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- [00:01]
Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:36]
Mark Bittman
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- [01:38]
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- [02:13]
Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History. Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Today, I'm thrilled to be bringing you Some breaking news. A new discovery that will change the way we have always thought about Elizabeth I. For centuries, Elizabeth's correspondence has been taken as proof of an impulsive, emotional queen, the woman with the heart and stomach of a king and supposedly a very bad temper to match. But when Dr. Clodag Murphy started scrutinizing hundreds of those letters that Elizabeth had sent using computational analysis and archival sleuthing, a different story emerged. Elizabeth's male secretaries were not just taking dictation. Sometimes they were actively counterfeiting Elizabeth's anger, injecting outbursts in her letters to create a kind of weaponized performance of queenly fury. And that's only half the drama. In the process, Dr. Murphy identified a previously unidentified hand in the royal correspondence. A Spanish refugee who was trusted to draft letters about troop movements, naval strategy and state secrets in the tense years around the Spanish Armada. What should we make of the Spaniard embedded at the heart of Elizabeth's communications machine? Or writing in the Queen's voice while England was officially at war with Spain? I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Cloda Murphy, along with Professor Nadine Ackerman, who is no stranger to not just the Tudors. We've spoken to her in previous episodes about spycraft, 17th century female spies, and Elizabeth, the forgotten queen. Professor ackerman supervised Clodagh's PhD research as part of her European Research Council funded FEATHERS, which stands for Females and their Scribes project, which uncovers how queens, kings and their secretaries collaborated to build a monarchy of letters. So stand by for revelations that will change our understanding of gender, power and authorship. And this startling revelation that some of the most sensitive English state correspondence was being shaped by a Spanish hand under an assumed name. Welcome to not just the Tudors.
- [04:55]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Thank you so much for having me. It's a delight to be here.
- [04:58]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
Thank you so much.
- [04:59]
Susannah Lipscomb
So I suppose when we think about Elizabeth I's letters, most of us are going to think about Elizabeth's letters written in her own hand. And that certainly was a form of intimacy and favor. But what I learned from your thesis, Clodagh, is that Elizabeth's letters were mostly written by her scribes.
- [05:19]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Yes. So we have around 3,000 surviving letters of Elizabeth I, and I think only around 100 of these are written by the Queen herself, in her own hand. The overwhelming majority are written by scribes. Most of the work on Elizabeth's letters has focused on these holograph missives, despite the fact they make up such a small portion of her epistolary output. And it is to Some extent understandable. The holograph letters, as you point out, was reserved for a circle of intimates, favoured courtiers, relations and other monarchs, the Queen's hand serving as a sign of favour and intimacy. So they are historically very significant documents. But we are neglecting a huge portion of Elizabeth's letters in focusing so exclusively on those she wrote herself. The majority were produced collaboratively by her secretariat in collaboration with the Queen, and raise all sorts of interesting questions about their production, their authorship, who was responsible for what, and how we can disentangle those contexts of production.
- [06:24]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. And do you think one of the reasons why historians have not focused on these scribal letters is a concern that scribal interventions reduce the authenticity of the letters? So perhaps we could think about the question of whether early modern letters should be regarded as bearers of authenticity, as reflections of a correspondence, innermost individual self.
- [06:50]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Absolutely. I do think that is a large part of the motivation. I think there has been a sustained interest in trying to isolate or recover the words that Elizabeth generated herself in an attempt to sort of gain access to this sort of authentic voice of the Queen, her personality, her thoughts. But you're very right to point out that this is to sort of misunderstand or misinterpret early modern letters and functions they served. They were not the sort of personal, private, spontaneous text we might assume, but were heavily crafted rhetorical texts that underwent lengthy process of sort of drafting and revision, of careful crafting of the authorial voice. So we shouldn't necessarily take them at face value or treat them as documents that offer us this sort of access or insight into the voice of the Queen and her thoughts and feelings, but rather as these sort of very carefully crafted, political, diplomatically motivated, rhetorical.
