Elizabeth: The Golden Age: There’s Something about Mary (Stuart, That Is)

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16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Babington Plot, Cate Blanchett, Eddie Redmayne, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Geoffrey Rush, Kings and Queens, Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart, Samantha Morton, Shekhar Kapur, Tudor England

In 2007, Shekhar Kapur returned to the life of Queen Elizabeth I, making Elizabeth: the Golden Age as a sequel Elizabeth (1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur). The film brought back Cate Blanchett in the title role and Geoffrey Rush as her loyal spymaster Francis Walsingham, and added Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh. Despite the fact that the two films were shot in a very similar style, had the same director, and had Michael Hirst, the screenwriter from the first film assisting with the script, EtGA did much more poorly at the box office, not even breaking into the top 100 films of the year, whereas Elizabeth was 65 the year it was released, and its lifetime gross has been less than half the first film’s. It also received much less love from the critics. In an overall sense, it’s actually better history, because it hews a little more closely to the facts than Elizabeth did, although that’s not really saying that much.

The Babington Plot

Like Elizabeth, EtGA intertwines the story of Elizabeth I’s love life (or lack thereof) with a story about a Catholic plot to depose her and Walsingham’s efforts to protect her. In fact, it actually recycles part of the first film’s plot. Elizabeth features a plot against the queen that is a composite of the actual Ridolfi and Babington Plots, with the Jesuit John Ballard featuring as the assassin. EtGA shows us the Babington Plot somewhat more accurately, but since John Ballard was already killed in the first film, they decided to rename the Jesuit orchestrater of the plot Robert Reston.

The historical Babington Plot involved a Catholic effort to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her on the throne with her Catholic cousin Mary I of Scotland, who had been captured and held in genteel confinement in England for 19 years. Walsingham understood that Mary was the focus of numerous plots, since as Elizabeth’s closest living relative she was naturally a factor in Catholic plots to remove Elizabeth. Her letters show that Mary was extremely well-informed about multiple conspiracies, but Elizabeth was deeply reluctant to take action against Mary. Since Mary was a crowned queen in her own right, executing her would provide precedent for executing Elizabeth, and it would undermine the mystique that Elizabeth felt was essential to her rule. Walsingham tried without success to get his queen to take decisive action about her cousin.

So when Walsingham captured an English Catholic named Gilbert Gifford who was conspiring to assassinate Elizabeth, he saw an opportunity to eliminate Mary. Gifford agreed to act as a double agent. He met with Mary and arranged to have letters smuggled to her in beer barrels.

As the plot developed, it came to focus around a wealthy Catholic named Anthony Babington, who was in what he thought was secret coded communication with Mary via those beer barrels, never realizing that Gifford and another member of the plot were letting Walsingham decode and read the letters. The Jesuit priest John Ballard was working to gain Spanish agreement to launch an invasion on England in Mary’s name, while Babington was being maneuvered to win Mary’s assent to a scheme in which Babington was to assassinate Elizabeth, Mary would be rescued from confinement, and then placed on the throne. Mary eventually sent Babington a letter laying out what she saw as necessary for any plot to rescue her from captivity. This letter on its own was probably enough to implicate Mary in the whole plot, but one of the spies copied it and added a postscript in which Mary appeared to agree to the effort to kill Elizabeth. That was enough to let Walsingham arrest Ballard and Babington, who were subsequently executed.

Mary Queen of Scots

The Execution of Mary

Mary was put on trial in 1586, based on a Bond of Association passed by the Privy Council in 1584. This bond, which Mary among many others signed, allowed for the execution of anyone in the line of succession (read: Mary) who was aware of any plot to kill the queen, even if they were not actively involved in the plotting. Parliament followed this up with an Act of Association that provided for the execution of anyone who stood to benefit from a plot against the queen. So despite Mary’s insistence that she was not subject to English law, and despite the fact (or rather because of the fact) that she was allowed neither legal counsel nor defense witnesses nor access to the evidence against her, Mary was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.

