Elizabeth I did not just have the heart and stomach of a man – in her letters, she commanded his bile, too
Queen Elizabeth I left behind more than three thousand letters upon her death. Whilst historians have so far focused primarily on the hundred or so written in her own hand, PhD candidate Clodagh Murphy delved into the rest. She uncovered a network of illusion and strategy. ‘Elizabeth’s anger was not a typically feminine trait, but a carefully devised tactic.’
During her reign, Queen Elizabeth was surrounded by a large civil service. Under the leadership of Francis Walsingham, scribes handled the lion’s share of her correspondence, even when it appeared personal at first glance. ‘For example, we have a letter from Elizabeth to her sister Mary, Queen of Scotland, who was in captivity at the time,’ explains Murphy. ‘In the letter, Elizabeth urges reconciliation. You might interpret this as a sign that both Mary and Elizabeth wanted to improve their strained relationship at that time, but in reality, that conciliatory tone was carefully crafted by Walsingham, who hoped that Mary would thereby act in the interests of the English government.’
Murphy knows this because, over the past few years, she has analysed 550 letters dating from 1581–1590, Walsingham’s final decade as principal secretary. By comparing the different versions of the letters side by side, it became clear just how much strategy underlay Elizabeth’s communication, even when it appeared to be personal and emotional. ‘Elizabeth has long been portrayed by historians as someone with a very quick temper,’ says Murphy. ‘She was said to be excessively emotional and irrational. When you look at the history behind the letters, this turns out to be a misogynistic interpretation. Elizabeth’s male scribes, in fact, sometimes deliberately employed that emotion as a rhetorical strategy.’
A refugee as a scribe
In addition to the strategy employed by the scribes, Murphy also discovered who these officials were and which letters they wrote. Although a large proportion of the letters are uniform and, stylistically, barely distinguishable from one another to the untrained eye, Murphy combined computational analysis with painstaking forensic handwriting analysis and archival sleuthing to detect stylistic patterns, revealing which writer was responsible for particular passages within the letters.
‘One of the most striking discoveries is that one of the scribes, John de Cárdenas,’ says Murphy, ‘is a Spanish refugee. He wrote letters on behalf of the Queen, was even entrusted with state secrets, and all this at a time when England was officially at war with Spain.’
It is possible that De Cárdenas contributed to that war by gathering intelligence abroad. ‘He was sent to Morocco in 1589 under unclear circumstances,’ says Murphy. ‘The lack of official diplomatic instructions from the government could suggest that he was there in the capacity of a spy, as could the fact that he was the only secretary to use an alias, “Ciprian”.’ If Cárdenas was a spy of Walsingham's, he must have been very good, as any evidence is very well hidden. His position shows, above all, how much England has been built on the efforts of migrants.’
Murphy’s PhD research forms part of the FEATHERS project, a study led by Professor Nadine Akkerman into the production of texts as a collaborative or ‘socialised’ endeavour involving secretaries and scribes who physically wrote down what the author dictated.