- [07:51]
Susannah Lipscomb
And, Nadine, you've done an awful lot of work with letters by early modern people to this point. And this has been your finding as well, has it?
- [07:58]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
Yes. And I think what is quite important to sort of realize is that Elizabeth I herself would have known that her handwriting, the use of her own hand, would convey that kind of intimacy. So she could also manipulate that knowledge. It could be that a scribe had completely drafted a letter and she just took up the quill herself, pretending this was all her. And the other way around, she could have dictated an entire scribal letter and we just don't have her hand anymore. So it could be that Queen Elizabeth I was actually much more present in these scribal letters that most historians have ignored. So we have concentrated on these hundred letters that are in our own Hands sort of disregarding a couple of thousand more inscribable hands. So the kind of discovery is still to be done are astonishing. I think once we realize that Queen Elizabeth I could just well be in those scribal letters as well. I love that.
- [09:03]
Susannah Lipscomb
So her handwriting is actually a bit of a red herring.
- [09:06]
Rakuten/Carl's Jr. Advertiser
I think.
- [09:06]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
It is not necessarily, but it could well be.
- [09:10]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
I think there does often emerge this sort of gap between the hand and the sort of agent of composition. You can never really rely on the hand as an indicator of who right a letter, even though it is physically written in that hand.
- [09:23]
Susannah Lipscomb
I can see the words, the gap between the hand and the agent of composition being quoted in many an essay from hereafter. So you've chosen to focus CLODA on the years 1581 to 1590. Why that period?
- [09:38]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
These were the years of Francis Walsingham's tenure as Principal Secretary. He became principal secretary in 1573. He was then second secretary or the junior secretary to the senior Political Secretary, Thomas Smith. He then worked after Smith's death with Thomas Wilson as his own second secretary until 1581 when Wilson died. And then he was Left without a second secretary until 1586 for the sort of brief four month stint of William Davison.
- [10:11]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
Yes. We thought that concentrating on these years when Walsing has the sole tenantship of being Principal Secretary would make it easier. And I think what we sort of didn't realize in the beginning is that his handwriting is so completely atrocious. Another reason why describer letters have been ignored is that the handwriting can be so complicated. So the amount of work that Clodagh has done is astonishing. That sort of deciphering into inscribing all these letters that haven't appeared in editions in order to sort of compare different versions is incredible.
- [10:49]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. We all know those letters where the scholars have just gone, oh, I am
- [10:53]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
not going close to that.
- [10:54]
Susannah Lipscomb
And then you know, that bit gets ignored. And you've done that with lots of letters.
- [10:59]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
I wanted to focus on Walsingham as well, specifically because everyone looks to William Cecil. Lord Burleigh was famously Elizabeth's sort of right hand man and key advisor throughout her reign. He was her first political secretary. He has been observed to have continued assisted in the writing of her letters even after he was no longer her secretary. And but I think what has been neglected in observing Burleigh's productivity is how other people also did contribute. And Walsingham's secretarial tenure extended nearly two decades. And in that time he wrote a huge amount of Elizabeth's letters. But he has been primarily treated as Elizabeth's spymaster, somewhat anachronistically, and as a sort of politician, a privy councillor. He's not been approached as someone who worked with Elizabeth to write letters as a secretary in that sense. So I wanted to take a closer look at this facet of his role and what it revealed about his relationship with Elizabeth as well.
- [11:59]
Susannah Lipscomb
And to be clear, what did the role of secretary encompass in this period?
- [12:04]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
The principal secretary was in control of the monarch's correspondence. Fundamentally, they received all incoming letters, they filed them, they took copies of them, they wrote responses to them. They were essentially involved in drafting instructions for diplomats abroad. They were key advisors to the Queen as well.
- [12:27]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
And secretaries in this period were also known as the keeper of secrets. If you think about the etymology of the word secretary in secret, these men were really trusted by the Queen. Just imagine that you have someone who is opening your mail and reading everything that is being sent to you and sometimes also drafting what you should reply. So it's a great level of trust that these men enjoyed.
