth I by Francis Delaram after Nicholas Hilliard.

Preface to the Second Edition

Elizabeth Tudor—better known as Elizabeth I, queen of England from 1558 to 1603—is one of the most studied and mesmerizing historical personages. Her allure has many sources, just as she herself seemed to have many identities: she was an unwanted daughter born to a father who needed a son, she was an innocent political prisoner during her half-sister Mary’s bloody and dramatic reign, she was the Western world’s most eligible and elusive bride. Elizabeth reigned over great cultural flourishing and worked to maintain peace during a time of religious and political unrest in the rest of Europe, but she also served as a staunch protector of her country, defending England from the invading Spanish with, as she stated herself, the heart and stomach of a king.

Perhaps most impressively for a woman on a man’s throne, Elizabeth ruled for almost forty-five years alone. She has often been described as one of the greatest of all English monarchs, and from her age until our own we have wanted to know more about her and her success. The first history of Elizabeth’s life and reign was published by William Camden in Latin in 1615, translated into English in 1625.¹ At the end of the seventeenth century, Edmund Bohun in The Character of Queen Elizabeth claimed that Elizabeth had been celebrated not only in her times, but in all that have since followed, concluding that this celebration will continue to the end of the world.² While this is certainly hyperbole, during the twentieth century more than a thousand nonfiction books in English were published about Elizabeth, with more than twenty released just in the last year. She has also been the subject of novels, plays, and movies, and there are books about her not only for adults but also aimed at a much younger audience, ranging from alphabet books to young adult novels and biographies. People are so fascinated by Elizabeth that her story has been used in a wide range of media, including full-color comic books depicting her defending England from the Spanish Armada and how-to texts suggesting that emulating her actions is a way to be successful in today’s business world.³

Why is Elizabeth so endlessly intriguing? Might it be the irony of her success as queen when her father so intensely wanted a son to rule after him? Or the fact of her brilliant political and survival savvy even as a young girl? Is part of our fascination because she was queen in the age of Shakespeare? Certainly some of Shakespeare’s strong female characters have evoked comparisons with Elizabeth. Perhaps people are most intrigued because at a time when power and femininity appeared antithetical, she ruled as an unmarried woman and was still highly successful.

Given the four centuries of fascination with Elizabeth, one might think that so much has been published and presented about her that there is nothing else to add. Despite all the representations of her, however, and despite all that we know about her life and her reign, she remains an elusive figure, with the keys to her success and the details of her personal life still shrouded in mystery.

And yet new and exciting scholarship about the queen continues to be published. In 1994 University of Pennsylvania Press published my own study, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. I am proud of this work, as well as the scholarship that has followed which this work may have influenced. In this preface to the new edition I would like to discuss what is important about this study, how it fits into a scholarly field, and what impact it has had both on my own career and in the field of Renaissance studies.

I spent many years working on The Heart and Stomach of a King, and my interest in Elizabeth went back far before I started work on this project. I read my first biography of Elizabeth when I was ten years old. Like so many young girls I was fascinated by Elizabeth, how she survived the many perils of her early life, how she triumphed, and it was an interest that has never left me. I am amazed by how many adults tell me they read or heard about Elizabeth as a child and continue to find her enthralling, though most of these people—usually women—did not, like me, devote their lives to studying her. Elizabeth Tudor is a woman who captures the imagination and does not let it go. People want to know her life story.

While I used many biographical incidents in the writing of this book, The Heart and Stomach of a King is not a conventional biography. One reason I decided not to write a traditional biography is that there were so many biographies of Elizabeth already written, a number of them excellent.⁴ Rather, I wanted to explore how Elizabeth presented herself and how others responded to her as an unmarried woman in power. Coming of age during the second wave of the women’s movement, these were issues I found compelling. So a central question initiating this study was how difficult it was for an unmarried woman to rule in sixteenth-century England and how effective she could be, given the cultural and political constraints imposed by the gender constructs of the time. As I was immersed in my exploration of Elizabeth from a new angle, other scholars were also bringing new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of Elizabeth.

