Elizabeth: the Golden Age: All Romance, All the Time

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16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Abbie Cornish, Bess Throckmorton, Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Geoffrey Rush, Kings and Queens, Sir Walter Raleigh, Tudor England

Like Elizabeth, Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007, Shekhar Kapur) is as much about Elizabeth’s (Cate Blanchett) lack of a love life as it is about the plots swirling around her. In this film, the object of her erotic fixation is Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), the famous soldier, explorer and pirate.

Raleigh was something of an adventurer. He fought for the Huguenots in France, helped suppress a rebellion in Ireland, explored the Atlantic Coast of North America (and later on, South America) and founded the ill-fated Roanoke colony in Virginia. He acted a privateer against Spanish ships in the Caribbean, played a minor role in the defense of England during the Armada War, and eventually helped capture Cadiz. He served in three Parliaments and served as governor of Jersey. Perhaps because of his exploits, he became a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, but after Elizabeth died, he was implicated in a plot to prevent her cousin, James Stuart, from inheriting the throne. He was tried and sentenced to death, but James initially spared him. Later on, he participated in an attack on a Spanish colony, and the Spanish ambassador persuaded James to reinstate the death sentence, with the result that Raleigh was executed in 1618. Overall, he lived a life filled with colorful incidents, and his inclusion in EtGA is a reasonable one.

As I noted in my previous post, the film substantially misrepresents his contribution to the Armada War, but since I’ve already discussed that, I’ll focus in this post on the romantic sub-plot.

Early in the film, Elizabeth is being courted by various suitors, including a young Austrian prince who is obviously not a good match for the queen. (Historically, this happened much earlier in Elizabeth’s reign). Raleigh returns to court and immediately attracts the queen’s attention because of his rather more blunt and bold personal style. Unlike the Austrian prince, Raleigh is a real man, and the queen quickly finds herself being fascinated by his stories of adventure. He clearly represents a life she might have had under different circumstances.

Raleigh being typically studly.

Her intermediary with Raleigh is her lady-in-waiting, Bess Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish). The coincidence that the queen and her handmaiden both have the same name allows the film to create a love triangle in which Elizabeth is infatuated with Raleigh, who is interested in her in return but cannot make headway with her because she refuses to marry. So instead he becomes attracted to Bess. Elizabeth herself encourages this, seeing Bess as a stand-in for herself. So in one scene, she orders Bess to practice dancing the volta with Raleigh, despite his protestations that he doesn’t know the steps. (This is clearly a call back to Elizabeth, in which the queen dances twice with the earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes), in two rather erotically-charged scenes.) But Elizabeth’s voyeuristic impulses unwittingly encourage Bess to fall in love with Raleigh. Bess gets pregnant and the couple quickly marry.

Elizabeth getting her voyeuristic freak on with Bess and Raleigh

The problem with this as that since Bess is legally Elizabeth’s ward, it is illegal for her to marry without Elizabeth’s permission. When Elizabeth learns the truth, she furiously beats Bess, expressing both her sexual jealousy and her sense of betrayal. “My bitches wear my collars!” she shouts. The queen imprisons Raleigh, only agreeing to let him out to help fight the Spanish. By the end of the film she has forgiven them. She visits them after the birth of their son, giving him her blessing in a scene that makes it clear she thinks of the baby as the son she cannot have.

The facts here are basically correct, but the chronology is wrong. Raleigh and Throckmorton only married in 1591, three years after the events of the film. Their son died in infancy, and the clandestine marriage remained secret for about another year before Elizabeth got word of it. Both were imprisoned, and Raleigh was released to help in a different campaign against the Spanish.

