My Substack about these podcasts got such an enthusiastic response, I wanted to share that section here on my author website blog.
After enjoying two episodes from different podcasts on Henry VIII in recent weeks, I was excited to see that the long-running podcast The Rest Is History was releasing a series of episodes devoted to Elizabeth I. I’ve enjoyed the witty and erudite talks by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, especially their mini seasons devoted to Lord Byron and the French Revolution.
This is why I was dismayed to hear so many mistakes and misinterpretations in “Elizabeth I: The Fall of the Axe,” the episode about her parents. After beginning reasonably well on the background of Henry VIII and his first marriage, I’m told that Elizabeth I’s mother, Anne Boleyn, “was not even really an aristocrat.”
Oh?
She was the granddaughter of the Duke of Norfolk and spent her childhood and teenage years as a maid of honour at the courts of Brussels and Paris, two of the most prestigious in Europe. No other Englishwoman in the early 16th century had such a heady start.
We’re also told that Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, was a country squire who loved horses, akin to Major Ferguson, Sarah Ferguson’s father.
What?
Boleyn, proficient in Latin and French, was England’s ambassador to France, nothing like the “galloping major.”
Things got worse. They say Anne Boleyn miscarried of nearly a full-term son in 1534, Henry VIII formed a liaison with Jane Seymour in 1534, and Henry Norris, executed for adultery with Anne in 1536, defended her on the scaffold. The historical record does not support any of these “facts.”
What makes it so baffling is that in the YouTube version, you can see the men reading from notes. Where on earth did they get these notes? It’s not as if the life of Anne Boleyn is obscure! The Tudors and The Other Boleyn Girl get more history right than this. I’m baffled.
Nonfiction Book to the Rescue
I don’t think I will be listening to the rest of The Rest of History’s episodes on Elizabeth I. Which is a shame, because it feels like these days historians are putting the Late Elizabethan court under greater scrutiny than the usual “Armada-Shakespeare-James I Succession” golden haze.
Five years ago, I was drawn to the end of Elizabeth’s reign and wrote “Elizabeth I: The Final Days of the Great Queen” for English Historical Fiction Authors. When researching it, I felt like Elizabeth’s naming of her successor, the Scottish king who was her first cousin twice removed, carried the whiff of the apocryphal. Supposedly, while dying and unable to speak, she pointed to her head when James’ name was spoken. But I wasn't aware of anyone challenging it. Until now.
I have just finished reading a full-length book that delves deeply into this fascinating subject: The Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty. The author is Tracy Borman, Chief Historian for Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that manages Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace, and more. Borman’s research makes a strong case that Elizabeth I never named James; instead, Elizabeth’s closest counselors engaged in a dangerous conspiracy with James, up in Scotland, to smooth the way for him to succeed. Years after he took the English throne, James was so sensitive on this subject that he pressured William Camden, writing a book about Elizabeth I, to distort the tale of the succession sequence. Borman reports that examining Camden’s handwritten manuscript proves that key passages were pasted over and rewritten to make James I look better.
James I is very much a mixed bag. Undeniably intelligent, he was obsessed with a fear of witchcraft and personally wrote Demonology, a treatise meant to justify witch trials and executions. Elizabeth’s councillors were taken aback to realize that, unlike the last Tudor monarch, he was not interested in hands-on running of the country or financing world explorers. When not ranting about witches, he wanted to go hunting and have affairs with beautiful young men. The miniseries Mary & George depicts an ambitious woman from a second-rate gentry family, played memorably by Julianne Moore, scheming to get her handsome son, played by Nicholas Galitzine, into the bed of the new King of England.
One bone I have to pick with Borman’s book is the title. James “stole” it from…who? He had no serious competition for the English throne. That's one of the chief reasons the Tudors were followed by the Stuarts. His tragic first cousin, Arabella Stuart, seems to have struggled with severe emotional problems and behaved erratically, Borman writes. Other relatives with a strain of Tudor or Plantagenet blood were not persuasive candidates. He was the strongest in a weak field.
While she took great pains not to name him officially, Elizabeth maintained a steady correspondence with young James, giving him a “master class in monarchy” that, in a pique of misogyny, he ignored his whole reign, Borman writes. James didn’t want to work with Parliament or create a majestic presence that the public could admire, as the Virgin Queen had done. Instead, he was obsessed with the “divine right of kings,” a concept unconnected to leadership, which he unfortunately instilled in his son, the future headless Charles I.
The Stuart father and son’s conviction that God had put them on a higher plane than mere mortals didn’t go down well in the 17th century. Today, reading about disgraced Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten’s demand that he be given a cook, housekeeper, gardener, and a butler before agreeing to hide himself away on the vast Sandringham estate, you have to wonder what delusions of innate superiority are still being inculcated by the royal family.
Can a more severe punishment be imposed on Andrew? This isn’t the 15th century, when Edward IV could order his brother, the duke of Clarence, to be drowned in a barrel of Malmsey. As Tina Brown pointed out in The Interview, released yesterday, it’s risky to make Andrew and Fergie’s lives so horrible that they have nothing left but to sell their secrets...
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