Elizabeth hesitated to sign the death warrant. She understood that executing Mary would certainly outrage France and Spain, and would remove one of the few active deterrents to a Catholic invasion. She also recognized that it would be very hard for her to control the perceptions and meaning of the execution. Nevertheless, driven by pressure from both Walsingham and the general English population, she eventually gave in and reluctantly signed the warrant. (Walsingham reported eased her discomfort by including the warrant in a stack of other documents that needed her signature.) Then Walsingham conveniently ‘fell ill’, leaving it up to a deputy to dispatch the warrant to Mary’s jailer. Elizabeth was furious at the poor deputy for having sent the warrant without her permission; like Walsingham’s illness, this too was probably a fiction, to provide her with some degree of deniability.

Mary’s last letter shows her being at peace with her impending death, and understanding herself as a Catholic martyr. The execution itself, in February of 1587, was less clean than was desired. The executioner failed to deliver a clean blow and had to take a second stroke. Her pet dog ran up to the body and got itself covered in her blood. When her head was held up, her wig either slipped off or was pulled off (accounts differ), revealing that she had gone grey (Mary, like Elizabeth, was well-known for her red hair). In later Catholic propaganda these details were elaborated to make the execution seem even more horrific than it was; it was claimed that the executioner took three strokes to kill her, so that her death was more like the torture of an early Christian martyr. The dog supposedly howled loudly and ran about the room getting blood everywhere. When the executioner picked up the head, he supposedly grabbed the wig by mistake, so that the head fell out and rolled across the floor. Elizabeth’s concerns were proven correct; she could not control the propaganda generated by the execution, and it triggered the Spanish Armada the next year.

The Death of Mary Queen of Scots

The Plot and Execution in Elizabeth: the Golden Age

EtGA follows the basic facts of the Babington plot, but it does make a few key changes. As noted, Ballard was renamed so as not to conflict with the first movie. The film lays out the messages being smuggled to Mary in beer barrels and Walsingham’s monitoring of the plot, although how he discovers the plot is wrong. In the film, he simply arrests some Catholics who give him the lead he needs; also his (I think fictitious) brother William is a Catholic entangled in the plot.

In reality, the plot never got anywhere near coming to fruition, but in the film, Babington (Eddie Redmayne) bursts into Elizabeth’s chapel and draws a pistol. He hesitates to shoot her but eventually pulls the trigger. It’s unclear at first but eventually it emerges that he was given a pistol that was loaded with powder but no bullet.

Redmayne as Babington, pointing his pistol at Elizabeth

The assassination attempt gives Walsingham enough leverage to persuade Elizabeth to try and execute Mary (Samantha Morton, in a very small but moving performance). Elizabeth is shown waffling before the trial, and has to be persuaded by Walsingham that she has a duty to protect her people by execution Mary. Elizabeth eventually agrees and Mary is put on trial and executed. The emphasis is mostly on the execution, which is shown without anyone of the unpleasantness. The sequence is quite sympathetic to Mary, who appears serene as she goes to her death, whereas Elizabeth is shown to be deeply agitated.

Morton as Mary; note that red is the liturgical color of martyrs.

Perhaps the biggest change that the film makes, however, comes immediately after the execution. Philip II of Spain declares war on England, and Walsingham suddenly realizes that Philip was behind the whole plot in the first place., because the Spanish king has been reading Mary’s correspondence. Babington’s gun was unloaded so that Elizabeth would survive, execute Mary and give Philip the justification to invade. Walsingham begs the queen’s forgiveness for misunderstanding the whole situation, and Elizabeth admits that she has erred in executing Mary.

Upon examination, this plot doesn’t work. If Elizabeth had been assassinated, Mary would have automatically become queen, and there would have been no need for a Spanish invasion. Executing Mary was the last thing Philip wanted to happen, because it meant that there was no Catholic heir to the throne (the new heir, Mary’s son James, having been raised as a Protestant), which would make controlling England after the conquest a bigger problem, since there is no Catholic heir to put on the throne as a Spanish puppet (although as the widower of Elizabeth’s older sister Mary I, Philip had his own very weak claim). Had Philip simply been waiting for an excuse, Mary’s imprisonment would probably have been enough on its own. In actuality, the execution of Mary forced Philip to take action when he was probably reluctant to do so.

