Vivat Regina!

She was only eleven years old when she was confronted with her future destiny.  It wasn’t something she wanted or welcomed, a little girl interested in the things that little girls are interested in.  For many nights thereafter, as she told her grandmother, her mother’s mother, she prayed for a little brother, someone to come and relieve her of the burden.  Her prayers, thankfully, were not answered.  She was Lilibet; she became Elizabeth; she is our Queen.

England is having a party.  This week we celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, sixty years on the throne, only the second time in our history that we have seen such an occasion, the first being for Queen Victoria in 1897.  But then Victoria, for so long in morbid isolation and declining in health, was the ghost at the party, the ghost of a passing age.  Not so Elizabeth, as active, as involved, as committed and as dutiful as ever. 

It was in 1947, when she was only twenty-one years old, that she made a promise to Britain, to the Empire, to the Commonwealth and to the world.  She was in South Africa at the time.  With the radio microphone before her she said “It is very simple.  I declare before you that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.”  It was five years later she came to the throne, suddenly and unexpectedly, following the death of George VI, her beloved father. 

And so it has been.  The Empire has gone, falling away bit by bit, but for the most part without bitterness or acrimony.  One by one former colonies emerged as self-governing republics, though still bound together with Britain in a Commonwealth of interest and affection for the Queen, a rock and a symbol above all petty politics.  I remember when I was in Uganda, there told of a past state visit, when the people of Kampala came out to greet Her Majesty in thousands. 

We should be grateful for all that she represents, for her continuity and for her strength.  I have the latest edition of the Spectator in front of me.  There, on the front cover, she can be seen in an illustration by the cartoonist Peter Brookes,  She is looking at portraits of all of the Prime Ministers of her reign, right back to 1952.  There are twelve in all, counting Harold Wilson’s two ministries as one, beginning with Winston Churchill (he headed a post-war ministry) and ending with David Cameron.  I say ending but I am convinced she will see more before the day is done!

The Queen quite simply is the Queen, recognised as such across the world.  Even in the United States, where she has never reigned, she has an approval rating of over 60%, far in excess of the President, having long since made up for the perceived misdemeanours of her ancestor George III.  Even in England, as we have moved from an age of deference to an age of vulgarity, she has stood like a rock, one upon which every republican tide has broken.

We challenge the institution of monarchy at our peril.  It defines who and what we are in this country.  I revere Queen Elizabeth not for what she says, or what she believes, or what she does – it’s simply for who she is and what she represents.  She is consistency and stability in the midst of change.  We have come to despise politicians as much as we revere the Queen.  The very idea of a republic with an elected head of state, a Tony Blair or a David Cameron, would, I imagine, give most English people nightmares.  It certainly gives me nightmares. 

Yes, we challenge monarchy at our peril.  I was eleven years old when Princess Diana died.  I still remember the mawkish outburst of sentimentality; I still remember the displays of emotion that shamed this nation, shallow, gay and fey.  I still remember my grandfather’s comments on the irresponsibility of the press, voicing gratuitous criticisms of the monarchy in general and the Queen in particular.  Once again it exercised the prerogative of the harlot throughout history: power without responsibility.  Elizabeth II survived it all; she survived the fashions of a season, growing stronger, the People’s Monarch in a deeper sense than the ghastly Tony Blair could ever comprehend.

I’m under no illusions about our present condition and future predicament.  I do not share the sentiments of Boris Johnson and others in the press in their over-the-top celebration of a new Elizabethan Age.  This is an age of decline; we have, with the brief intermission of Margaret Thatcher, been in decline as a nation for decades.  The future does not look good, shackled as we are to the Sick Man of the European Union.  But, for a moment or two, we shall take time out; we shall enjoy the spectacle of a wonderful pageant on the Thames. We shall fiddle while Europe burns! 

Anyway, I am getting set to carry the good news from England to Italy.  I leave tomorrow morning, spending my Jubilee week in Rome and Florence.  Have a super time, one and all, and declare with me, Vivat Regina! Vivat Regina Elizabetha! Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!

The She-Wolves of England

There is a letter in the Christmas issue of the BBC History Magazine complaining about the growth in factual inaccuracy. One of the examples the writer gives is that in the recent television adaptation of Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth Matilda, daughter of Henry I, is referred to as Maud. In a piece of counter-pedantry let me say that she was often written of as Maud or the Empress Maud (her first husband was Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor) when she was alive.