- [12:53]
Susannah Lipscomb
The number of hands involved in Elizabeth's letters seems to have been very many indeed. To help us understand why this was the case, Nadine, can you explain briefly for us the structure and the process of the production of the Queen's letters?
- [13:12]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
It could take various routes. A secretary could start with a template. Clauda has found templates that went back to Elizabeth I's half sister. So they would use a template that was, for instance, also used for Mary Tudor, which is astonishing if you think about the different kind of religions, the different kind of effects, but they had certain kind of formulas for certain events. So they could sort of start from a template, but then they started to weigh every single word. What kind of wording would have the most effect? Different secretaries were brought in. They were producing multiple drafts of any given letter before a fair copy would have been made.
- [13:55]
Susannah Lipscomb
And identifying who was actually writing which of Elizabeth's letters has defeated some fine scholars before Now, Clauda, however did you go about tackling this?
- [14:11]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Well, thankfully, a lot of the correspondence and communications between the secretaries and scribes who worked for Elizabeth and for Walsingham remain extant in the state papers. So there are a lot of letters of these scribes where they have signed them that give evidence of their handwriting. So that allowed me to compare the different hands in, in Elizabeth's letters with the letters of the scribes.
- [14:39]
Susannah Lipscomb
And I suppose when there's an absence of lots of letters from one person, it makes it harder to Identify them. You know, you've done some extraordinary work comparing the shapes of individual letters. I mean, this is painstaking paleographic work that you've done, but you need a great sample size to make it work.
- [15:00]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Yes. Sometimes having too big a sample size is also a problem, because their hands could vary so much in their own correspondence that it can complicate the issue even more. Another factor is that Elizabeth's scribes would write in what was referred to as a set hand, so a very neat, a very legible hand, and then they might write their own letters in a much more relaxed, messy manner. So that was quite a challenge as well. But a productive way of sort of getting around those paleographic variations was to compare the spelling preferences of the scribes in the period. Spelling had not yet been standardised, so there were many variant ways in which most words could be spelled. And luckily for me, Elizabeth's scribes did not seem to be fussed about if they were copying someone else's draft, they weren't too fussed about sticking to that scribe's spelling. So they would leave traces of their own preferences in the material. And their preferences were variable enough for me to be able to profile these different orthographies in the letters and identify some people, even where their hands produce a lot of variation.
- [16:12]
Susannah Lipscomb
That's wonderful. I can't resist telling you that I am currently reading a novel called A Traveler In Time to my child. Do you remember this one, Alison Utley? Somebody goes back in time to a house in which the Babingtons live. It's all about Mary, Queen of Scots. But one of the things that they say in it, in the people of the 16th century, is that spelling expresses who we are. Why would we want to use the same spelling as anyone else? And what you're saying suggests that that really was the case.
- [16:40]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
That's fantastic. Yeah, it absolutely was. There were all these personal idiosyncrasies. These sort of individual personalities have left their traces in the letters.
- [16:50]
Susannah Lipscomb
And one surprise finding is how often Walsingham worked with hitherto unidentified scribes to produce Queen Elizabeth I's letters. And you have identified one of the most prolific contributors. How did you do? So probably more of what you've just said. And who was he?
