Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

My wife and I went to this film this afternoon, the sequel to Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush again playing Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Francis Walsingham, respectively. Production values are again spectacular--although the Spanish Armada special effects are a little below the rest of the film. (Big deal.)

I was very pleased at how well they portrayed the complexity and ugliness of the times. In particular, we tend to romanticize how Elizabethan England operated--and this film reminds us that it was police state, with informers, arrests, torture, and family turned against family. From what I have read, Walsingham really did not like torturing people to get information out of them--but he was quite prepared to do whatever it took--including setting up Mary, Queen of Scots to get the evidence needed to try her for treason.

The full extent of the barbarism of the times is a bit cleaned up. Throughout human history, the vicarious thrill that young people get from watching movies like Saw and Hostel was fulfilled instead by watching real life torture instead. In particular, one of the participants in Mary, Queen of Scots plot against Elizabeth was subjected to an extraordinary execution, because ordinary drawing and quartering just wasn't painful enough. After several hours of the executioner working his way around the internal organs of the traitor, giving them a squeeze (and yes, he was conscious throughout), even the mob watching finally became disgusted--which is saying quite a bit.

This is one of the reasons that I don't have the confidence that some have in the virtues of the free market for promoting decent entertainment. The relative restraint of movies and television into the late 1960s (and much of that degradation seems quaint compared to Hannibal or Saw) was not because the audience was especially civilized, but because elites of relatively refined tastes were setting the rules.

The film does capture Elizabeth's great discomfort at signing the death warrant for her cousin Mary, and the struggle that developed during her reign over religion. Early on, having watched the execution of her mother and growing up during the reign of Bloody Mary, Elizabeth famously observed, "I have no desire to make windows into men's souls." She did not much care what people believed, as long as they didn't cause trouble, and kept their mouths shut. Over time, after the Catholic Church sent assassins into England to try and kill her, she because increasingly concerned with suppressing and punishing Catholicism--which is sad but unsurprising.

The sequence where Britain mobilizes as the Spanish Armada approaches is quite stirring--reminiscent of the sequence in Star Wars where the crews take off to battle the Death Star. It is stirring for the same reason that all decent people get choked up as they read of the naval aviators who flew off at the Battle of Midway knowing that they lacked enough fuel to hit the Japanese fleet and return to their carriers--the courage of those who accept that death is likely, because they have a duty to country.

This isn't my era of specialization, but even I noticed two historical errors.

1. Mary, Queen of Scots is speaking with a Scots accent--which is unlikely, since Mary grew up at the French court, not in Scotland.

2. Elizabeth did give a rousing speech to the militia in preparation for throwing back the soldiers of the Spanish Armada (if they had actually landed). From what I have read, however, she did not make that speech in armor. I read a history of British arms and armor and it said that Elizabeth was the only English monarch in several centuries that did not have a suit of armor made.

UPDATE: A reader more knowledgeable about World War II military history says that David Bergamini's book that makes this claim about the naval aviators taking off without enough fuel to return is wrong, and that Bergamini is the only source that makes this claim.