Furthermore, Babington never actually attempted to shoot Elizabeth, and it’s not clear how Philip would have been able to read Mary’s correspondence, since it was passing through Walsingham’s hands.

So the film essentially inverts the relationship between the execution of Mary Stuart and the Spanish invasion. The actual invasion was a reaction to Mary’s execution, whereas in the film, the execution is part of the scheme to set up the invasion. What the film gets right is the broad sequence of events, showing how the Babington Plot led to Mary’s death, which in turn led to the Armada War. With the exception of the detail about the pistol being unloaded as part of a deeper plot, the film’s changes to history are mostly in the way of simplifying the complex details of the plot and making the narrative  clear to the audience. In that sense, I think this part of the film works better as history than Elizabeth does. But as we shall see next time, there are other problems with EtGA.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

Like biographies about Elizabeth I, there are a lot of not very good biographies of Mary Stuart. John Guy’s biography on Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuartis probably definitive for scholarly works. But if you’re not up for 600+ pages, try Rosalind K. Marshall’s much shorter Mary Queen of Scots: Truth or Lies(Kindle edition), which focuses on answering the key questions about this famous but somewhat misunderstood woman. The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Series in History & Culture)is a short classroom textbook that addresses her trial and execution and offers the primary sources for those events.

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Elizabeth: Is Elizabeth Anti-Catholic?

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16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Elizabeth, Elizabeth I, John Ballard, Religious Issues, Ridolfi Plot, Shekhar Kapur, The Catholic League

When Elizabeth ((1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur) came out, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights accused it of anti-Catholic bias, and it’s worth considering whether the film can reasonably be accused of hostility to Catholicism. (Full disclosure: I’m a Lutheran, which obviously influences how I view the events of the Reformation.)

The 16^th century was a genuinely brutal time for religious tensions, and the film is correct that Catholics participated in the brutality with considerable zeal. The opening scene shows three anonymous Protestants executed under Mary I, out of an actual total of 283. Both the Ridolfi and Babington plots were very substantially driven by Catholic hostilities toward Elizabeth, who for much of her reign was the target of plans by Catholic rulers to remove her from office and replace her with her Catholic cousin, Mary of Scotland. Pope Pius V did support the Ridolfi plot (he made Ridolfi his agent in England, and gave him a letter of support for the plot), and John Ballard really was a Jesuit priest, though he does not seem to have enjoyed papal support for his scheme. So the Catholic League’s complaint about a “scheming pope who sends a priest to plot against and assassinate Elizabeth” is a reasonable only because Pius didn’t send John Ballard; but both details they complain about are historically true when taken separately.

The heart of the Catholic League’s complaint, however, is that the film doesn’t give equal time to Protestant atrocities against Catholics. They object that the movie says nothing about Henry VIII or the execution of Sir Thomas More, an odd argument to make about a film that begins more than a decade after Henry’s death. More was executed by Henry VIII in 1535, and thus can reasonably be considered a victim of Protestant hostility to Catholicism, but More was also an enthusiastic proponent of the public execution of Protestants, so citing his (again, not relevant to a film set twenty years later) example is something of a double-edged sword. This complaint feels like they are simply looking for something to complain about.

Elizabeth did persecute Catholics in the later part of her reign, but she did so largely in response to Pius V’s excommunication of her, which had the unfortunate effect of meaning that a devout Catholic could not be trusted to support Elizabeth as monarch (which is not to say that all Catholics opposed her, only that they almost automatically came under suspicion). The early part of her reign was marked by attempts to reach religious unity between Protestants and Catholics, which the film also largely glosses over. However, later in her reign, some Catholics were executed, such as Cuthbert Maine, and the film entirely fails to acknowledge this. An argument could be made that the film is focusing entirely on court life and therefore the execution of Cuthbert Maine in Cornwall is not relevant, but it’s undeniable that the film does present almost all of the aggression as coming from Catholics.