- [17:09]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Yeah. So we know quite a bit about Walsingham's secretariat. We know quite a few of its members already. Men such as Francis Mills, Thomas Philips, who was involved in the deciphering of Mary, Queen of Scots letters. Nicholas Ford, who's also another of Walsingham's intelligence secretaries. So we have a pretty good understanding of the men who worked for him. But what surprised me, actually, was when I was looking at the hands that cropped up most frequently in Elizabeth's letters and also in Walsingham setters, they were not hands that could be attributed to Mills or Thompson or Faunt, for example. They were hands I was unable to identify. So Walsham was working a lot more closely in the production of Elizabeth's English language letters, at least with anonymous scribes. And one of them, the most prolific contributor to Elizabeth's letters, certainly in the mid-1580s, and Walsingham's letters as well, really caught my attention. This hand that just seemed to be cropping up everywhere and I wanted to pin him down. There was a member of Wolsgang's secretariat that we know of as Cyprian, which is an alias for one John Decardenas, and he crops up in Walsingham's papers, this alias. We know that this person, Cyprien, is someone who worked for Walsingham and I was interested in seeing if I could find out a bit more about him. And thankfully some of his letters have survived also at the National Archives. And I was struck when I went to look at them, at the resemblance that they bore to my then anonymous, I think, scribe one. So that led me down a little rabbit hole of analysing the hands really closely and seeing again if I could make a positive attribution. I faced the same challenges where Elizabeth's letters tended to be written in these set, very neat, legible hands. And Cardinalus's own letters were in a much more relaxed style. But again, really close scrutiny of his preferred way of writing particular letters and letter combinations. His spelling preferences confirmed that he was the, of all of Waltham's secretaries, most likely candidate for this Scribe one and
- [19:23]
Susannah Lipscomb
I'm going to oppose you a question which sounds a little bit mean, but it's a question you pose yourself in the thesis, so I don't think it's totally unfair. How does identifying him inform our understanding of his contribution to Elizabeth's English scribal letters?
- [19:37]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Connecting a name to an unknown hand in Elizabeth Zetter's can reveal a lot of information about who produced them, how they were produced and the network of relationships that lay behind their production.
- [19:50]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
It's one of the most difficult questions of all times. Right. What do we actually gain when we have identified a scribe? But I think we're completely obsessed with authorship, as in a text written by Elizabeth I becomes more valuable because it has her signature. So it just tells us a bit more about the function of early modern authorship in general, but also perhaps about Elizabeth I carefully manipulating political situations. They trusted him, probably because they had worked with his father as well, and yet not completely, because Claudia told me only yesterday that she had found out that he had to sign an oath of allegiance once he started to work on certain specific letters.
- [20:39]
Susannah Lipscomb
And he sends some important letters, doesn't he, to the Earl of Shrewsbury, who's the jailer, to Mary Queen of Scots, to the English ambassador in Scotland. It seems like he's particularly dealing with Scottish matters. And I wondered whether that might suggest he was more than a penman.
- [20:54]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
It absolutely does. It's difficult to work out precisely what he contributed to the letters he wrote. I haven't found any drafts in his hand, for example, but he is overwhelmingly used to write letters relating to Anglo Scottish matters, including Mary Queen of Scots. So I think that that fact in and of itself suggests that there was likely a sort of specialism there, that there was very likely an intellectual contribution on his part, but also potentially that there was a strategy of information security at play, whereby certain scribes were perhaps trusted with particular topics exclusively or near exclusively, to reduce the circulation of knowledge of these matters. There are references in letters between, I think, Robert Cecil and Thomas Windebank, who was a clerk of the Signet, to restrict the circulation of letters among clerks, to reduce the amount of eyes on those papers. So there was clearly concerned in the Secretariat about how many people were working on these letters.
- [22:04]
Susannah Lipscomb
And the extraordinary thing that comes out of your work is that even though he seems to have written more letters than the Queen herself on her behalf, despite this service, he went ill rewarded, especially after Walsingham's death. What becomes of him?
- [22:21]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Yeah, so this was unfortunately quite a common fate. Working for the Principal Secretary was incredibly precarious work. There was no guarantee of secure employment. Your employment was tied to your master when he died, or if he was promoted or demoted, then your position ceased to be. So there was quite a scramble for appointments after Walsingham's death by the members of his Secretariat who were hoping to find work in the service of other prominent statesmen at the Elizabeth government. Eventually, he seems to cut his losses and move to Paris. He remains in contact with people in the 1590 Secretariat and into James's reign, but he never seemed to return to working the Secretariat.
- [23:09]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
If you think about specialism as well, I've never thought about it before, but if he really worked so much on these Anglo Scottish affairs, marry Queen of Scots is of course executed, so his specialism is perhaps also no longer needed in similar ways. If he was, for instance, employed because he knew something about the Spanish nature of certain of Mary Queen of Scots supporters, for instance, about King Philip. That kind of knowledge is no longer needed once Mary Queen of Scots actually are executed.