One of the earliest scholars to use a clearly stated feminist analysis to examine Elizabeth was Allison Heisch, whose 1980 article, Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy, anachronistically took the queen very much to task for embracing male ideas of how the world should work and for not supporting women.⁵ Alternatively, in 1988, Susan Bassnett’s proclaimed feminist biography was extremely positive about Elizabeth without going deeply into some of the problems of her rule. Susan Frye used a variety of modern theoretical frames to examine three specific incidents in Elizabeth’s life and reign—the coronation pageant, the visit to Kenilworth in 1575, and the end of the reign—to examine how a wide range of those around Elizabeth, such as her courtiers and poets, constructed the queen. Susan Doran’s fine study of the various marriage negotiations—arguing that Elizabeth was more open to the idea of marriage than was formerly believed—put gender less in the forefront of her analysis.⁶

But for me gender was paramount. Elizabeth was far more successful than her predecessor—her half-sister Mary—and the other women rulers of her time. During her reign England was not engulfed in civil war as happened to neighboring Scotland and France. Instead, she presided over the creation of a broadly based religious settlement. Because of this achievement, Elizabeth was recognized by her contemporaries as one of the leading Protestant monarchs of sixteenth-century Europe. At the same time, her reign was a time of great cultural achievement. For many years Elizabeth kept England out of expensive and dangerous foreign entanglements, and was the symbol of national unity, especially at the time of the Spanish Armada. It was at Tilbury in 1588 that Elizabeth gave a rousing speech to her troops that is said to include the famous words, I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king. Thus, Elizabeth’s own words, and the gender constructs they portrayed, provided me with the title for this book.

Yet even as I state that this work is not a biography, we might also reconsider what we define as biography, or more specifically, reexamine how the manner in which scholars are using biographical incident has been evolving. Perhaps the most groundbreaking scholarship in Renaissance studies and biography over the last decades is the work of Stephen Greenblatt, especially his early work, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980). The ways Greenblatt contextualized the English sixteenth-century authors he analyzed opened a new way to look at the interiority of those who lived in the period as well as the way the individual experienced the culture, or the poetics of culture, especially as it concerned power, and Greenblatt’s interpretation of the psychological understandings of power is particularly valuable. Related to that, Greenblatt’s insights into the differences between a culture of shame and a culture of guilt are important in understanding the great changes going on from medieval to early modern in sixteenth-century England. Yet this work, and much of the very important work following, focused almost entirely on the male experience.⁷ Using Greenblatt’s insights on power, identity, cultural context to think about Elizabeth and her rule helped shape how I constructed The Heart and Stomach of a King.

There are also some other studies that have forged paths similar to mine. Just before my own book was completed, I read Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. In his introduction Nicholl wrote about his book, It is not a biography…. Quite often it is not Marlowe at all, but about the bad company that he kept.⁸ While this book was not a traditional biography, and its perspective on Marlowe’s death has been much debated, it provides an arresting portrait of Marlowe and the Elizabethan London in which he lived. By placing Marlowe’s fascinating life and haunting death at the center of an analysis of late Elizabethan politics and culture, Nicholls produced a new way of doing a biographical study.

A book published about a decade after Heart and Stomach was even more impressive as a new way to do biography: James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.⁹ I have found this to be the best recent book in helping me understand Shakespeare and the time in which he lived. Shapiro examines just one year in Shakespeare’s life, but it is not only a year when Shakespeare’s movements are unusually well documented but also a highly significant year for Shakespeare the playwright. Shapiro places Shakespeare and his work in the context of the late Elizabethan crises experienced at the end of the sixteenth century. Shapiro was concerned with what was occurring as Shakespeare went from being an exceptionally talented writer to one of the greatest who ever lived. Shapiro did extensive research on what Shakespeare read, on who the actors and playwrights that he knew were, and on how his engagement in the world around him ignited his imagination. Shapiro greatly expanded the more conventionally used sources because he was as interested in rumors as in facts, in what Elizabethans feared or believed as much as in what historians later decided really happened. This book is beautifully written and uses an extraordinarily wide range of sources with great sensitivity. While not a traditional biography, it is a model of what the best of biographies can be. I would call what I do and what I find most interesting cultural biography, and I believe what my book has in common with those of Nicholl and Shapiro is that all three are cultural biographies of the same time period. By this I mean examining a life as it is lived within the culture and using wide-ranging sources that include attitudes and belief systems such as rumor and gossip. I define cultural biography as the interplay between an important historical figure and the aspects of culture that shaped that figure’s life, and in turn the impact of that life on the cultural milieu. In the case of Elizabeth, who reigned for almost forty-five years, the reciprocal relationship between the political and cultural life of early modern England and her life as female monarch was profound and unprecedented.