Another reasonable point is the League’s objection that the film depicts its Catholic characters negatively. Mary I is shown as harsh, fanatical, and somewhat unstable. Norfolk is a sneering villain. De la Quadra is dark and creepy, Henri d’Anjou is just weird, and Stephen Gardiner is given a disturbing cataract in one eye. The film’s chief villain, Norfolk, was not in fact Catholic at all, so making him a scheming Catholic is hard to justify from the standpoint of historical accuracy, even if it does make the narrative simpler. Nor did the earl of Leicester convert to Catholicism. And the film treats the priest Ballard as if he were personally an assassin, for which there is no evidence; in Ballard’s plot, he was the organizer, not the killer. So the film’s strong tendency to associate Catholicism with villainous behavior is definitely a problem. As the Catholic League points out, the film suggests that all the religious tension in England was driven by Catholics, which is not true. There were most definitely Protestants who enthusiastically called for the death of Catholics.

But it is not true that every Catholic in the film is depicted negatively. Arundel is shown as being kind to Elizabeth when he is ordered by Mary to imprison her, and when Arundel is caught during the plot, Elizabeth makes a point of saying that she will remember his earlier kindness to her. Unlike the creepy Spanish ambassador, the French ambassador comes across as a fairly decent man. And of course Leicester, who supposedly converted to Catholicism, is given sympathetic treatment; his conversion is presented as an expression of his frustrated love for her.

The film distorts historical facts in a way that negatively depicts Catholicism. Is the motive for that anti-Catholic bigotry? Obviously that’s hard to know, since only Shekhar Kapur could answer that for certain, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the film’s perspective. Elizabeth and Walsingham are the heroes of the film, and about half the film’s plot revolves around attempts to assassinate her. Having decided to build the film around that aspect of Elizabeth’s reign, it’s easy to see why the Catholics became the villains of the story; from Elizabeth’s viewpoint, the Catholics are the bad guys, and I think that much of the film’s negative depiction of Catholics is driven chiefly by the desire to have clear villains and a simple narrative rather than any strong animus against Catholics. That doesn’t exonerate the film from its strongly anti-Catholic stance, but I do think it helps explain it.

So while a lot of the Catholic League’s charges are, in my opinion, unreasonable, it is certainly true that the film largely makes the Catholics the villains, in a way that distorts the facts. In part this is because the Protestant position is represented by Elizabeth, the heroine of the film and Catholic efforts to kill or depose her must therefore be presented negatively. But the film makes little attempt to explain the Catholic position or explore the deeper religious or moral issues at stake. In fact, the film makes virtually no attempt to explore what the Protestant/Catholic divide was about at all. In that sense, the film could just as easily have been Democrats vs Republicans. The Catholics in Elizabeth are evil mostly because they’re Catholics and Catholicism is bad in this film. So in the end, I think we have to admit that Elizabeth is anti-Catholic the way that Braveheart is anti-English or 300 is anti-non-straight-white-physically-perfect-people. The factual distortions required for the plot create a bias even if there was no actual hostility there.

Patterns mean something, and the meaning of a film emerges from the patterns it creates. This, more than anything, is what I try to teach my students about how to read historical films. The Catholic devil is in the Protestant details, I guess.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth is available on Amazon.

Norman Jones’ The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation focuses on the ways that families tried to manage the challenges of the Reformation over the course of the 16th century. He looks at the ways that families sought to overlook or rewrite the religious differences between three generations while remaining families. It’s a book that really changed my view of the English Reformation.

An interesting window into the plots against Elizabeth is Jessie Child’s God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England, which examines the struggles of one Catholic family to navigate the political currents of Tudor religion.

Elizabeth: Why Does Elizabeth Live in a Cathedral?

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16th Century England, Durham Cathedral, Elizabeth, Elizabeth I, Hampton Court Palace, Shekhar Kapur

When Shekhar Kapur decided to make Elizabeth (1998), he clearly decided he wanted striking interior visuals. So we see numerous shots of an unidentified palace in which first Mary and then Elizabeth live in. It has tall narrow chambers with pillared arcades, and the pillars are decorated with geometric patterns. It’s definitely a gorgeous set. You can get a brief look at the set in this clip from the film, starting at the 3:45 mark.

Notice the column on the left, with the diamonds, and the one in the middle right, with the chevrons. The column on the far right is composed of multiple smaller columns. Notice also toward the back of the shot you can see that the pillars are actually columns in a rounded arcade with windows above to let in some light. The sense it offers is that Elizabeth’s palace is a long, wide stone hall with extremely high ceilings and massive columns.