Overall, this is probably the most accurate portion of the film. All the basic facts are right, and the adjustment of the chronology to make it coincide with the Armada War is not too outrageous. The major problem is that the film assumes that he was Elizabeth’s favorite because she was sexually attracted to him. While that’s certainly possible, there isn’t any special reason to assume that it is so, and it’s another example of Hollywood films reducing the complexities of history to simple romantic relationships. Given that Elizabeth was in her mid-50s by the time of the film, the prospect of a romantic relationship between Elizabeth and Raleigh is a bit unrealistic (although, obviously, older women can certainly develop romantic or sexual fixations), but the fact that Blanchett was in her late 30s when she made this film helps get around that. Presumably Kapur concluded that no one wanted to see a woman in her mid-50s playing a woman in her mid-50s.

Blanchett at Elizabeth, in one of many great, if somewhat improbable, gowns

Just Because She’s a Queen Doesn’t Mean She Knows How to Govern

In a previous post, I pointed out the ways that Elizabeth undermines the historical Queen Elizabeth I’s agency. It pretty much attributes most of her success to the efforts of Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) while suggesting that her historically-accurate indecisiveness about her marriage was a result of a personal inability to make decisions about her husband. And EtGA unfortunately does the same thing. Elizabeth spends much of the film mooning over Raleigh and then getting viciously angry when another woman beds and marries him. On one level it’s an interesting exploration of the conflicted feelings Elizabeth might have felt about her situation, but on another level it’s demeaning to suggest that one of the most powerful women of her day (perhaps the most powerful) spent most of her time acting like a lovesick cheerleader. The film makes even less effort than Elizabeth to explain that Elizabeth’s decision to remain single was the result of political factors at least as much as personal ones. It’s not especially clear in this film why she can’t marry Raleigh, so the viewer is left to assume that she’s just a fussy woman.

Elizabeth in a stunning gown

On its own, this might not be too serious an issue. As I said, this is an interesting exploration of the feelings the historical Elizabeth might actually have experienced. But Kapur again combines this plot with a political plot in which Elizabeth is almost entirely reliant on men. The main plot is the Babington Plot, the execution of Mary Stuart, and the Armada War, and Elizabeth is almost entirely passive in this plot. She is the object of the assassination plot, and survives purely because actually killing her is not the true goal of the plot. Walsingham is the active figure in that part of the plot, ferreting out what’s going on and then working to persuade the queen that she owes a duty to her people to execute Mary. During the Armada War, Elizabeth is wracked with fears about her death, and Raleigh has to teach her how to be courageous, after which point she mans up, dons her armor and delivers the film’s rather weak version of the Tilbury Speech, which strips out most of the speech’s stony determination. Elizabeth spent her formative teen years under constant threat during her sister’s reign and was a periodic target of assassination plots for much of her life; the idea that she didn’t know how to manage her own fear is absurd, but that’s what the film is telling us.

Elizabeth in another stunning gown

The historical Elizabeth was definitely indecisive. She spent years refusing to decide who she would marry, and spent years after that refusing to formally designate her heir (in fact, she may never have made an explicit statement on the subject). She was deeply reluctant to execute Mary Stuart and Walsingham was smart enough to recognize that she needed help taking that step. But while indecision may have been a personal trait, there were also very powerful political reasons for her to not want to take decisive action on issues where there could be no turning back once certain actions had been taken. EtGA hints at the complexity of issues around Mary Stuart when Raleigh observes “Kill a queen and all queens are mortal.” But even here the film implies that the issue is Elizabeth’s inability to acknowledge her own mortality, rather than her understanding that her political position was stronger when her subjects saw her as being more than human.

Elizabeth in yet another stunning gown

The film offers one other moment intended to reveal her personal feelings. After being out in public all dressed up, she sits in front of a mirror, takes off her wig, and contemplates the fact that she’s aging and starting to have wrinkles. I think this was intended to explore the contrast between her glamorous political persona and the reality of her humanity, but it has the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing the notion that women are primarily concerned about their physical appearance and not growing old. And the fact that Blanchett looks remarkable good for a woman who’s supposed to be in her mid-50s just reinforces the unreasonable beauty standards Hollywood forces on women.

Elizabeth in a stunning..fairy cosplay outfit?