Still, I’m thankful to Mr Pedant for setting my mind off at yet another tangent, thinking about the lesser known queens of England, queen consorts, to be more accurate, some of them of truly formidable character, including four of my favourites: Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II; Isabella, the so called she-wolf of France, wife of Edward II; Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI; and Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I.

The turbulent relationship between Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, a figure of considerable territorial and political importance in the twelfth century, was beautifully captured in The Lion in Winter, a 1968 movie based on a stage play of the same name, with Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn in the title roles. Poor Henry: King Lear was positively fortunate compared with him. In place of two treacherous daughters he had a scheming wife and four treacherous sons!



When it came to scheming and treachery Eleanor was an amateur compared with Isabella, daughter of Philip the Fair of France and wife of Edward II. She was briefly to be one of the most powerful women in the whole of the Medieval period, deposing her husband in a coup in 1326, thereafter ruling England jointly with Roger Mortimer, her lover, on behalf of Edward III, her underage son, until she herself was deposed in 1330. I might be tempted to describe her as England’s Lady Macbeth, except she was altogether more ruthless! Her relationship with Mortimer, with whom she formed an attachment in 1325, was, by all accounts, one of the most passionate of the day, just as her relationship with Edward, almost certainly a homosexual, had been cold and distant.


What happened to Edward after he was deposed continues to be a source of considerable speculation. The old story remains popular, that he was murdered in a particularly atrocious fashion within the walls of Berkeley Castle. Though his death from an unspecified ‘fatal accident’ was announced in September, 1327, the contemporary evidence on the matter is thin in the extreme. The sources continue to be challenged, most recently by Ian Mortimer writing in History Today (Fragile Historical Sources: Barriers to the Truth). Some historians, on the basis of fragments and rumours, have suggested that he escaped, dying many years later in exile.

What do I think? I can only speculate, of course, and I do not believe that the matter will ever be resolved conclusively. I have little doubt, though, that the stories of the wandering hermit are all so much nonsense. The death of prominent people in the Middle Ages, especially if the exact circumstances were unclear, was almost always followed with rumours to the effect that they were not dead at all. In the end it comes down to politics and nothing more. Edward died, by whatever means, because he was too dangerous to remain alive, a fate that was later to descend on Richard II and Edward V.

For a disloyal queen let me give you one of the most loyal, yet another Frenchwoman – Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, an even more worthless monarch than Edward II. It was Henry’s incapacity for government, and his periodic bouts of insanity, that led England into the fifteenth century dynastic struggle later known as the Wars of the Roses.



Henry as a man and a leader was a complete vacuum; it was Margaret who filled the space created. She was the driving force behind the Lancastrian campaign against their Yorkist opponents. In her vengeful anger she was to give the struggle a particularly vindictive and bitter edge. But for all of her effort in the end she was left with nothing. Edward, her son, for whom she sacrificed so much, was killed at the Battle of Tewksbury in 1471. Soon after Henry was deposed and murdered. Broken in spirit, Margaret was finally allowed to return to her native France, where she died in August 1482 aged only fifty-two.

My final queen (yes, you guessed it; she’s also French!) is Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I. To begin with her relationship with her husband, who preferred male favourites, was no more cordial than that between Edward and Isabella; but unlike them Charles and Henrietta Maria came to love one another, forming a particularly strong familial bond. In many ways she was the best and worst of consorts: the best in giving her husband unfailing support; the worst in advising him of action that often proved disastrous. It was her Catholicism, and fear of the Catholic party around her, that added to the mutual hostility between Crown and Parliament, leading to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642.


With the struggle underway she helped raise money and arms for the Royal cause on the Continent, returning to England like a goddess of battles in 1643. She was Charles’ backbone, the most militant of his counsellors and confidants, arguing, rather disastrously, as it turned out, against all peace overtures from Parliament. In encouraging the schemes of the earls of Montrose and Antrim she helped widen the theatre of operations by carrying the war to Scotland, allied with the English Parliamentary party. But with the military situation continuing to deteriorate, Henrietta Maria, pregnant with her last child, finally left Oxford, the Royalist wartime capital, for the safety of Bath in early 1644. From there, by stages, she returned to the Continent. She and Charles were never to meet again.

So, these are my queens, the she-wolves of England, in every case deadlier than the male.

England and the Spanish Armada

When I was an undergraduate I once addressed myself to the question what would have happened in the Spanish Armada had succeeded in landing in England. I know the ‘what if' school of alternate history is frowned on, but I quite like it, as I like all kinds of games. Here is the answer I gave, as close an approximation of the facts that I can muster.