- [23:42]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, of course.
- [23:57]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
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- [24:00]
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Susannah Lipscomb
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- [24:44]
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- [24:59]
Susannah Lipscomb
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- [25:00]
Mark Bittman
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- [26:06]
Susannah Lipscomb
Can we think about what you mentioned earlier, Nadine, about sort of stylistic conventions? You talk about the sort of form letters. Do scribal letters bear idiosyncratic traces of the scribe? Do we have a certain diction a style and tone, as well as distinct spelling from time to time.
- [26:25]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
Yes. I think what Claude's work has really shown is that we can really see an authorial fingerprint even in these formulaic letters. And I think we sort of assume that their voices are institutionalized, but actually it is quite exciting that we can really see them as authors with their own style. And I think computational analysis, stylometry helps to identify such styles. So it's a combination of forensic handwriting analysis, comparing every single letter, comparing a running hand to a more kind of set hand, different kind of scripts, but also using computational analysis to sort of determine the specific styles of letters. Once you use computational analysis, you can sort of also see that these anonymous scribes come to the fore and we have sort of completely overlooked them.
- [27:24]
Susannah Lipscomb
Give me a bit more information, Clodagh, about those computational methods. What sort of thing is the program searching for?
- [27:30]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
It's looking for patterns in function word use. So these sort of very grammatical words, words that didn't carry any sort of semantic meaning, these have been shown to be used very frequently, which makes them obviously useful for frequency based analysis. They are used largely unconsciously by writers and speakers, but are also used by them in slightly idiosyncratic ways. So they're very useful for detecting personal writing styles in texts, particularly where, in this instance, these are writers who are deliberately trying to mute their own voices and conform to a particular set of stylistic conventions. Analyzing the function words can sort of read against the grain of this attempt to create a homogenous institutionalised voice and detect these stylistic idiosyncrasies.
- [28:21]
Susannah Lipscomb
Another part of your work is to do with letter packets, and I love the fact that the shape of the packet would tell the recipient what sort of letter they were getting. What's the value in trying to reassemble the contents of these packets?
- [28:38]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
Yes.
- [28:39]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
So royal letters were individually locked and sealed, but then packaged up together and dispatched as a packet of letters secured by a piece of paper that served as a wrapper on which the delivery instructions were written. Once these packets reached the recipient, the wrappers tended to be discarded, the contents became dispersed. So these original contexts in which the letters were dispatched and received, these packets, have become sort of lost to us when we approach the letters in the archive, when they appear as individual documents bound now into volumes. So we sort of lose sight of this original material way in which they were received. Elizabeth's letters were commonly sent alongside letters from her secretary, so letters from Walsingham to their recipients. And what I realised was that Walsingham's letters often provide some commentary on the royal letters that they were sent alongside, sometimes simply introducing the letter that it would have been in the packet, sometimes providing extra information about it, sometimes shaping the way the recipient read the letter. So there's a lot of information that comes out of trying to reassemble these packets and reading Elizabeth's letters in dialogue with the letters of the secretary that they were originally sent alongside.
- [30:10]
Susannah Lipscomb
One example that you have reconstructed is a letter packet from 1577 containing letters from both Walsingham and the Queen to the Earl of Shrewsbury. What do we learn about the role of secretary from that comparison?
- [30:25]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Yeah, so this is a letter that Elizabeth wrote to the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury while they were custodians of Mary, Queen of Scots.
- [30:33]
Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, this is Bess of Hardwicke for those who just need to join up the dots. Bess of Hardwicke and George Talbot.
