It was a baptism of royal fire. Elizabeth was a disappointment. She should have been a boy since Henry had married Anne Boleyn to beget a male heir; some immediately called her "the little bastard" and at first her half-sister, Mary, detested her. Then her father killed her mother through the agency of an executioner at the Tower. It might be described in contemporary terms as a "problem family", but Elizabeth never adverted to the miseries and terrors of her childhood. She kept her own counsel and, in particular, never mentioned her mother.
But her trials lent her strength. At the age of six, she spoke with the authority of a woman of 40. She was formidably learned and, under the guiding hand of Catherine Parr, made a thorough study of divinity. Her principal guide, however, was her father; she listened to his speeches, and watched his behaviour. Thus in turn she would become imperious and vindictive, ambivalent and calculating.
Yet calculation was the means of her survival. During the reigns of Edward and Mary she kept her head in every sense; while Mary was on the throne Elizabeth was in danger of "imminent execution or murder". She was even taken to the Tower on suspicion of approving an aborted rebellion against her Sovereign but, as usual, she survived with a mixture of diplomacy and theatricality. A great tactician, she combined a lawyer's sharp mind with an instinctive understanding of character.
Starkey's biography also defines her role as an actress. He is fascinated with the rituals and ceremonies of power; London and the court are here converted into stages upon which various figures disport themselves, while theatrical metaphors bind his account with silvered words. Starkey has the mind of an historian but the eye of a court painter. It is in this context, too, that he views the religious crises and perplexities of the period since, in his words, "Tudor royal ceremonial was intrinsically religious".
There are two anecdotes not mentioned here, no doubt because they occur at a later date; Starkey's narrative ends when Elizabeth ascends the throne, and he is projecting another volume entitled Queenship. The first anecdote concerns her habit of dancing furiously and wildly by herself, leaping into the air when she thought she was alone; this marks the sheer exuberance of her character. The second concerns her tendency to listen, unseen, to gossiping servants so that she might gauge the private news of her court which might not otherwise reach her. This lends a more humane aspect to her majesty, perhaps also revealing the mystery of her loneliness.
The stories also disclose something of her femininity and questions of gender dominate this book. The daughter of a man who married six times remained resolutely single, but the Virgin Queen used coquetry on a grand scale. More interestingly, Starkey reveals how the young Princess's household became a haven for educated and often "deeply unconventional" women. It was a "marriage-free zone" which helped to define the nature of late Tudor society. It has been said that the Reformation degraded the education of women, but among females of high rank there was still a tradition of learning.
This is made nowhere more evident than in Elizabeth's collected writings, which reflect the image which David Starkey has helped to create; Elizabeth was exceptionally well-read, and could bandy Latin with the most scholarly of her clerics. She wrote poems in Latin, prayers in Spanish and Ancient Greek, and letters more often than not in plain English: "And if that shall not move them, then you shall cause them to be put to the rack . . . Whereof fail you not, as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril." It is not hard to imagine the feelings of the recipients.
Many of the letters are also in Latin, following all the appropriate rhetorical flourishes together with quotes from Pliny, Homer and other notables. But it is possible to glimpse the movement of her mind in the subordinate clauses, the conditionals, the subjunctives and the optatives, endlessly saying nothing definite on any matter of policy; she practised what she herself described as "answer answerless".
There are epistles as intimate as that to Leicester which begins: "Rob, I am afraid you will suppose by my wandering writings that a midsummer moon hath taken large possession of my brains this month . . ." But there are other letters of urgent personal necessity, such as that which she wrote to Queen Mary when under suspicion of treason: "Yet I pray God as evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other." Here the note of anxiety emerges through all the circumlocutions and velleities and regrets.
Elizabeth's speeches are well known, but their reputation does not prepare the reader for their magnificence. They seem to have been improvised as "oral utterance" before being recorded later. If this is indeed the case, then the intelligence of the Queen can hardly be overestimated. Even her speeches in Latin were extemporaneous, but her English is rich and weighty. "How nigh a traitorous trick this tumbling cast did spring" is one example of her high contempt, when faced with a parliamentary delegation urging her to marry; on matters of hypocrisy and dissimulation she coined the wonderful image, "two faces under one hood, and the body rotten". As Starkey notes at the close of his rewarding biography, Elizabeth, Sovereign absolute, was "a mistress of language" as well.
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'Rebel royal' Zara kisses away tongue stud(Yahoo: Reuters)
LONDON (Reuters) - The Queen's granddaughter Zara Phillips has given up her tongue stud -- because her boyfriend said it spoilt kissing her, The Sun reported on Thursday.
Eighteen-year-old Zara, dubbed the "royal rebel" by the tabloids because of her unconventional antics, recently rekindled a romance with top British jump jockey Richard Johnson, 21.
The tabloid, citing an unidentified royal source for its information, said the removal of the stud would please Zara's mother, Princess Anne, and the queen who both frowned on her decision to have her tongue pierced when she was 16.
"Zara is a highly spirited girl and knows her own mind," said the source.
"The tongue stud did not go down well with the family, but it is amazing what people are prepared to give up for a boyfriend."
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U.S. court rejects Al Fayed bid for secret papers(Yahoo: Reuters)
RICHMOND, Virginia (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court has rejected a bid by Mohamed Al Fayed to obtain secret government documents about his son, Dodi Fayed, and Princess Diana, killed together in a 1997 car crash in Paris.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond upheld a lower court ruling blocking Al Fayed from obtaining documents compiled by the National Security Agency on his son and the princess and on an alleged plot by unnamed conspirators to sell Al Fayed secret CIA documents.
Using a federal statutory provision normally reserved for foreign judges, Al Fayed, who is conducting a personal investigation into the crash, had sought to compel the release of the secret files by asking a federal court to subpoena the U.S. agency.
Under U.S. law, government documents are routinely sought by individuals through Freedom of Information Act requests, but the government may deny these on grounds, among others, of possible damage to national security.
A federal court had previously ruled that Al Fayed tried to "make an end run around FOIA" by seeking to subpoena the agency, which had refused to release the documents to two newspapers -- London's Daily Mail and New York's Daily News -- because of national security concerns.
"Because the district court did not abuse its discretion under (the applicable federal statute), we affirm (its decision)," a three-judge panel of the appeals court ruled.
AGENCY ENUMERATES DOCUMENTS
The National Security Agency disclosed to a news agency seeking similar information in 1998 that there were 182 separate documents on Princess Diana in its files, including 39 that were classified and thus could not be released. The remainder were produced by other federal agencies.
In a letter denying the unnamed media organisation's freedom-of-information request, the agency said the documents were classified "because their disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."
U.S. attorneys also disclosed to the appeals court that Al Fayed's attorneys sought to obtain the same documents in December 1998 by filing a freedom-of-information request, which was denied in July 1999, also for security reasons.
The appeals court said Al Fayed had has filed a separate subpoena application in Washington seeking documents from the CIA.
A federal court initially issued a subpoena, then quashed it on April 10 after the U.S. government appealed, arguing that the CIA and other federal agencies could not be subpoenaed under the law in question.
The appeals court said requests for subpoenas were usually reserved for foreign judicial officers and sometimes prosecutors, plaintiffs or defendants in foreign court proceedings. They are "almost never utilised by persons in Al Fayed's position," it said.
A French judge closed an investigation into the Paris crash in September 1999, concluding that the accident had occurred because Fayed and Diana's driver was drunk, the appeals court noted.