Elizabeth I: The Conference Papers
Elizabeth: The Gender Queen
I wrote this paper for presentation at the annual meeting of the Elizabeth I Society, which met in conjunction
with the SouthCentral Renaissance Conference in Corpus Christi Texas, inMarch 2010. Because I was unable to
attend, this paper was read for me by my friend and colleague, Catherine "Cat" Howey Stearn.
How many of you consider gender to be a useful category of historical analysis?
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott posed this question in a
groundbreaking article in the American Historical Review. As the interpretive wheel continues to
spin, increasing numbers of scholars are saying “no” to Scott. This is quite a change from my salad
days as a graduate student, in the previous century, when gender emerged as the methodological
portal for feminist reinterpretations of the life and career of Elizabeth I. As this century unfolds,
there has been an inevitable backlash. In the works of your friend and mine, Susan Doran, and,
more recently, in Jeri McIntosh’s work on the pre-accession households of Mary and Elizabeth
Tudor, and a forthcoming edited volume on Elizabeth and Mary by Anna Whitelock and Alice Hunt,
the importance of gender as an analytical tool for understanding Elizabeth has been subject to
scholarly scrutiny concerning its utility as an analytical category.
Like the rest of you, I am only interested in locating the objective truth wherever it may be found.
However, I freely admit that I have invested heavily in the concept of gender as an analytical quality,
which I deployed with undisguised relish in my doctoral dissertation, and revised, my first book, The
Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (2006). I was an enthusiastic convert
to gender analysis, which I applied to studies on the twelfth century Empress Matilda, Queen Mary I,
the Stuarts queens Mary II and Anne, Queen Victoria’s Bedchamber Crisis of 1839, and her current
majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. It is in the introduction to The Lioness Roared that I discuss the
relationship between gender and Elizabeth, where I make the rather bold claim that explanations for
Elizabeth’s successes and failures through time have reflected changing perceptions of socially
constructed gender roles for men and women in the public spaces of civil and political societies. The
main difference I noticed between Elizabethan histories and those of England’s other female rulers
was that describing the historical Elizabeth usually involves explaining, or arguing against, what is
usually considered a success story. Yet whether toasting or trashing her achievements, political
historians in general have had difficulty squaring Elizabeth’s success as Queen with the fact that she
was a woman, subject to pressures to reconcile acceptable female behavior with the office of king. In
fact, a number of eminent scholars of Tudor history have identified this fundamental problem, but
lacked a methodology with which to pursue it.
Long before feminist scholars invented the term gender analysis, historians from the Victorian era to
the present day have been groping for a mode of analysis that explains Elizabeth's success as a
female ruler within the context of a male dominant society. Elizabeth, of course, ranks among
England’s greatest monarchs. However, the most successful of the male kings of England; Henry II,
Edward I, Henry V, or Elizabeth’s own father and grandfather, do not have their successes explained
as unusual for the male gender. Instead, it is implicit in historical studies that successful male kings
embodied male gendered virtues and abilities; only when less successful male kings lost their
thrones was there a discussion of their deficiency of masculine kingly power. In contrast, historians
throughout the twentieth century have moved towards the conclusion that Elizabeth’s mastery, or
lack of it, had to be explained within the context of her gender, that is, of how a woman was able to
confront, manipulate, and transcend the structures of male dominated politics. This process has been
under a constant state of refinement among historians since the Victorian era.
We will start with the Victorians. Agnes Strickland, whose Lives of the Queens of England was
published over the course of the 1850s, lumped queens consorts and queens regnants together. So,
Elizabeth was examined in the same historical context as England’s queen consorts, and suffered in
the comparison. To Strickland’s disapproving Victorian eye, Elizabeth displayed blatant masculine
characteristics, such as intellect, cunning, and energy, in effect transgressing acceptable female
behavior. Strickland’s contemporary James Anthony Froude, in his five volume The Reign of
Elizabeth, also used contemporary notions of gender to knock Elizabeth off the pedestal of historical
greatness, minimizing her success by his emphasis on her natural female failings; her indecisiveness,
her distaste for military glory, as well as her legendary temper.