- [30:38]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Yes. The letter was written to thank the Shrewsburys for having recently hosted Leicester at Chatsworth. The letter is really fascinating because it exists in a draft version and the sent version, so we have quite a full picture of the production process. The draft version is incredibly playful, incredibly jocular. There's a lot of their sort of tongue in cheek commentary, these sort of joke prescriptions about what the Shrewsburys are allowed to feed. Leicester, for example, the Queen jokes that he is prescribed the shoulder of a wren for his dinner. I'm not quite sure of why this was funny. It's an incredibly playful, very light letter, but it's really substantially revised and becomes a much more sort of sober, just straightforward letter of gratitude. Historians who have looked at it have wondered who was responsible for this revision. When you put this letter into the context of the packet, it emerges that it was sent alongside a letter of Walsingham's. Walsingham was writing to the Earl of Shrewsbury specifically to inform him, essentially, that his warrants for his payment for looking after the Scottish Queen were going to be delayed. They weren't going to be assigned as regularly as he wanted. In the draft version of the letter, Elizabeth makes a joke about herself becoming bankrupt. So when the draft version and Walsingham's letter placed together, the draft version becomes very insensitive. Elizabeth's talking about her own financial concerns when she's also rejecting or refusing to pay the Shrewsburys and therefore contributing to their financial concerns. So what the packet reveals is that the revisions were suggested by Walsingham to bring Elizabeth's letter into more complementary alignment with the secretarial letter that it was being sent alongside and that it would be read in close succession by the Earl. So it sort of reveals Walsingham's navigation of sort of intervention in maintaining Elizabeth's interpersonal relationships with her subjects.
- [32:55]
Susannah Lipscomb
So there's a sort of tempering of the Queen's narcissism in order to not upset the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury too much.
- [33:04]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Yeah, he is doing that. What's important about the draft version is that it was written before Shrewsbury's request for money was received, so it was not as insensitive when it was originally written. It also, in its playful tone, was a much more personal letter than the one that was eventually sent. So the draft itself, I think, was Elizabeth's attempt to reward the Earl and Countess by sort of showing her favour. And it only became a slightly more offensive approach when Shrewsbury's letter was received by Walsingham.
- [33:41]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
Yes. I was just thinking about the letter packet. We're so used to reading individual letters in archives and sometimes not the complete packet survives. Not all the letters that were once inserted in one packet survive together. But I think we have to be on the lookout because Clauda's research has really shown that sometimes one letter could give instructions how to read another letter. So, for instance, one letter could be expressing a lot of anger. At one point, Elizabeth is writing to Mary, Queen of Scots, saying, your jailer, Ralph Sattler is doing a terrible job. I completely sympathize with. But there's in the packet also a letter to Ralph Sadler saying, don't worry about this letter. I'm just trying to play nice with her. I'm completely happy with how you conduct your business. So these two letters, if you don't read them together, give a completely different impression. If you start reading them together, apart from individually, it changes everything.
- [34:46]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. That is so interesting. And I found this in my own research as well. It's really fascinating. Well, let's look then at the fact that in the example we've just considered, essentially what Walsingham is doing is tempering what Elizabeth has to say. He's tempering her playfulness. And you've looked at his role in constructing the sort of personal and emotional motive, sentiment in her letters. One of the things that we think about Elizabeth is of her great temper and some of her untempered letters definitely give a flavour of that. Perhaps we could offer a couple of examples because they're just so delicious. And then we'll think about the ones where we know that Walsingham's got involved.
- [35:31]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Elizabeth does have a reputation for having something of a short temper. There are numerous anecdotes that survive. I think in one instance, the Spanish ambassador to England record Elizabeth throwing a slipper at Walsingham and hitting him in the face with it. So there are some sort of unfortunate moments.
- [35:51]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
I think, as a biographer, when you come across such an anecdote, you're so happy that you found such a lovely, sensational anecdote that you will put it into your biography, because that's what you hope you want to write a kind of text that people want to read as well. But with Elizabeth I, it has had an unfortunate effect. And I wonder if she hadn't been a woman. I don't think if a man had said similar things or done similar things, that would have been completely normal. Nobody would have thought less about a male monarch. But because it's a female monarch, we've sort of zoomed in on these moments of anger and that is sort of showing almost that she can be a bit irrational. So it creates a kind of misogynist view of Elizabeth I, because these are such delightful. We can all imagine her throwing that slipper at Sir Francis Walsingham. We can always be in that room and laugh about it.
