Tudor Love and Politics

DVD Review

Elizabeth I, HBO Productions, 2006

Sometimes it is funny to think about how you learn things as a kid and they stick with you until you go to reexamine them later. That seems especially true about history. Sometimes it is covered with so much banality and rot that it is hard to get the story straight. Old Queen Bess fell into that category. If one compares a film version from the 1950’s of how she was perceived and this production, except for the names of the parties, it might as well be two different people. And this is only film. What the hell is the real her-story then?

In the schoolboy histories of my youth Henry VIII’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, old Bess of blessed memory, who reigned in England during the turbulent last half of the 16th century, had the sobriquet of the Virgin Queen. Of course we were kids then and did know any better about the real ways of royal politics and intricacies of adult romance so that label kind of stuck.

The film under review goes a long way to visually shifting that image as Helen Mirren as the first Elizabeth presents us with a full-blooded and somewhat coquettish Emmy-winning performance. But, wait a minute, didn’t Mirren just play the modern Elizabeth and get an Oscar for it. Yes. I believe that I am right. Frankly, old Bess is a hell of a lot more interesting as she seeks romance (with the likes of the Earl of Leicester and later the youthful Earl of Sussex) and the enhancement of the royal prerogative in a long and apparently personally unhappy reign. Off Mirren’s performance here though I am glad that Cromwell and the boys in the next century did not have such a ruthless adversary in Charles I. The success of the Commonwealth might have been a much nearer thing.

The story line here centrally revolves around Elizabeth’s struggle (like her father’s) to enhance the royal power, as is to be expected, but also, as is the norm in dynastic politics, to insure the line of succession. Hovering all through this saga is the question of when or whether Bess will product an heir. In the end we know that she did not and James VI of Scotland (as James I) came on board. However, along the way Bess insured by her policies that England would remain a Protestant country (despite the intrigues of Mary, Queen of Scots and others), that England would become an important naval and mercantile power and that, for a time, the centralizing role of the crown would keep the feuding nobility at bay. Not bad for an old ‘Virgin’ Queen.