But if the Victorians disdained Elizabeth, twentieth century scholars, by and large, fell in love with
her, even when they had a hard time understanding her. The noted twentieth century Tudor scholar
G.R. Elton considered the first truly modern biography of Elizabeth to be Mandell Creighton’s,
Queen Elizabeth, published in 1899. Unlike Strickland and Froude, Creighton set out to write a
success story. However, in doing so, Creighton detached Elizabeth from any identification with
sixteenth century womanhood, contrasting Elizabeth’s abilities with those of her siblings who
preceded her on the throne; the underage Edward VI, “the prey of self-seeking and unscrupulous
adventurers,” and the pathetic Mary I, “an appendage of Spanish power.”(p. 29) Yet after negotiating
the treacherous waters of her sibling’s reigns, Elizabeth simply bursts on the scene in his narrative, as
a Renaissance Athena, “exceptionally fitted to occupy the post of ruler.” (p. 29) Nevertheless,
Creighton’s Elizabeth is schizophrenic; references to her being a “Queen and a woman” appear
routinely throughout the text, without a clue to what the term “a Queen and a woman” actually
means. . Has anyone ever heard a historian use the term, “he was a king and he was a man?” Part of
the problem was that Creighton was unable to see one woman as queen moving through a variety of
public and private spaces, but a split personality constantly shifting between performing what he
perceived to be the contradictory roles of ruling queen and woman. Thirty years later, J. E. Neale, in
his still influential Elizabeth I (1934), also wrestled with the genie of Elizabeth’s gender. Neale's
Elizabeth was also a success story, whose political successes are explained by her ability to rise above
her supposedly biological imperfections as a woman. Conversely, Elizabeth’s shortcomings as a
monarch are explained by other, unmistakably ‘natural’ feminine traits. This model created
heightened dramatic contrast and complexity for Neale’s narrative, as he notes, “the country had
already made its first experiment of a woman ruler; it was anything but a happy augury for the
second.” (p. 63) Neale delighted in contrasting Elizabeth’s abilities with those conventionally
assigned to women in post-Victorian social mores, citing her superlative humanist education as the
primary means by which she overcame the natural limitations of her gender. So far so good, but
Neale could not resist documenting initial disbelief, by chief minister William Cecil and Philip II of
Spain, that Elizabeth could rule effectively unaided, noting that “However they disguised their
belief, statesmen held government to be a mystery revealed only to men.” (p. 67) So bolstered by her
rigorous education and keen mind, which was capable of harnessing her feminine emotions, Neale’s
Elizabeth emerged as the dark horse who won the race between herself and the male politicians who
wished to dominate her.
Mid twentieth century political historians accepted Neale’s rather embryonic gendered premises, but
saw no need to expand upon them any further. The earlier noted G.R. Elton in his book England
Under the Tudors (1965) also had some thoughts concerning Elizabeth’s greatness and its relationship
to her gender, writing, “Elizabeth’s character was of steel, her courage utterly beyond question, her
will and understanding of men quite as great as her grandfather’s and her father’s. She was a natural-
born queen as her sister had never been- the most masculine of all the female sovereigns of history.
At the same time she nourished several supposedly feminine characteristics.” (p. 262) Elton went on
to note that “Her parsimony has already been explained as the careful housekeeping of a poor
queen”, a gendered reference to a woman’s ‘natural’ abilities at housekeeping. Yet Elton, noting the
very same qualities in Elizabeth’s grandfather Henry VII, saw no need to apply any gendered quality
to his assessment of the parsimonious first Tudor. But to any problems that Elizabeth faced because
of her gender, Elton is nearly silent, making one more reference to the gendered qualities of her rule:
Tudor rule depended in the first place on a full, even fulsome,
recognition of the prince as the visible embodiment of the state.
