September 28, 2026 7:45 a.m.<\/p>\n
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Work on Elizabeth I\u2019s letters has focused on identifying the English queen\u2019s \u201cvoice\u201d within them. Yet they were often the products of collaboration between Elizabeth and her secretaries.
\n Illustration by Meilan Solly \/ Images via Wikimedia Commons under public domain<\/p>\n
On February 10, 1586, Elizabeth I<\/a> wrote one of her most famous letters: a furious rebuke<\/a> to her favorite, Robert Dudley<\/a>, First Earl of Leicester. The Tudor queen sharply reprimanded Leicester for disobeying her.<\/p>\n \u201cHow contemptuously we conceive ourself to have been used by you,\u201d Elizabeth raged. \u201cWe could never have imagined had we not seen it fall out in experience that a man raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favored by us above any other subject of this land would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment.\u201d She demanded that Leicester obey her directions and issued a stark warning: \u201cFail you not, as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.\u201d<\/p>\n The queen\u2019s fury jumps off the page. Yet the only surviving copy of this letter is written in the hand of a secretary: Francis Mylles<\/a>, servant to Elizabeth\u2019s principal secretary, Francis Walsingham<\/a>. Were Mylles and Walsingham involved in writing this apparently personal royal communication?<\/p>\n Without the original copy of this letter, we cannot say for certain. However, through careful analysis<\/a> of more than 500 of Elizabeth\u2019s other letters, I have discovered<\/a> that the expression of emotion in her correspondence was often carefully constructed by her secretaries.<\/p>\n Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s principal secretary and spymaster<\/p>\n Public domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n Around 3,000<\/a> of Elizabeth\u2019s letters survive, the overwhelming majority of which were penned by scribes. These so-called \u201cscribal letters<\/a>\u201d have been severely neglected by historians, with priority given to those written in Elizabeth\u2019s own hand.<\/p>\n Work on Elizabeth\u2019s letters has focused on identifying<\/a> the English queen\u2019s \u201cvoice\u201d within them. Yet they were often the products of collaboration between Elizabeth and her secretariat.<\/p>\n Disentangling these collaborations and recovering the contributions of Elizabeth\u2019s secretaries was the focus of my PhD research, part of the Feathers project<\/a> led by Nadine Akkerman<\/a>, a scholar of early modern literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Feathers sought to distinguish between authorial and scribal voices in collaboratively produced manuscripts from the early modern period<\/a> (from around 1500 to 1800).<\/p>\n Finding Elizabeth\u2019s voice<\/p>\n How can we distinguish between Elizabeth\u2019s voice and those of her secretaries? It might be assumed that the more personal elements of her letters, including the expression of emotion, can be safely attributed to the monarch herself.<\/p>\n This is logical enough: Daring to communicate or presume to know the queen\u2019s feelings without her prior instruction would have been bold indeed. Additionally, early modern secretaries were expected to employ formal and impassive language and exert a tempering influence, moderating emotion to ensure the goodwill of the addressee.<\/p>\n However, as I dug into the archival material, a more complicated reality emerged. Elizabeth\u2019s letters<\/a> survive in a dizzying array of versions, including drafts, sent letters and copies. Through the reassembly of these different manuscripts, painstaking handwriting analysis and close textual comparison, I found evidence that the expression of emotion in Elizabeth\u2019s letters was carefully crafted by her secretaries.<\/p>\n One example is a letter from Elizabeth to George Talbot<\/a>, Sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, written in May 1584. At the time, Shrewsbury was the custodian of Mary, Queen of Scots<\/a>, claimant to the English throne and a thorn in Elizabeth\u2019s side. Elizabeth would have expected Shrewsbury to share the missive with his royal prisoner.<\/p>\n Need to know: Mary, Queen of Scots<\/p>\n