But this scene wasn’t shot on a Hollywood set.  It was shot on location. And it wasn’t shot in a Tudor palace. If they had wanted to go that route, they could have filmed here:

Hampton Court Palace

Hampton Court was built during the reign of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, who liked it so much he forced the original owner to trade it to him.

Instead, this scene was shot here:

Durham Cathedral

Durham Cathedral was built in northern England in the late 11^th century in the Romanesque style, and decorated (uniquely, as far as I know) with massive pillars with geometric banding. It’s one of the most famous churches in England, and easily recognizable because of its distinct style.

Let’s take a look at the interior of the nave:

Durham Cathedral interior

Note the pillars with chevrons, the composite pillars, the rounded arches, and the clerestory windows letting in much of the light.

Here’s another shot:

Durham Cathedral pillar

That’s right; this film has Mary and Elizabeth using Durham Cathedral as a royal palace.
Actual royal palaces weren’t built with massive columns and high ceilings, and during the Tudor period they generally had wood-paneled interiors, not bare stone. Here’s the interior of the Tudor-era Great Hall at Hampton Court:

The Great Hall at Hampton Court

It’s a pretty impressive space in its own right, and much more indicative of the interior of Tudor-era palaces (because it is one).

I can understand Kapur’s desire to find impressive locations that offered striking interior shots, but did he have to choose one of the most famous churches in all of England? Imagine a movie set in New York City, with a character who lives in a lavish skyscraper apartment, and then the film uses a shot of the Empire State Building for the exterior. Ok, Durham Cathedral isn’t quite as famous as the Empire State Building, but it’s not exactly obscure.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth is available on Amazon.

Elizabeth: Dissing Queen Bess

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16th Century England, Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth, Elizabeth I, Geoffrey Rush, Kings and Queens, Shekhar Kapur, Tudor England

I mentioned in my previous post on Elizabeth (1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur) that the film reduces the complex political issues around Elizabeth’s (Cate Blanchett) marriage choices to a question of personal interest. Her indecisiveness is depicted entirely as Elizabeth wavering between a man she loves but knows is unsuitable and a repugnant suitor who would be a good choice politically. While her personal feelings were probably an issue in her choice, the real reason for her refusal to commit was she recognized that whichever choice she made would bring with it at least as many problems as advantages. There was no truly good choice for Elizabeth to make, so she changed the terms of the problem and made refusing to choose the best option. Doing this forced her to endure substantial pressure from her Privy Council, her Parliaments, and other European monarchs, as well as to defy social convention, so her choice required her to develop a variety of strategies for successfully managing this pressure.

Blanchett as Elizabeth

In other words, Elizabeth refused to choose a husband because she was an extremely savvy politician, not because she was an indecisive woman, and the way she enacted her choice demonstrated considerable finesse. So by downplaying the political issues and emphasizing her personal feelings, the film strips Elizabeth of much of her political skill and replaces it with a set of issues straight out of a rom-com. In a serious historical film, it’s degrading to one of the most intelligent people ever to sit on the English throne to depict her as little better than Kate Hudson or Drew Barrymore looking for love.

And unfortunately, the film does this fairly consistently. The film only shows her engaging in one piece of actual politics, when she works to persuade the English Parliament to pass the Act of Uniformity that helped resolve the kingdom’s religious problems. In the film, we see her struggling to craft and memorize a political speech that will win over the bishops in particular. On its own, this would be an interesting moment, but when time comes to give the speech, she remains hesitant and off-balance. Gradually she finds her feet, but even at the end of the speech, she doesn’t seem truly confident. We know from many sources, including her speeches, that Elizabeth was an extremely skilled public speaker. She may well have been less skilled at giving speeches when she was early in her reign, but the film never shows us a moment when her oratorical skills truly shine, which leaves the audience with the impression that she was not a gifted speech-maker.

Furthermore, during the speech the camera cuts to six Catholic bishops who are locked in a cellar somewhere, and therefore unable to participate in the voting. (This never happened.) Eventually, it is revealed that Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) is responsible for this, and that Elizabeth won the vote by five votes; if Walsingham hadn’t intervened, Elizabeth would have lost the vote. So according to the film, Elizabeth only triumphed on this issue because Walsingham secretly stacked the deck for her, and not because she skillfully managed the members of Parliament and the bishops to win their support.

