THE final monarch of the Tudor dynasty, Queen Elizabeth I of England was known for her intelligence, diplomacy, and virginity. But the last was not entirely by choice.
Earlier in her reign the Virgin Queen endeavoured mightily to find a match and birth an heir before declaring herself ‘sick to unending with all the bullock-ordure of the dominant sex.’
While historians previously focused on the post-Reformation tumult and the delicate balance of European powers, new readings of the period believe the Queen decided that it was not worth the effort required to ride a dick.
In a letter to her cousin Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth wrote: “Mar, I grow weary. I feel imprisoned by my suitors intentions, just as you are imprisoned for your pesky insistence on being Scottish and Catholic. But you suffer not as I.
“The court brings portraits of handsome men with leashed hounds or holding large fish before me, which I dismiss by waving left or favour by waving right. At night I am shown corresponding private oils of their members. None so much as tempts.
“With Robert, who was so absent and toxic and impossible to communicate with but also six feet tall which evened everything out, I began my exhaustion. Having his wife murdered so he could bone me seemed to my eyes a fluttering scarlet pennant.
“The Spanish King Philip continues to propose marriage, but as we both know he was married to your sister and would prefer you, and as Father always told us ‘do not foul where ye must feast.’ Though he takes rejection not well.
“And Archduke Charles of Austria getting all up in my correspondence with his schnitzel has finished it for me. I’m swearing off men. This Boleyn girl is putting herself first and if my line be extinguished, so be it.
“No more will I waste away an hour fretting as it has been three days and his messenger still hasn’t arrived, or trying to catch his eye with a brand new coating of lead paint on my face. Let it be proclaimed that Queen Elizabeth is in her Eat Pray Love era.”
And so, Mary Queen of Scots spent her remaining years imprisoned, psychologically tortured by endless letters from her cousin stating how she was ‘off men for real this time, it doesn’t matter how fetching the new Lord Chamberlain looks in his tunic’.
Next week: to 1483, when the mysterious absence of young princes Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury from public life is explained as ‘planned cranial surgery’.