- [36:51]
Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. It's such a good point because we've got good evidence of Henry VIII hitting Cromwell about the pate and yet we don't talk about it in the same kind of way that we talk about the irrationality of Elizabeth's actions. And the same is true of the sort of letters that you quote of hers in your work, Clodagh. What they reminded me of most of all was Henry VIII's letters when he was annoyed. I marvel at you doing so. And so is a common phrase of his, and it means you're really in deep trouble. And we see similar things from her. So I think that's a really good observation, Nadine. But our sense is that Walsingham's role would always have been to maintain a dispassionate style and temper the Queen. But your work suggests that we have evidence of him doing the opposite to what we might expect.
- [37:42]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Yeah. So there are instances in which Elizabeth was incredibly angry and wanted to dispatch a letter that reflected that fact. And she had some battles with Walsingham over that, who often saw the potential for a diplomatic incident in doing so and attempted to tone things down a bit. But there were was one example I encountered of Walsingham actually intensifying the Queen's anger. This was a letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury written in 1584. It was written to the Earl, but it was expected to be read by Mary, Queen of Scots, and it was sort of intended for her eyes. It was written in response to her refusing to know negotiate with the English government until they restored her liberty. The letter survives in a copy again at the National Archives, that was prepared for signature but never signed. And it's endorsed, not sent. But there's another version of it that suggests it was actually redrafted. And indeed a copy of that version remains in Robert Beale's papers at the British Library. Bill was at Sheffield when this letter was dispatched there to Shrewsbury. So evidently Bill's copy suggests that the letter was indeed sent and it was the redrafted version that was sent and that Bill copied and kept in his papers. The redraft is really fascinating because it reveals that the letter was rewritten to intensify the critiques that were made in it about Mary Queen of Scots and her son, James VI of Scotland. She writes, for example, that Mary shall never live to see those days, that the crown of England shall depend upon the crown of Scotland. And she criticises James really heavily, claiming that he was evil counselled when, at the first entry into his government, he sees him the same with blood, which is a reference to his execution of the Earl of Morton in 1581. So Walsgren has made this a much angrier missive. And indeed the vocabulary of these criticisms bears overlap with comments Wolsgan makes in his own letters. So it's very clearly his voice that speaks in this letter rather than Elizabeth's own. He does this for a particular political effect. He intensifies the criticisms in an attempt to show Mary that. That her attempt to refuse to negotiate with the English government was not going to work and that she had to play by their rules in order to get what she wanted. So there was a diplomatic, political motive behind Walsingham's decision to revise this letter. But what was so fascinating about it and what it really reveals is that these personal elements, these emotive elements, this sort of intensification of emotion, cannot always straightforwardly be attributed to Elizabeth herself. I think there's a temptation to see the more emotional elements of letters as Elizabeth's responsibility rather than the scribes. And I think this is to some extent logical. You know, daring to sort of communicate or presume to know the Queen's feeling without her prior instruction would have been highly presumptuous on the part of the scribe. Evidently, it's not. Not quite that simple. The scribe was not necessarily restricted to writing in such sort of formal and impassive style as we might assume. And so we cannot quite safely assume that these sort of personal attacks or these intense emotional criticisms were necessarily Elizabeth's.
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- [42:51]
Susannah Lipscomb
So do you think, and I understand it's impossible to know, but do you think that these additions reflect Walsingham's opinions or do you think that they accurately reflected perhaps how Elizabeth felt and spoke about the matter, but it wasn't in an earlier version?
- [43:11]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
I think the fact that they were added into the letter and that this letter was signed off on and sent suggests these comments were in line with with Elizabeth's opinions. However, I think that on this occasion, Elizabeth's and Walsingham's opinions on the matter were in alignment. And I wonder whether the fact that they were in alignment on this letter is why Walsingham's voice comes through so strongly in this letter. Because he is drawing on his own feelings and he is parroting comments he's made to other people in his own correspondence.
- [43:44]
Susannah Lipscomb
It's both.
- [43:45]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Yeah, it's both.
