AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Old english letters font james2/20/2024 ![]() ![]() ![]() Why did Elizabeth initiate this correspondence with James? Why at this date rather than earlier or later? What did she intend by it or hope from it? While Elizabeth offers no direct answers to these questions, I find her intentions readable, to a considerable degree, from her themes and her vocabulary. The letters are in the two monarchs' own handwriting-as graphic witnesses of their mutual high status but also of the immediacy and frankness with which the two royal correspondents soon begin to treat each other (although they never would meet face to face). The great preponderance of these letters survives in the collection now known as British Library, Additional MS 15891. ![]() The correspondence continues at irregular but not infrequent intervals until Elizabeth's last letter of January 6, 1603, slightly more than two months before her death. Now, in mid-1585, Elizabeth and James begin to write directly to each other. Previously the two sovereigns had communicated through their respective ambassadors and the messages orally entrusted to them. Elizabeth was 51 years old James celebrated his nineteenth birthday in June. In the late spring or early summer of 1585, Elizabeth began a correspondence with James VI of Scotland. The "Ermine Portrait" of Queen Elizabeth I, painted by Nicholas Hilliard in 1585. She regarded any such explicitness as a colossal piece of political folly that endangered the incumbent and the designated successors alike-in the first instance, by opening up alternative rallying-points for disaffected subjects in the second, by casting a designated successor as an arch-rival to the person then ruling. But since, in the nature of things, marriage and progeny would take some time, the Lords and Commons simultaneously urged Elizabeth to secure the throne of England by specifying a line of succession after herself.Įlizabeth was always much more negative about specifying the succession than about marrying. This problem obsessed Elizabeth's earliest Parliaments, in 1558-59, 15, when both Houses created an ongoing crisis for her authority by admonishing her, again and again, to marry and bear an heir. Ithin a system of hereditary monarchy, the toughest problem for a self-styled Virgin Queen was to assure a successor to her own reign. The Correspondence of Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI by Janel Mueller ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |