 Brought to you by Penguin. Elizabeth I. The Forgotten Years by John Guy Read by Alex Jennings Preface Elizabeth was born at Greenwich Palace, shortly after three o'clock on the afternoon of Sunday, the 7th of September, 1533. The granddaughter of Henry VII, the Tudor Dynasty's founder, and daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, she was the last of her father's children to inherit the throne. After a run of chastening, sometimes terrifying, experiences during her Catholic half-sister Mary Tudor's reign, she was proclaimed Queen by the Heralds on the early morning of Thursday, the 17th of November, 1558. Anointed and crowned in Westminster Abbey at the age of twenty-five, she ruled for forty-four years, longer than any of her adult predecessors, apart from Edward III, a considerable achievement in itself. With so many years to cover, Elizabeth's biographers have tended to flag once she passed the age of fifty. Having established a pattern for the years of peace before the arrival of the Spanish Armada of 1588, they either skate over the years dominated by war, or fall back on the convenient shortcut of William Camden's monumental annales, he wrote in Latin, completed in 1617 and published in two unequal installments between 1615 and 1627. The book, now better known as the History of Elizabeth, is a mini-archive in itself, but it is a treacherous guide. Despite Camden's claim to have written an unbiased history firmly rooted in the archives, a forensic comparison of his quotations with the original documents shows that he regularly doctored his sources to fit his theories. His account institutionalized a whole raft of hoary myths full of reverential nostalgia for the dead queen. To insulate her from criticism, he drew a veil over her vanity and her temper tantrums. Most conspicuously, he glided over topics that were still politically explosive when he was writing. Usually this meant anything connected to the question of the succession, and particularly to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, whom, sensationally, Elizabeth had executed. Anxious not to offend the new King of England, Mary's watchfully indolent son, James I, whose re-interment of his mother in a spectacular marble tomb at Westminster Abbey was taking place even as the earliest draft of the analysis was approaching completion, Camden was also eager to protect the reputation of his former patron, Sir William Cecil, who had served Elizabeth faithfully, if in his own way, from the time she was barely sixteen. Since Cecil, promoted in 1571 to be Baron of Burley, and the next year to Lord Treasurer, had been Mary's nemesis, Camden declined to pry into what, like the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus before him, he called the Arkana Imperii, or Mysteries of State. Worse still, Camden's best-selling translator, the Ghana and mathematician Robert Norton, barely an adult when Elizabeth died, cheerfully proceeded to bowdlarise the analysis while preparing the English version most commonly available today. Between 1630 and 1635, years during which Charles I's suitability to rule first began to be seriously challenged by critics of the monarchy, Norton inserted many spurious interpolations into his three English editions of Camden's text. With the barely cloaked intention of using Elizabeth as a stick with which to beat her Stuart's successors, Norton spun fresh legends, chiefly concerning the allegedly spontaneous outpourings of love and devotion to good Queen Bess. He has her devoted subjects, running, flying, flocking to be blessed by the sight of her glorious countenance as often as ever she came forth in public. Deeply versed in such apocryphal material, the biographers writing after the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 raised Elizabeth to dizzy heights of veneration. After personally nursing her divided people through a Protestant religious settlement in 1559 but commanded wide ascent, or so these authors believed, the fiery red-haired heroine who shaped England's destiny went on to stride boldly where her advisers feared to tread. A cultural icon who presided over the greatest flowering of literature and art that the country had ever seen, she was— Ready to continue?