In the letter, Elizabeth strongly rebukes Mary. Elizabeth writes that Mary \u201cshall never live to see those days that the crown of England shall depend upon the crown of Scotland.\u201d She also criticizes Mary\u2019s son, James VI<\/a> of Scotland,\u00a0claiming that he was \u201cill counseled when at the first entry into his government the same was seasoned with blood\u201d (a reference to the 1581 execution of his regent James Douglas<\/a>, Fourth Earl of Morton).<\/p>\n Identifying the draft of this letter, I discovered that it was substantially edited by Walsingham, whose handwritten revisions remain on the manuscript.<\/p>\n Mary, Queen of Scots<\/p>\n Public domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n Walsingham\u2019s edits intensify, rather than temper, Elizabeth\u2019s criticisms of Mary and James. The vocabulary of these revisions bears significant overlap with the phrasing of the secretary\u2019s own writings<\/a>. Evidently, it is Walsingham\u2019s voice, not Elizabeth\u2019s, that speaks in this letter\u2014and possibly his emotion that spills out of it.<\/p>\n In an October 1584 letter<\/a> written to another one of Mary\u2019s custodians, Ralph Sadler<\/a>\u2014and also intended for the Scottish queen\u2019s eyes\u2014Elizabeth again criticizes her cousin but is now more conciliatory. She describes the \u201cliking we had for a time\u201d of Mary\u2019s friendship and raises the potential for \u201ca thorough reconciliation.\u201d<\/p>\n Historians have generally<\/a> assumed<\/a> that Elizabeth composed this letter; however, my recovery of a hitherto unnoticed draft\u2014which is littered with Walsingham\u2019s scribbled emendations\u2014revealed that these expressions of goodwill were his additions.<\/p>\n I argue that Walsingham\u2019s alterations to both letters were intended to manipulate Mary\u2019s impression of her relationship with Elizabeth and move her to act in English interests.<\/p>\n By crafting an \u201cangry\u201d Elizabeth in the letter to Shrewsbury, Walsingham hoped to show Mary that refusing to cooperate with the English government would get her nowhere. By constructing a \u201cnostalgic\u201d Elizabeth in the letter to Sadler, he sought to convince Mary that the English queen\u2019s favor could be regained in the hope of dissuading the former from plotting against<\/a> the latter.<\/p>\n Portrait of Elizabeth I commemorating the English defeat of the Spanish Armada, circa 1588<\/p>\n Public domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n That Walsingham crafted and even intensified the expression of emotion in Elizabeth\u2019s letters is remarkable and sheds important new light on this iconic monarch. It provides an important corrective, for example, to Elizabeth\u2019s reputation for emotional outburst.<\/p>\n Many anecdotes of Elizabeth\u2019s short temper<\/a> survive, and there is an inherited idea from the early modern period that these outbursts were evidence of female irrationality. That the expression of anger in some of Elizabeth\u2019s letters was crafted by her male secretaries reveals that, far from being overly emotional or irrational, the queen strategically deployed<\/a> emotion to achieve particular political goals.<\/p>\n She did so, crucially, through collaboration with secretaries such as Walsingham, who evidently had a far greater and more creative hand in constructing her letters than has been realized.<\/p>\n What does this mean for Elizabeth\u2019s voice? As I unpicked these collaborations<\/a> with her secretaries, I began to see that the voice we encounter in her letters is a carefully\u2014and collaboratively\u2014constructed rhetorical performance.<\/p>\n Rather than search for Elizabeth\u2019s authentic voice, we might instead appreciate her political savvy and willingness to incorporate the suggestions of her advisers\u2014qualities of a strong monarch indeed.<\/p>\n This article is republished from the Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Francis](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sir_francis_walsingham_by_john_de_critz_the_elder.jpg\")
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\n\tMary was related to Elizabeth through her paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor<\/a>, the older sister of the English queen\u2019s father, Henry VIII<\/a>.
\n\tMary fled to England in 1567, after Scottish nobles forced her to abdicate<\/a> in favor of her infant son. Instead of offering Mary refuge, Elizabeth imprisoned her<\/a> for 19 years before ordering her execution<\/a> on charges of treason in 1587.
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