- [43:46]
Susannah Lipscomb
But as you say, it complicates our search for personal candor for authenticity in the letters. And one final letter I'd like to discuss that you talk about in your work is a letter to Sadler from 31st October 1584. This also confuses the matter a little bit for us. How so?
- [44:06]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Yeah. So I think the letter to Shrewsbury, although the voice in this letter and although the words in this letter are Walsingham's, and although he is responsible for intensifying the emotion and exaggerating it, I do think that it is reflective of Elizabeth's genuine feeling at the time. I think she was genuinely offended by Mary's attempts to negotiate. The letter to Sadler reveals the opposite, that the feelings that come through in Elizabeth's letters are not always and cannot always be reliably taken as her genuine feelings. This letter is also critical of Mary. It was written at a very fraught time in Elizabeth's and Mary's relationship. It came after the exposure of a number of plots to depose Elizabeth. So the political tension was very high. It's written to Sadler, but again it is intended for Mary's eyes. Elizabeth criticises Mary again, but she is also conciliatory. So she sort of reflects on a time of friendship between herself and Mary, describing the sort of liking we had for a time of Mary's friendship, and she raises this potential for a sort of reconciliation between her and Mary and her desire for a thorough reconciliation. Elizabeth has been sort of assumed to be responsible for the composition of this letter, and I think it's very likely that she was involved in writing it. But the letter actually exists also in a draft version that has sort of escaped notice, that is again, sort of littered with Waltingham's scribbled revisions. Attention to the revisions reveals that this sort of desire for reconciliation, these expressions of goodwill, were not Elizabeth's but added in by Walsingham. This was done, I think, on this occasion to convince Mary that Elizabeth's favour could be regained in the hope of sort of dissuading Mary from plotting against the English queen, and also, I think, in another attempt to encourage Mary to play ball with the English government and act in their interest.
- [46:08]
Susannah Lipscomb
So as we come towards the end, I'd like to ask you what you think the ramifications are of your research.
- [46:18]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
I think that what is revealed is that there's no such thing as a sort of the authentic voice in Elizabeth's letters. We can't get access to her so straightforwardly through them. What it does reveal is that instead we see Elizabeth working really closely with her secretaries, collaborating with them. We can really appreciate her sort of of political savvy in her willingness to incorporate the suggestions and advice of those around her, which I think are qualities of a strong, smart monarch. Indeed.
- [46:50]
Susannah Lipscomb
Are there any potential Problems of thinking about questions of agency, and this woman writer who now actually turns out to be written, in fact, quite a lot by men. What should we make of that?
- [47:04]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
I think if you look at the corpus of Elizabeth I's letters, we had these hundred letters that we were completely obsessed with and we were ignoring 2,900 other letters. The corpus of potential agency has just grown enormously by sort of saying that there's no such thing as a feminine voice, there's no such thing as a masculine voice. All these letters are performative, and we've just only started to understand the game that is being played here.
- [47:39]
Susannah Lipscomb
So what is the one thing you want people to take away from hearing about your work today?
- [47:45]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
I think what actually emerges from this is not a sort of removal of agency, but its reconfiguration. The nature of Elizabeth's involvement in her letters is simply brought into sharper focus and it doesn't always conform to our expectations. And sometimes this reveals biases in our own assumptions. So what emerges is a sharp picture of the Queen and how she worked with the men around her to construct her voice and construct her royal identity. She was very well aware of the performative nature of these texts. She commented famously that monarchs are sort of set up on a stage for the world to see. And I think this really comes through. I think we see that she's very aware of Helettis performances and she is creatively and collaboratively working to construct different versions of herself in them.
- [48:34]
Susannah Lipscomb
Well, brava. Thank you so much for sharing the fruits of your research. Hot off the press with us. What a delight to feature them. And thank you for coming on to explain them so carefully. Dr. Clodag Murphy and Professor Nadine Ackerman, thank you.
- [48:53]
Dr. Clodagh Murphy
Thank you so much.
- [48:54]
Professor Nadine Akkerman
Thank you.
- [48:56]
Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. And to my producer, Rob Weinberg, we are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from historyhit Hit.
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Susannah Lipscomb
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