This book examines how Elizabeth represented herself and how people in turn responded to her as an unmarried woman in power. Once I had shaped the question in the largest sense, the issue for me then was more specifically how to frame my research. I am interested in issues of sexuality, gender construction, and image making. I have used many different sources in my work: tracts and pamphlets, religious works, Parliamentary statutes and speeches, sermons and homilies, ceremonies and progresses, plays and ballads, diaries, gossip, rumor, calendar and holy days, liturgy, sixteenth-century books, records of the Privy Council, Elizabeth’s own speeches and letters, and recorded dreams about Elizabeth. Some of the richest sources are the letters of foreign ambassadors, who frequently wrote long letters home about what was going on at Elizabeth’s court and recorded not only important affairs of state, but fascinating—if trivial—court gossip, which often was at the heart of what people at least believed was important. The trust that somehow developed between Diego Guzman de Silva, Spanish ambassador to England from 1564 to 1568, and Elizabeth led to conversations that the ambassador recorded in detail in his dispatches. The letters home from Elizabeth’s ambassadors at other courts are also very useful in demonstrating what people far away thought about Elizabeth and the power of her representation of self.

Much of the evidence we have for popular reaction to the queen comes from first-hand descriptions of her public ceremonies and progresses, letters, ambassadors’ reports, and, especially, court cases involving people arrested for slandering the queen. All these sources have to be used with extreme care and cannot necessarily be taken at face value. They may reflect more about the person giving the evidence than about the queen herself, or may tell us more about what Elizabeth wanted someone to believe than what her actual feelings were. But pieced together these sources can help illuminate the issues of gender and rule in sixteenth-century England.

While these sources do not always provide accurate factual information about Elizabeth’s life, they tell us a great deal about the social-psychological response to queenship, to a woman in power, particularly in terms of attitudes toward sexuality and power. Very important as sources for this study were gossip, slander, and rumor. When I was a student, many scholars did not look to such sources for providing historical insight, and my work was one of the first to take these sources seriously, to demonstrate that we can learn a great deal about the cultural anxiety of a period by listening to its gossip. Once when I presented my research as I was working on this book, another scholar contemptuously suggested that I was doing "the National Enquirer form of history." Fortunately, the scholarly tide has largely turned, and it is understood that cultural perceptions and anxieties are as important as what actually happened, if such unequivocal truth is discoverable. Since the publication of The Heart and Stomach of a King, a number of English Renaissance scholars have used rumor and slander to analyze cultural creation, context, and anxiety. Particularly valuable in demonstrating how valuable rumor and slander can be as a historical source are the works of Lindsay Kaplan and of Keith Botelho.¹⁰ Whether we like it or not, today’s reliance on the 24-hour news cycle makes rumor and gossip integral to the political landscape, and it is helpful to see that this is far from a new phenomenon.

So for me, a traditional biography was not really so useful, as in some ways I am less interested in the facts about Elizabeth’s life than in what she said about herself, and even the gestures she made, and what others said about her. Whether it was factually true or not, it held a truth for me as representing an attitude or belief system. As award-winning novelist Tim O’Brien once stated in discussing his experience in Viet Nam and what he has written about it, Sometimes a lie is truer than the truth.¹¹ There were a variety of rumors recorded during Elizabeth’s reign that she had a number of lovers and illegitimate children. There is no factual evidence that Elizabeth had either lovers or children, but these beliefs about her present us with a truth about values and cultural anxieties of the time: the great fear toward the end of the reign about what would happen after Elizabeth’s death since she, an unmarried woman in power, had no designated heir. In my work on Elizabeth, cultural biography if you will, we see a complex interaction and a constant interplay of person with a specific period of time and place.

The fascination with Elizabeth continued for me after the publication of The Heart and Stomach of King, and led to a number of other projects including other studies on Elizabeth and working on the remarkable exhibit Elizabeth I: Ruler and Legend, curated by Clark Hulse. This exhibit was at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2003, and its traveling counterpart went to forty libraries between 2004 and 2006.¹² With Donald Stump I also co-founded the Queen Elizabeth I Society.¹³ Papers presented at the Society have been revised and published in a number of collections.¹⁴

When I look at the books that came after mine but are in the same tradition, one that I particularly value is Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History, published in 2006. Some of the gender analysis about Elizabeth that I used in The Heart and Stomach of a King is utilized on other British figures. Beem uses the term female-kingship to analyze women who ruled legally as kings and the gender constraints they found themselves in. He focused his study on the Empress Matilda, Mary I, Queen Anne, and Victoria, and was particularly interested in how these married women operated in the political spheres beyond their husbands, as the political systems changed and evolved.¹⁵ Charles Beem and I now co-edit a series, Queenship and Power. A number of books in this series continue to explore Elizabeth and her significance in exciting new ways, such as Anna Riehl, The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I; Rayne Allinson, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I; and Linda Shenk, Learned Queen: The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry. These books also approach a study of Elizabeth in the context of cultural studies and further illuminate new ways to understand the queen and her times.¹⁶