Most films about historical leaders take at least some effort to explore the political issues they dealt with. Imagine, if you will, a film about George Washington in which his only motive for fighting the British was his love for Martha, or a film in which Winston Churchill was fighting World War II out of a sense of sexual rivalry with Adolf Hitler. In Braveheart, Wallace at least claims that his rebellion is about “freedom”, whatever he means by that. And yet, in this film, with its female leader, the politics virtually vanish or are given into the hands of men, and the queen is mostly driven by personal motives revolving around her frustrated sexual desires and her inability to make up her mind about anything that matters.

After watching this film, I think one could be forgiven for assuming that Elizabeth’s primary historical significance is that she had really great fashion sense and knew how to get the best camera angles, and not that she was one of the most effective and consequential rulers in British history. Second-wave feminists insisted that the personal is political, but in this film, the political is all personal.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis 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.

If you’re interested in Sir Walter Raleigh, you might think about getting Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and Legend(Kindle edition).

Elizabeth: the Golden Age: Nobody Expects the Spanish Armada!

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16th Century England, 16th century Europe, Battle of Gravelines, Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Military Stuff, Sir Walter Raleigh, The Spanish Armada, Tudor England

Well, except everyone actually. Contrary to a line in Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007, dir. Shekhar Kepur), the preparations for the Spanish Armada were well-known across much of Europe, and the timing of the invasion was actually a subject of considerable public debate. So when the Armada finally set sail for England, very few people were surprised.

Philip II was not only the king of Spain; he was also the ruler of the Spanish Netherlands. But the Dutch Protestants there had rebelled against Spanish rule in the 1570s, with the active aid of the English government. Elizabeth recognized that it was to her advantage to disrupt Spanish control of a territory that was, after all, directly across the English Channel from southern England; it would be a comparatively easy thing for Spanish forces in the Netherlands to launch an invasion of England.

The plan of the Armada when it finally set sail in 1588 was to sail a fleet of 130 ships up the English Channel to the Netherlands, where the Armada would act as protection for a small fleet of barges that would carry about 30,000 Spanish troops across the Channel to act as an invasion force. Since the English army was mostly composed of new recruits, once the Spanish army landed on English soil, a Spanish victory was almost assured. The English correctly realized that the only opportunity to defeat the invasion was to prevent the Armada from meeting up with the Spanish troops in the Netherlands and thereby prevent a crossing.

When the Armada reached English waters, it had a brief opportunity to trap the much larger English navy in Plymouth harbor (because the tide was against the English), but the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was in charge of the Armada, passed up the chance, which proved to be the great mistake of the campaign.

The English navy, led by Lord Howard and Sir Francis Drake, led two minor skirmishes, in which they were able to capture a few ships before the Spanish reached Calais and took up a tight formation. But they were unable to meet up with the Spanish army before the English sent in a number of fireships, burning ships filled with explosives. The Spanish cut their anchors to avoid the fireships, and the result was that their formation was badly disrupted.

The next morning, the two navies engaged at Gravelines. Although the Spanish ships had more powerful guns, they were so tightly packed with supplies that once the guns were fired, it was nearly impossible to pull them in for reloading. So in the battle, the Spanish tended to fire once and then seek to close in to board the English ships. But this was thwarted by the superior maneuverability of the English ships, who were able to stay just out of range and repeatedly fire their guns. When the wind changed, Medina Sidonia was able to escape to the north-east, with the result that the Armada, which had only lost a few ships, was unable to meet up with the Spanish land forces. So the battle of Gravelines entirely defeated the strategic goal of the Armada.

The Armada Portrait

Instead, the Armada was forced to begin the circumnavigation of the British Isles. Without anchors, however, the fleet proved vulnerable to the remarkably stormy weather; a number of ships were lost off the Orkneys, and due to a navigation error, a large portion of the Armada was driven onto the rocks of the western Irish coast. Only about half of the Armada returned home. The war itself continued on until 1604, but the major battle of the war had already been fought, and the Spanish had lost.