Elizabeth maintained this tradition by carefully cultivating her
own appeal as a queen and a woman. (p. 382)
Like Crieghton’s, Elton’s Elizabeth was a split personality, torn between queen and woman; as he
concluded his brief discussion of the topic: “What really matters, of course, is Elizabeth’s ability in
politics- her standing as a Queen rather than her pretty obvious failings as a woman.” (p. 262)
But in the final two decades of the twentieth century, an interpretive shift began to develop. In his
1988 work, Elizabeth I, Christopher Haigh concocted a form of historical affirmative action, and
considered the particular problems Elizabeth faced as a female ruler:
The reign of Elizabeth saw a constant testing of the political power
and the political skills of the Tudor monarch. Her task could hardly
have been more difficult. And she had to achieve all this despite an
appalling political handicap; she was a woman in a man’s world. (p. 171)
Haigh’s Elizabeth is much less the success story, his interpretation suggests it was her gender that
held her back from total success, portraying Elizabeth as a conservative, suspicious, high wire act,
whose very survival was the rational end in itself. As Haigh injected a thoughtful consideration of
gender into Elizabethan political studies, feminist historians had already begun to reassess Elizabeth’
s performance within the context of gender analysis. This analytic shift also questioned the Elizabeth
as success story model; in a ground breaking 1980 article in Feminist Review, historian Alison Heich
lambasted Elizabeth for her nonfeminist accommodation to male dominant political structures. In
response, Susan Bassnet, in her work, Elizabeth I: A Feminist Perspective (1988) argued that
understanding contemporary notions of gender present in Tudor society were crucial to interpreting
Elizabeth’s responses to the encroachments of a male dominant political society to her prerogative.
In doing so, Bassnet implicitly accused historians from Strickland to Neale of presentizing their own
contemporary notions of gender and imposing them upon their assessments of Elizabeth’s
performance.
Two works of the early 1990s, Susan Frye’s Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (1993),
and Carole Levin’s The Heart and Stomach of a King (1994), aptly represent the marriage of social and
political history that Bassnet advocated. Discarding the dichotomy between success and failure that
had long dominated Elizabethan historiography, Frye and Levin’s lines of inquiry explored topically
the various significant gendered aspects of Elizabeth and her rule. In Frye’s work, the symbolism
inherent in public spectacles and literary allegories is deconstructed to illustrate the complicated
gendered pressures Elizabeth faced over the course of her reign. While political historians identified
Elizabeth’s chief problems as marriage and succession, the Protestant religious settlement, Mary,
Queen of Scots, and the continental religious polarizations that led to war with Spain, Frye
uncovered a constant battle, over the course of her entire reign, between Elizabeth and her ministers,
parliaments, and politically concerned male subjects to construct an effective representation of female
kingship. Carole Levin also uncovered potent evidence to demonstrate how Elizabeth’s efforts to
maintain her authority as a female king were an ongoing, career-spanning process. Levin attempted
to deliver on what was only hinted at in Creighton or Neale, and ignored in Elton, namely how
Elizabeth was able to reconcile being a queen and a woman. In Levin’s analysis, Elizabeth erected a
formidable arsenal of tactics to ward off the numerous competing pressures present in sixteenth
century English society that were antagonistic to female rule, as she detailed Elizabeth’s efforts to
counter the enormous pressure to marry by constructing herself as king and queen simultaneously.
In reaching this theoretical threshold, Levin reassembled the Elizabeth of Creighton, Neale, and
Elton, torn between being a queen and a woman. But this process was complicated and
contradictory. As Levin noted, taking on visual and symbolic aspects of kingship and queenship
tended to confuse a society unused to such gender-bending tactics.
In the works of both Levin and Frye, a facet of Elizabeth’s reign which previous scholars only hinted
at emerges, of an Elizabeth keenly aware of paternalistic attempts to undermine her authority, and
her own ability to adapt socially constructed gender roles, male and female, to bolster the unstable
authority of a female king. Indeed, Frye’s and Levin’s most potent contribution to Elizabethan
historiography is the notion that Elizabeth had to work much harder than her male predecessors; to
mitigate deeply embedded social antagonisms to female rule, and to construct sometimes
contradictory representations of appropriate modes of female rule for public consumption. This
process preoccupied Elizabeth's entire reign, and overlay all of the major problems identified in
conventional political histories.
Why Elizabeth Never left England
(The following paper is scheduled to be presented at the annual meeting of The Elizabeth I Society,
in conjunction with the South-Central Renaissance Conference, in St. Louis Mo., in March 2011. It is
a shorter version of an essay co-written with Carole Levin, and included in my edited volume The
Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I.)