Another fine book in this tradition is Mary Hill Cole’s 2000 The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony, which examines the significance of Elizabeth’s progresses.¹⁷ At many times in The Heart and Stomach of a King I was more concerned with what people thought of Elizabeth than with what factually happened. Two books took the same approach in terms of Elizabeth’s memory. In The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen, Catherine Loomis examines the immediate response to the final illness and death of the queen and how her subjects responded to the loss of their sovereign in the ways they reconstructed her. John Watkins took this approach to the memory of Elizabeth throughout the seventeenth century in Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England. He carefully analyzes how different political factions used Elizabeth’s image for their own needs.¹⁸

With the publication of Marcus, Mueller, and Rose’s Elizabeth I: Collected Works and Steven May’s Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, Elizabeth’s own words have become more accessible and further analyzed and discussed by scholars. A particularly fine study is Ilona Bell, Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch, which provides very close readings of Elizabeth’s words as well as thoughtful cultural and political context.¹⁹

It is always hard to say that a scholarly project is completed, but eventually one has to mark it done and send the final manuscript to the press. In the years since I published The Heart and Stomach of a King, I found new examples of people slandering Elizabeth, of comments about her from foreigners, of dreams about her from her contemporaries. While I wished I could have included them, and many of them found their way into other pieces I have published, I still feel that the argument I made in the book stands up close to twenty years after its publication.

And the differences in how women and men in power were viewed in the sixteenth century still resonate in the twenty-first. We in the United States have had women such as Hillary Clinton and Michele Bachman run for the nomination of presidency from a major political party, and Sarah Palin was a vice presidential candidate in 2008. But the reactions to these women—how they looked, how they sounded, what they wore, if they cried—is markedly different from the way male candidates are perceived. Yet on the global stage there are now women in positions of power, and we perhaps we can see the shadow of a long-dead queen behind them. Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist, was president of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and then became under-secretary-general and executive director of UN Women. She was the first woman elected president in Latin America who was not the widow of a political strongman. Angela Merkel was elected chancellor of Germany in 2005, and Africa’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was elected president of Liberia in 2006 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. In 2006, the New York Times referred to this group as the most independent and accomplished group of female leaders ever collected—with the possible exception of when Elizabeth I dined alone.²⁰

On October 28, 2011, at a summit in Perth, Australia, the sixteen leaders of British Commonwealth nations of which Queen Elizabeth II is head of state unanimously approved a change in the succession so that the eldest child, not eldest son, is the next heir to the throne, thus overturning centuries of the rule of primogeniture. When the queen opened the summit, she proclaimed, The theme this year is Women as Agents of Change. Elizabeth II further elaborated on this theme: It reminds us of the potential in our societies that is yet to be fully unlocked and it encourages us to find ways to allow all girls and women to play their full part….We must continue to strive in our own countries and across the Commonwealth together to promote that theme in a lasting way beyond this year.²¹ Prime minister of Australia Julia Gillard proclaimed this to be an extraordinary moment: I’m very enthusiastic about it. You would expect the first Australian woman prime minister to be very enthusiastic about a change which equals equality for women in a new area. She added that just because such changes may seem straightforward to those of us in the twenty-first century doesn’t mean that we should underestimate their historical significance, changing as they will for all time the way in which the monarchy works and changing its history.²² As a result, when Prince William and his wife Kate, duchess of Cambridge, have a child, that child will eventually be in line for the throne regardless of gender. As a reporter enthusiastically exclaimed in the April 2012 TV special, William and Kate: The First Year, showed on ITV1, many in England hoped the couple’s first child would be a girl, as the great rulers of England had been women: Elizabeth II, Victoria, and, of course, Elizabeth I.

Perhaps one reason Elizabeth I has so thoroughly captured our imaginations is that there is still so much we in the twenty-first century can learn from her. Studying Elizabeth allows us to understand so much more about the ways a woman can obtain and retain power, not only in her age but in our own. In many ways the idea of a powerful woman is still an oxymoron, for traditionally the characteristics of an ideal woman had nothing to do with power or autonomy. But Elizabeth demonstrated a way to successfully be both female and powerful, and the desire to be able to do both still resonates today.

