Queen Elizabeth: The (Virgin?) Queen
by The Hairpin Sponsors
The world knows her as Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth Tudor. Gloriana. Good Queen Bess. The Virgin Queen.
ERRR (train stopping sound). Virgin, you say?
Elizabeth I ruled England and Ireland from 1558 to 1603. She presided over a golden age in England, a time when the arts flourished, and England became one of the most powerful, prosperous countries in the world. While she cultivated an image as “The Virgin Queen,” many modern historians believe she was anything but.
Queen Elizabeth’s romantic life and sexual escapades have been a topic of interest (and debate) for centuries. Sure, she was perpetually single. And she could have had anyone she wanted; the George Clooneys and Russell Crowes of Elizabethan England were lined up to wed her, and her closest advisors urged her to tie the knot (“think about what the CAKE would be like!”). But Elizabeth despised the idea of marriage.
Was Elizabeth a lesbian? A pan-sexual “more the merrier” swinger? Was she asexual by choice and inclination, therefore a celibate virgin devoted only to the work of preserving the state? Did Elizabeth have children, or was she infertile? Was she congenitally “different”? While these questions weren’t necessarily headlines in a 16th-century Star, they were definite topics of gossip within the court.
Elizabeth’s unwed status could be attributed to a few things. Her father killed most of his wives, including her mother (Ann Boleyn), and her stepmother (Catherine Howard). You see your father behead his wife at the age of eight, you start to develop some subconscious fears about marriage — kablammo. Also, there was the whole “power” issue; if you have direct governance of an entire nation, and exercise complete sovereign rule by your own accord, why diminish your own political power by “sharing”? Or even, why not diplomatically dangle the fruit of the possibility of marriage as a power play?
And when you’re Queen Elizabeth, you don’t need a marriage to get orgasms. Oh no. No you don’t.
Elizabeth was surrounded by people at all times, and had complete power over them. And from what Cosmo tells us, we know that power is “hot” (although girdles are “not”). While her relations with men were often documented as “romantic,” we know that’s just a 16th-century term for “erotic and sex-filled.”
Her supposedly “romantic” relationships with several men, including Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor from 1587 to 1591, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, in her old age, with the much younger Robert Devereux, The Earl of Essex.
Essex first came to court in 1584, and by 1587, his charm had won him great favor with the Queen. She fancied his mind, eloquence, and his clouts in courtly love. She made him rich and powerful, granting business rights and political titles. But after making a bad deal to quell an uprising, he was stripped of everything. He tried to incite his own rebellion against the Queen, but it failed miserably and led to his execution.
Filmmaker Roland Emmerich explores the love affair between Elizabeth and Essex — and imaginatively expands on others similar to it — in Anonymous.
The film, set in Elizabethan England in and around the time of the Essex Rebellion, investigates the centuries-old “Shakespeare authorship question” through the lens of the Elizabethan court. Political intrigue abounds between the Tudors and the Cecils for the succession of Queen Elizabeth I. Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is portrayed as not only one of Queen Elizabeth’s incestuous lovers, but also the real writer behind the work attributed to William Shakespeare. During this time, cloak-and-dagger political intrigue, illicit romances in the Royal Court, and schemes of greedy nobles hungry for the power of the throne were exposed in the most unlikely of places: the London stage.
Anonymous opens in theaters October 28, 2011.