Like her siblings Edward VI and Mary I, Elizabeth I never left England to visit other realms in the
British Isles and the European continent during her reign. It is tempting to imagine what might have
happened if Elizabeth had left England to visit the larger world that lay beyond the island fortress
that was her kingdom. It is a question akin to other, ultimately insoluble interpretive problems, such
as the depth of her religiosity or why she never married. Similar to her unmarried state, the fact that
Elizabeth never left her realm was never a conscious, clear cut decision- it simply worked out that
way for a number of compelling reasons.
Following her accession (17 November 1558), Elizabeth was keenly aware of the dangers she faced
as queen. Like her sister Mary, the unmarried Elizabeth had no direct heir, other than those
designated in Henry VIII’s will. While many of her subjects celebrated her accession as a
providentially sent English Deborah, to the monarchs of Catholic Europe, Elizabeth was not a
legitimate monarch. Within England, if her contemporaries agreed on anything, it was that an
unmarried female ruler needed much more help ruling her kingdom, and much more protection from
physical danger than any of her predecessors, the kings of England. Contemporaries also expressed
great anxiety concerning what might happen if she died prematurely, while there was utterly no
consensus within Elizabethan political society concerning who would wield the royal prerogative if
the Queen were in any way incapacitated or removed from the realm.
Had Elizabeth stepped foot outside her kingdom, she would have had to appoint a regent. But
whom could Elizabeth appoint that would have been acceptable to both her Privy Council and her
subjects at large? Elizabeth lacked a consort as well as adult male royal relatives. This left either her
chief nobles or her councilors. Her closest male relative, Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk,
conservative in religion and lacking the requisite leadership qualities, would have been a divisive
choice, while the only other preeminent noble choice, Henry Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, was also
unpalatable for similar religious predilections and political limitations.
This left her councilors. Especially in the first few decades of the reign, William Cecil, created
Lord Burghley in 1571, whose social origins were from the middling level of the gentry, would not
have been acceptable to the nobility as a sole regent. Neither would royal favorite Robert Dudley,
created Earl of Leicester in 1564, who Elizabeth had wished to name as regent when she was stricken
with and nearly died from smallpox in 1562. In other words, there was no one, either by birth,
position, or achievement, who towered even slightly above Elizabethan political society to serve as a
sole viceroy should there be an occasion for the queen to leave the realm. This situation actually
suited Elizabeth nicely, as the queen had no desire for any individual to play the role of either rising
sun or her own winding sheet. But while the lack of a clear cut regent may have satisfied the queen’
s taste in power dynamics, it precluded her from quitting the realm.
Elizabeth’s councilors considered even traveling to York to be risky venture, considering the
conservative religious climate in the northern shires, and Elizabeth never ventured that far north.
When Elizabeth had expressed interest in a face to face meeting with Mary Queen of Scots soon after
her arrival in Scotland in 1562, her council strongly opposed the measure. Mary’s subsequent forced
abdication in 1567 and flight to England the following year ended any chance of Elizabeth even
visiting her northernmost shires. As a Catholic heir on English soil, Mary was in exactly the same
position as Elizabeth during her sister’s reign, a viable religious alternative to the current occupant of
the throne. From this point on, Elizabeth never considered a face to face meeting with Mary. The
Catholic threat to Elizabeth that Mary represented was compounded by the Revolt of the Northern
Earls in 1569 and the issuance of the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis in 1570, which declared Elizabeth
deposed and absolved her Catholic subjects from their allegiance to her.
One of the ways that Elizabeth could have neutralized Mary’s threat was by taking a husband and
bearing her own heirs, something her councilors, parliaments, and subjects continuously urged upon
her the first twenty five years of her reign. However, potential suitors needed to come to her, as she
clearly stated that she would not dream of marrying a man she had not seen, and it was hardly
befitting a woman to initiate courtship, even if she were a queen. King Eric of Sweden begged to be
allowed to come to England in the early years of her reign, but Elizabeth refused. But Elizabeth did
suggest that the Austrian Hapsburg Archduke Charles and the French Duke Henri of Anjou come to
England for her to meet, which both of these potential suitors ultimately declined to do, though it is
highly doubtful that Elizabeth actually wanted them to make the visit. When Spanish ambassador
Guzman de Silva teased Elizabeth that Charles might actually be in England as part of the imperial
entourage, Elizabeth nearly fainted. Anjou’s younger brother, however, Francis duke of Alencon
and later Anjou, did come to England in 1579 and 1581 to pay court to a queen old enough to be his
mother in a series of negotiations that may have been the closest that Elizabeth ever came to actually
marrying.