As the film constructs its narrative, at the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth is a very emotional woman who lacks inner strength and is easily distressed by the difficulties she encounters. In many of her difficult moments, she requires the intervention of a man to calm her and stiffen her resolve. When her Privy Council bullies her into war with Scotland, Walsingham advises against it, and he proves right. Later on, it is Walsingham who teaches her that she needs to be more ruthless with her enemies, and it is Walsingham who tells her that she has to do without love. So as the film structures events, one of the greatest rulers in English history wouldn’t have been great at all if she hadn’t had a man standing behind her advising her how to win and occasionally intervening to ensure her triumph.

Rush as Walsingham

This is simply untrue. Elizabeth showed great political skill and savvy during the years of her sister Mary’s reign, when a wrong step could easily have gotten her executed. She prudently dissembled about her religious beliefs and at least nominally embraced Catholicism until she was able to admit she was a Protestant after she became queen. So she didn’t need Walsingham to teach her how to be an effective politician.

Additionally, Walsingham didn’t really become an important figure in Elizabeth’s government until the late 1560s, by which point she had already been in power for more than a decade, and had managed to enact the Act of Uniformity, begin dealing with the issue of her marriage, and confront the French build-up in Scotland; while the Scottish campaign was poorly conducted, it achieved her main goal of getting the French to withdraw most of their forces from Scotland. In all of these matters, Elizabeth generally set her own policy, often to the frustration of the men on her Privy Council. There is no doubt that Elizabeth was a skilled politician even at the start of her reign.

And then there’s the fact that for much of the second half of the film, the main plot revolves around a plot to kill Elizabeth that requires Walsingham to keep her safe. For a movie about Queen Elizabeth, the story is surprisingly dependent on the actions of men.  Indeed, in one scene, the assassin Ballard (Daniel Craig) catches her alone and gets within about 20 feet or so of her. Elizabeth is presented as helplessly demanding that he tell her his name; had other events not created a distraction, Ballard clearly would have killed her. This moment contrasts sharply with a real assassination attempt that she survived. In 1584, Elizabeth was surprised alone in her garden by Dr. William Perry, a member of Parliament and one of her spies, who had decided to kill her. But he was so daunted by her presence that he was unable to carry out the deed. (At least this is how some sources describe the incident; others suggest that he was trying to get her attention to raise his standing with her.) The notion that she was a helpless woman in the face of violence is false.

Elizabeth surviving an assassination attempt (note the emphasis on her fear)

For the film to undermine her accomplishments and attribute them to a man is, sadly, pure sexism. It feels as though the screenwriter, Michael Hirst, and Shekhar Kapur simply couldn’t imagine a strong political woman who wasn’t dependent on a man. If there was ever a woman who wasn’t dependent on men for her success, it was Queen Elizabeth I. Her story is one of a woman successfully navigating a male-dominated world and rising above the limitations men attempted to place on her. That’s a story I would much rather have seen than the one this film gives us.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth is available on Amazon.

If you’d like to know more about Sir Francis Walsingham and his espionage efforts, try, The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I.

Elizabeth: Whose Plot is It Anyway?

Tags

16th Century England, Babington Plot, Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth, Elizabeth I, Joseph Fiennes, Kings and Queens, Ridolfi Plot, Tudor England

So now that start of the semester stuff is more or less done with, I finally had time to sit down at watch Elizabeth (1998, dir. Shekhar Kapur). The film tells the story of the early years of the famous Queen Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett). Specifically, it focuses on the process by which she went from an extremely emotional young queen to a more mature, emotionally-reserved queen. She has to learn harsh lessons about love and political decision-making over the course of the film.

Let’s Marry the Queen!

After showing the danger Elizabeth was in during her older sister Mary I’s reign, the film largely focuses on two things. The major thread throughout the film, starting once she is queen, is whom she will marry, King Philip II of Spain, the French prince Henri d’Anjou (the future Henri III, played by Vincent Cassel), or Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes). While she loves Leicester and has sex with him, it gradually becomes clear that he is not good choice for emotional reasons; he is a weak man, not faithful to her, and presumptuous of his rights over her. He is also already married to another woman. The shock of learning this fact drives Elizabeth to end her relationship with him and increasingly shut him out.