I believe that what we write about tells us something about ourselves, as well as our subjects, that there are connections between scholarship and our own biographies—how our research projects tell us a lot about ourselves, our concerns, our values. I was at college and graduate school in the midst of the second wave of the women’s rights movement, and my commitment as a feminist and to seeking an ethical world has infused my scholarship and my teaching and certainly was part of the way I approached my study of Elizabeth. That meant that traditional approaches no longer did justice to the kind of exploration this fascinating and enigmatic woman warranted. By using some nontraditional sources I have been able to explore aspects of Elizabeth and her reign in a quite different manner than what has been traditionally written about her.

That I chose to spend so many years of my life writing about Elizabeth says that I greatly value doing history with women—a certain woman in this case—at the center, and that questions of how a woman was able to attain and then maintain power seem to me important ones. I think one reason I was so struck as a child reading a kid biography of Elizabeth was that I as a female was reading about another female rather than the usual powerful men of history. So I believe that The Heart and Stomach of a King is also a celebration of a particular woman in history, and of a woman writing history. I am delighted that nearly twenty years later The Heart and Stomach of a King is still such a valuable study. I am deeply grateful to Jerry Singerman for the faith he had in this book from the beginning and to Caroline Winschel for her help in this new edition.

Notes

1. William Camden, Annales rerum Anglicarum, et Hibernicarum, regnante Elizabetha, ad annum salutis (London, 1615); William Camden, Abraham Darcie, and Robert C. Vaughan, Annales: the true and royall history of the famous empresse Elizabeth Queene of England France and Ireland &c. True faith’s defendresse of diuine renowne and happy memory (London, 1625). Camden had died in 1623.

2. The character of Queen Elizabeth. Or, A full and clear account of her policies, and the methods of her government both in church and state. Her virtues and defects. Together with the characters of her principal ministers of state. And the greatest part of the affairs and events that happened in her times (London, 1693), 65.

3. Alan Axelrod, Elizabeth I, CEO: Strategic Lessons from the Leader Who Built an Empire (Paramus, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2000); Colin Hynson, Elizabeth I & the Spanish Armada (Columbus, Ohio: School Specialty, 2006).

4. Still the classic is John Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1992; originally published in 1938). Other important twentieth-century studies include Elizabeth Jenkins, Elizabeth the Great (New York: Coward-McCann, 1959); Joel Hurstfield, Elizabeth I and the Unity of England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); Neville Williams, The Life and Times of Elizabeth I (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972); Paul Johnson, Elizabeth I: A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974); Lacey Baldwin Smith, Elizabeth Tudor: Portrait of a Queen (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975); Jasper Ridley, Elizabeth I: The Shrewdness of Virtue (New York: Viking, 1988); Wallace MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (London: E. Arnold, 1993). I addressed a number of issues about doing biography in Reflections on the Life of a Scholar Looking for the Woman’s Part in Renaissance England, Medievalist Feminist Forum 43, 1 (Summer 2007): 58–71.

5. Allison Heisch, Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy, Feminist Review 4 (1980): 4, 45–56.

6. Susan Bassnett, Elizabeth I: A Feminist Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 1998); Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996).

7. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

8. Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992).

9. James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2005).

10. M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Keith M. Botelho, Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

11. Tim O’Brien said this at a lecture at SUNY New Paltz about fifteen years ago.

12. Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves, eds., Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003). The website for the Elizabeth exhibit is http://publications.newberry.org/elizabeth/.

13. http://research.uvu.edu/Moss/Home.html. Donald Stump, St. Louis University, was the first president of the Society, I was the second, and Brandie Siegfried, Brigham Young University, is current president.

14. Some of the publications that have come directly from scholarship presented at the Queen Elizabeth I Society include Donald Stump and Carole Levin, guest eds., Explorations in Renaissance Culture: Special Issue: Images of Elizabeth I, 30, 1 (2004); Donald Stump, Linda Shenk, and Carole Levin, eds., Elizabeth I and the Sovereign Arts: Essays in Literature, History, and Culture (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011); Carole Levin, guest ed., Explorations in Renaissance Culture: Special Issue: Scholarship on Elizabeth I, 37, 1 (2011). Charles Beem, ed., The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

15. Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

16. Linda Shenk, Learned Queen: The Imperial Images of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Anna Riehl, The Face of Queenship: Representations of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

17. Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).

18. Catherine Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

19. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Steven W. May, Elizabeth I: Selected Works (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004). Very important are Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel, Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Elizabeth I: Translations, 1592–1598 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ilona Bell, Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

20. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/opinion/19thu3.html.

21. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2054467/UK-royal-succession-laws-Commonwealth-agrees-historic-change-sex-equality.html.

22. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15492607

1. Introduction

"I may have the