So Elizabeth remained in England, exploiting her position as an entirely English queen in both
her domestic and her foreign policies. Unlike her sister Mary, the daughter of a foreign consort who
married outside of the realm, Elizabeth emphasized her position as entirely, or “mere” English as the
daughter of both an English father and mother. As she informed her parliament of 1566,
Was I not borne of this realm? Were my parents born in any
foreign country? Is there any cause I should alienate myself
from being careful over this country? Is not my kingdom here?
Unlike her sister or her cousin Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth could not count on the support of
powerful foreign relatives to bolster her position in England- she literally had no choice but to court
the popularity of her own subjects. This process began with her coronation procession of January
1559, in which Elizabeth’s active engagement of the people of London who lined the streets to see
their new queen set in motion the creation of a widespread perception that she loved her people.
Her stance as a “mere” English monarch, coupled with her seemingly lack of desire to leave her
realm, were policies fully consistent with the desires of her increasingly xenophobic subjects at large,
feelings exasperated by the religious polarizations of the later sixteenth century. Ten years into her
reign, Spanish ambassador, Guerau de Spes betrayed his frustrations with Elizabeth’s subjects as he
observed that “the English hate the very name of foreigner.” In contrast, Elizabeth made sure
foreign correspondents, who often accompanied her on her summer progresses, were able to see how
much Elizabeth’s subjects esteemed her, which they could pass on to their royal patrons back in
Europe, a form of psychological weapon during the first quarter century of Elizabeth’s rule, when
England could not have successfully rebuffed the efforts of European Catholicism to remove her
from her throne. By 1585, the Protestant king Henri of Navarre (later Henri IV of France)
acknowledged Elizabeth’s signal domestic advantages, “seeing that she is in a sure port, while others
are tossed at sea . . . “
Although she never left her kingdom’s shores, Elizabeth enjoyed her annual summer progresses.
While she never traveled to certain areas in England, such as Yorkshire, Cornwall, Devon, or to any
place in Wales; she did visit twenty-five of the fifty-three counties of her realm, in trips that averaged
between forty-eight and fifty-two days. Elizabeth’s summer progresses were important forms of
queenly multi-tasking, placing part of the burden of maintaining her court on her well heeled
subjects, who vied for the opportunity to earn the prestige that came only with a successful and
satisfying royal visit and entertainment. But as she travelled from town to town, she showed herself
liberally, accepting gifts, listening to orations, and speaking ex tempore, inspiring loyalty in her
subjects and allowing her to perform the kind of political theatre that clearly brought her immense
pleasure. In 1568, the Spanish ambassador reported,
She was received everywhere with great acclamations and great joy
as is customary in this country; whereat she was extremely pleased
and told me so, giving me to understand how beloved she was by
her subjects and how highly she esteemed this, together with the fact
that they were peaceful and contented, whilst all her neighbors on all
sides are in such trouble.
Three years later, after the Ridolfi plot was uncovered, which planned to assassinate Elizabeth and
replace her with Mary Queens of Scots, Elizabeth refused to cancel her summer progress, indicative
of not only how important it was to her to both see and be seen by her subjects, but for foreign
observers to know this also.
Elizabeth, in fact, received an overwhelmingly positive press from the foreign ambassadors
resident in her court. As Nate Probasco has demonstrated, the drama inherent in Elizabeth’s funeral
like reception for the French ambassador, Bertrand de Salignac de la Motte-Fénélon, following the St.