In reality, Elizabeth knew all along that Leicester was married (Dudley did in fact marry his second wife in secret though, so the film is collapsing details about two marriages); while she was very intimate with him, she disliked his wife Amy, who only saw Leicester for a few days at a time and lived away from court. In 1560, Amy was found dead at her country house, having apparently fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her neck. There is no evidence that this was anything other than an accident, but speculation immediately began that Leicester had orchestrated Amy’s murder, because her death left Leicester free to marry Elizabeth. But many of Elizabeth’s counselors opposed the match, and argued that she could not afford to risk the scandal that would ensue if she married him. Elizabeth seems to have eventually accepted this fact, although she remained close to him the rest of his life.

Fiennes as Leicester

An additional factor in the opposition to Leicester as a suitable husband for Elizabeth was the unfortunate history of his father John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland. He was Lord Protector of the realm during the short reign of Elizabeth’s young half-brother Edward VI. When Edward died, Northumberland attempted to engineer the accession of Edward’s cousin Jane Grey as queen, having married Jane to his son Guildford Dudley. The scheme collapsed in less than two weeks, Mary I took the throne, and Northumberland and Guildford were both executed. As a result, some English nobles may have feared that if he became king, Leicester would avenge the death of his father and brother on the nobles who had supported Mary.

Elizabeth’s other two suitors both brought with them the prospects of an alliance with a great power, but also the enmity of whichever great power she didn’t choose. As the movie emphasizes, England was not a great power in the 16^th century, and Elizabeth was therefore rightfully worried about getting pulled into the orbit of either France or Spain, which would have tended to overshadow her interests. With only a small army, it is unclear whether England could have won if either power had invaded, and France was allied to Scotland, which could easily invade northern England. As one famous British historian remarked, Elizabeth’s marriage was a weapon like a bee sting; it was powerful, but it could only be used once. So Elizabeth adopted a different strategy; instead of marrying, she played France and Spain off against each other, constantly dangling the possibility of marriage before them, but never committing to either side. This strategy kept England out of war for 30 years.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth barely touches on any of these issues. Instead, in general Hollywood fashion, it prefers to explain Elizabeth’s refusal to choose a husband in terms of her personal feelings. She loves Leicester but they are poorly matched as people, and she is shattered by the revelation that he is already married. She is uncomfortable with the prospect of marrying Philip of Spain because he was Mary’s husband. Henri d’Anjou is presented as vulgar, obnoxious, immature, overbearing, and, bizarrely, a transvestite. In reality, Henri never met Elizabeth, and there’s no basis for the film’s depiction of him. While historians have certainly seen deeper feelings in Elizabeth’s indecisiveness, all serious historians agree that her feelings were only one factor, and probably not the major one. By glossing over the political elements of the choice, the film unfortunately reduces Elizabeth to the status of a woman who just can’t make up her mind about whom she wants to marry.

No, Let’s Kill the Queen!

Starting in the second half of the film, a second plot element emerges, dealing with a plot to assassinate Elizabeth. The tension between Catholics and Protestants is a major issue throughout the film (which opens with the burning of three Protestants). Partway through the film, there are two unexplained assassination attempts. The first involves someone shooting crossbow bolts at Elizabeth while she is riding on a barge, although they only manage to kill one of her attendants. The second involves a poisoned silk dress that one of her ladies-in-waiting tries on so she can have sex with Leicester. From that point on, the marriage question gets relegated to the back burner as Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) works to uncover a wider plot. (The barge incident is basically true, although the would-be assassin used a gun, not a crossbow. Who was behind it does not seem to have ever been found out. The dress incident is completely fabricated, and seems lifted partly from Medea.)