The Armada in Elizabeth: the Golden Age

The film quite drastically distorts the Armada Campaign. The basic strategy of the Armada is explained relatively accurately. But once the Armada shows up in the English Channel, events start to diverge. The English fight a couple of minor skirmishes with the Armada, but the result is a loss of English ships, not Spanish ships. The film emphasizes that the English ships are outnumbered, and cannot afford any losses, when in fact the English navy was considerably larger than the Armada.

The Spanish drop anchors to maintain a tight formation, and then conduct a massive religious ceremony, which means that they don’t notice the fireships being sent against them. As a result, many of this ships are lit on fire (instead of mostly evading the fireships). Then a large storm sets in, and that’s pretty much the end of the conflict. The actual battle of Gravelines is not shown, although there is fighting before the fireships are sent in. There is no explanation that most of the Armada survived the battle of Gravelines, nor is there a depiction of the Armada circumnavigating the British Isles.

Elizabeth watches the Armada burn

The film inverts the roles of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen). In reality, Drake was the Vice-Admiral of the English navy and fought at Gravelines, while Raleigh acted as an advisor to the queen but did not actually participate in any of the fighting. In the film, Drake stands in the background and barely speaks during council meetings, while Raleigh is one of the leading captains of the battle and personally (and more or less single-handedly) sails a fireship into the Spanish Armada, leaping off and swimming to safety when it explodes.

When word reaches Philip that the Armada has been defeated, he is immediately abandoned by both his daughter and the clergy around him, and he begins to lament his pride and beg God’s forgiveness. The suggestion is that the war was immediately over, instead of lasting for another 16 years.

The Tilbury Speech

Almost two weeks after the battle of Gravelines, after the Armada had been driven northward, Elizabeth gathered an army at Tilbury, near the mouth of the Thames, in case the Spanish army in the Netherlands found a way to cross over. At Tilbury, she gave what has become the most famous speech of her life, the so-called Tilbury Speech. She was wearing a white dress with a breastplate over it, and was mounted on a white horse.

Three different texts of the speech survive, but most scholars accept that the latest copy of the text, dating from 1624, is likely to be the most accurate one, and this is the version that widely known. Here is a fairly close (though not exact) version of the speech, from a BBC miniseries The Virgin Queen (2005, dir. Coky Giedroyc).

In EtGA, Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett) delivers a speech before the battle of Gravelines. Here the breastplate has become a full suit of armor.

As you can see, EtGA’s version of the Tilbury speech bears almost no similarity to the actual speech, with the exception of Elizabeth’s statement that she is resolved to live and die with her troops. In particular, the speech omits what is probably the single-most famous thing Elizabeth ever said, “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”. This is an example of how Elizabeth frequently maneuvered herself across the dividing line between male and female, variously presenting herself in masculine or feminine terms as she found useful. It’s possible that they omitted this line because she makes a similar statement in Elizabeth, but it seems unlikely that the audience would have remembered that.

Instead, the screenwriters have simply invented a new speech for Elizabeth, one that sounds more than a little like the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. It’s not a very good speech; it reeks of the sort of machismo that has become so common in contemporary action films, and has nothing of the grace of the original speech. Part of the problem here is that the film wants the Spanish threat to end with the defeat of the Armada, doesn’t want to have to point out that the war continued after Gravelines, and and doesn’t want to deal with the problem of the Spanish army sitting in the Netherlands. So instead of showing us the Tilbury Speech in its proper context, the film relocates the speech to before the defeat of the Armada, and uses it as a way of building up anticipation for the coming battle. But the result is a little clumsy, since it prepares us for a land battle that never happens.

What the film’s version of the Tilbury Speech chiefly emphasizes, I think, is a tendency for modern screenwriters to not recognize good historical material when they see it. It’s a little like a film about Abraham Lincoln and rewriting the Gettysburg Address because modern audiences would probably find the original speech dull.

Want to Know More?

Elizabeth: The Golden Ageis available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about the Spanish Armada, you could start with The Spanish Armada: Revised Edition, which combines history with the insights offered by maritime archaeology.