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572 was primarily meant to convey the queen’s attitude back to a
royal audience back in France, with predictable results on a rattled Charles IX, hardly Elizabeth’s
equal in the complexities of diplomacy. Nearly twenty years later, Elizabeth staged an impromptu
performance for her court, occasioned by the ill-advised oration by a Polish ambassador, who
received a sound drubbing in ex tempore Latin that was reported all over Europe, reminding her
contemporaries of her princely majesty, even in the last decade of her reign. As Ilona Bell has noted,
Elizabeth well knew that her words to ambassadors were scrutinized in foreign courts- as the
ambassadors recalled their memories of their audiences with Elizabeth, the drama, spectacle,
clothing, and personality that surrounded Elizabeth’s words undoubtedly colored their responses to
their royal patrons.
Given the relative novelty of female rule and England’s relative weakness against its more
powerful European neighbors, Elizabeth believed that some of her power and safety for her
kingdom came from the mystique that she created as a domestic icon who never left her realm.
Within England that meant allowing more of her subjects to see her and develop their loyalty.
Conversely, in her relations with other nations, Elizabeth’s mystique came from not being seen.
Barely half a decade into her reign Elizabeth’s fame as an autonomous ruling queen was such that
she was visited by the Swedish princess Cecilia, sister of Elizabeth’s spurned suitor King Eric, who
travelled land and sea while pregnant in order to meet the already legendary virgin queen in person.
Representations of Elizabeth as Solomon visited by Cecilia as the Queen of Sheba seeking wisdom,
underscored Elizabeth’s identification as a wise and learned queen. Henry VIII had also been
represented as an English Solomon in written texts and iconography, visited by the Queen of
Sheba. While Henry was the Solomon who left his realm to consort with his fellow monarchs,
Elizabeth was the more authentic Solomon who remained in her kingdom for others to travel to and
partake of her wisdom. As Linda Shenk has explained, Elizabeth’s developing international persona
as a learned queen encompassed an imperial image for European consumption of a female Solomon
superior in knowledge and virtue as well as a champion for European Protestants.
Images of Elizabeth were also exported to the European continent, in the form of portraits as well
as coins. These forms of representation were perhaps the most far reaching and influential. Far more
people saw the queen’s image than ever saw her in person. One result was that those abroad who
had not seen Elizabeth very much wanted to know if the portraits they saw were genuine likenesses
of the queen. Both Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, and Frances, lady Cobham, assured the French
royal family that the images they saw were truly Elizabeth. As Anna Riehl Bertolet points out, Sussex
and Cobham became “the ambassadors in whose power lies not only the truthfulness of the image,
but also the very formation of the concept of Elizabeth’s real face in the viewer’s minds.”
Elizabeth and her governments did their best to exercise control over how her image was
represented to the rest of the world, a not altogether successful task. In 1598, a German traveler,
Paul Hentzner described the aged Elizabeth, “wrinkled . . . her teeth black,“ wearing “false hair, and
that red,” as an old woman. In her court, however, residents, including ambassadors, never officially
recognized that the Queen was subject to the aging process. As the ageless icon of courtly love,
Elizabeth’s portraits, which circulated in the courts of Europe, also served to keep the image of
Elizabeth as eternally youthful. Louis Montrose has described how Elizabeth’s image was exported
to chieftains in Ireland, while a Dutch representation from the 1580s displays Elizabeth as Diana
slaying Pope Gregory VII. As Brandie Siegfried has explained, the cleanup of the base elements of
English and Irish coinage broadcast to Europe and beyond not just the queen’s image, but the
solvency of her finances, and, by analogy, the vigor of her rule, without having to step foot out of her
realm. Elizabeth’s contemporary image even made it to the new world, as Walter Raleigh distributed
coins stamped with Elizabeth’s image to the indigenous peoples of Guiana in return for their
“obeisance” to the Queen.
Yet late in Elizabeth’s reign there was at least a whisper of a suggestion that Elizabeth was willing
to leave her realm if necessary. In 1595 the English were greatly concerned that Henri IV was
considering a truce with Spain. Diplomat Henry Unton felt rather desperate at the cold reception the
French king gave him, and “let him know her majesty can be contented to come to a Conference with
him . . . . or give him any other convenient satisfaction.” If Elizabeth had ever dreamed of visiting
the European continent, this occasion could have provided her with the opportunity to do so. But of
course Elizabeth did not come to France to meet with Henri. Like her many offers to marry when the
time was right earlier in her reign, at the end of it Elizabeth stayed in England, her realm.