The main assassination plot involves efforts to smuggle a Jesuit priest John Ballard (Daniel Craig) into England so he can murder Elizabeth. The goal of the plot is to replace Elizabeth with Queen Mary of Scotland and to marry her to Thomas Howard, the duke of Norfolk (Christopher Eccleston), the leading Catholic noble in England. It’s a wide ranging plot, including Pope Pius V (John Gielgud) and the Spanish Ambassador Álvaro de la Quadra (James Frain), as well as Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the earl of Arundel, and the earl of Sussex. De la Quadra persuades Leicester to convert to Catholicism secretly and support the plot, apparently out of bitterness toward Elizabeth. Walsingham captures Ballard and Arundel (who is hiding Ballard) and finds a letter proposing the marriage between Norfolk and Queen Mary. He uses one of his spies to pass the letter to Norfolk, who signs it, thus providing Walsingham the evidence he needs to arrest Norfolk and Sussex. For good measure, Walsingham also assassinates Gardiner and de la Quadra. Elizabeth pardons Leicester so he can live on as a reminder to herself about how close she came to danger. Then the film ends in 1563 (as we know from an epilogue text that tells us that Elizabeth reigned for 40 more years).

Eccleston as Norfolk

There’s a lot wrong with this part of the film. Most importantly, it merges two separate plots against Elizabeth, neither of which had happened by 1563. In 1569, the Ridolfi Plot (as it has come to be known) involved a scheme conducted by a Florentine banker, Roberto Ridolfi, to marry Mary of Scotland to Norfolk and land Spanish troops in northern England; these troops would depose Elizabeth in favor of her cousin Mary. He won the support of Pius V and Philip II, as well as Mary and Norfolk, but the whole plot was badly planned out, and Ridolfi failed to discover that Norfolk wasn’t even Catholic but rather a committed Protestant. Several people warned Elizabeth about the plan and Norfolk was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. He was executed only in 1572. The Spanish ambassador (who was not de la Quadra, who had actually died years earlier) was expelled from the country. Arundel was arrested, spent time in the Tower, but was released and died peacefully in 1580.

In 1586, a different plot emerged, known today as the Babington Plot, after Sir Anthony Babington, one of the chief figures in it. The Jesuit priest John Ballard was seeking to free Queen Mary of Scotland from the house arrest that Elizabeth had placed her in, and he sought to use Babington to get in contact with her. Walsingham figured the plot out and allowed Babington to send a letter to Mary, who responded with a letter authorizing the assassination of Elizabeth. Walsingham used this letter to persuade Elizabeth to execute Mary for treason. Ballard and Babington were executed in such a brutal fashion that Elizabeth agreed to allow a less gruesome execution for the others implicated in the plot, although Mary’s execution also proved a disaster for Elizabeth’s reputation.

Bishop Stephen Gardiner died before Elizabeth even became queen, and de la Quadra died years before either plot. Leicester was never involved in any plot to murder Elizabeth because he was always a supporter of her, and he never became a Catholic. In the film, Ballard gets very close to Elizabeth before a distraction forces him to flee; in reality he got nowhere near the queen.

So the film has basically taken the Ridolfi plot and the Babington plot and just mixed them together. Both involved freeing Mary of Scotland, but the Ridolfi plot involved her marriage, while the Babington plot did not. Pius V and Philip II were involved in the Ridolfi plot, whereas Philip never committed to the Babington plot, and there is no evidence that Pope Sixtus V was involved in it at all. The Ridolfi plan was aimed as militarily deposing Elizabeth, not assassinating her, while the Babington plot involved assassinating Elizabeth but never got close to her. Walsingham was not involved in thwarting the Ridolfi plot at all, and used the Babington plot to entrap Mary, not Norfolk.

So while the first plot thread, about who will marry the queen, is basically accurate but oversimplified, the second plot thread, about efforts to kill her, is badly garbled history, and basically false in the facts it presents. However, the film does manage to tell a coherent story that is true to some of the spirit of Elizabeth’s reign. And it’s the film that brought Cate Blanchett to the attention of American audiences, which is definitely a big mark in its favor.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth is available on Amazon.

Elizabeth has been the subject of dozens of biographies, many of them not very good. For a current scholarly view of her, try David Loades’ Elizabeth I.

An interesting window into the plots against Elizabeth is Jessie Child’s God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England, which examines the struggles of one Catholic family to navigate the political currents of Tudor religion.