Alternate dimensions in experience and time: I suppose we are entering the realm of history as a form of 'game theory'. It is possible, in such abstract situations, to construct just about any scenario, with equal degrees of conviction. The answer that I am about to shape is probably no more convincing than any other, but I will try to build on the foundations of evidence.

If Parma had landed on the south coast of England his professional army would have faced a national levy of volunteers, badly trained and even more badly equipped. He would, in other words, have faced almost precisely the same situation as the Germans, if they had managed to affect a landing in 1940. For months, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I's chief minister, had been taking steps to ensure that all due preparations had been made. England did posses a kind of 'home guard', based on the county levies, the so-called trained bands; but the training these men had received was haphazard and patchy at best.

The Privy Council received numerous reports on the inadequacy of the county forces, including one from Sir Edward Stanley, who wrote that the men of Cheshire and Lancashire had not been mustered, and had received no training, in two years. A Spanish agent also reported that from the whole population of London scarcely 10,000 men had been assembled.

Some of the men in trained bands were armed with muskets, some with pikes, and still others with the longbow, the traditional English infantry weapon going all the way back to the Hundred Years War. Against well trained Spanish tercios they are likely to have fared badly. There again, the rate of fire of a well-trained bowman was considerably in excess of the cumbersome and slow loading fire arms of the day, so enemy casualties are likely to have been high.

As for Parma, on the assumption that he brought his whole force safely across the Channel, he would have had 40,000 men at his command, plus another 20,000 from the Armada itself. Exactly where the landing would have come we cannot be certain, though Kent seems more likely than Essex, as the Spanish would have known that the English forces were concentrating at Tilbury, to the north of the Thames. Robert Dudley, the English commander-in-chief, at the very last minute sent 1000 men to strengthen the defences of Dover.

Once the point of invasion was known, all of the English forces, along the whole of the south coast and the Home Counties, would have massed for a counter-attack, which would have demanded the utmost speed before the Spanish took Rochester and crossed the Medway. The Tower would have been able to withstand a siege, although for how long is almost impossible to say. If Leicester's army had been defeated, all that would remain would be the levies of the north. The Queen had her own personal army, though for the sake of royal security that may have fallen back on Wales, which would have become the centre of national resistance. It is likely that every able bodied boy and man, from the age of sixteen and sixty, would have been mustered, around 130,000 from a population of just fewer than 5 million.

From the Spanish archives we know, in outline, what would have happened in the event of victory. The country would have been subject to complete military occupation. A viceroy would have been appointed, or Phillip II may have nominated a king, possibly Parma, from his own family. Before her execution, Phillip had hoped to marry Parma to the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, which would have greatly strengthened his claim. Elizabeth, if captured, is unlikely to have lived, because of the threat she posed to the security of the occupation regime.

The heretical English Church would have come under the control of the Spanish clergy, 1200 of whom sailed with the Armada. Catholic recusants are likely to have received favourable treatment, though whether many would have chosen to be cast in the role of traitors and collaborators is impossible to say. In 1588 England was a much more unified nation than it had been in 1066, the time of the last full-scale conquest, so resistance would have been prolonged and bitter, possibly aided by James VI of Scotland, whose ambitions for the southern throne would have been ruined by the Spanish conquest.

So that’s it, that’s my best guess! Before leaving this I would like to thank This Royal Throne of Kings, a blogger whose page I recently visited, for reminding me of one of the most inspirational speeches in English history, that of Gloriana, England's greatest queen, England's greatest monarch, to the troops at Tilbury. It never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

The One Who Survived

Catherine Parr was probably the most intelligent of Henry VIII’s six wives; she was certainly the most literate. She financed the translation of Erasmus' Paraphrases of the Gospels, choosing the translators for each book, and may very well have translated The Boke of St Matthew herself. She certainly translated John Fisher's Psalms or Prayers. Her greatest achievement, though, was in writing Lamentations of a Sinner, the first work every published by a Queen of England, and the first in prose to be published by a woman in the sixteenth century.

Catherine was also a figure of some political influence. It was largely thanks to her that Princess Mary was brought back into the line of succession. She was trusted enough by Henry to have diplomatic conversations with the ambassadors of the Emperor Charles in the interest of improving Anglo-Imperial relations. When Henry went campaigning against France in 1544 he appointed Catherine Regent-General. She was highly adept in the arts of governance, even being bold enough to countermand an order from the King over military supplies.

So, in all, much more than the most married English Queen!