“Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince”, by Lisa Hilton

400 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, ISBN-13: 978-0544577848

An old woman, watching Elizabeth pass by on progress, expressed astonishment that the Queen was, in fact, a woman…well, that’s the story anyway, used to illustrate the way in which “the ambiguous interplay between the natural and political bodies of the monarch” enabled Elizabeth I to govern and project herself to her people. In Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince by Lisa Hilton, the title is indicative of the point the author is trying to make, that the Virgin Queen saw herself first, last and in-between as a Prince; not as a male ruler, mind you, but as a monarch who established and maintained public order and security through the use of practical political behavior, sometimes amorally. Her sex had nothing to do with it. Elizabeth needed to do so as she spent much of her life battling to establish and maintain herself as the ruler of a country divided by major issues of succession, religious conflict and political threat from larger, richer countries around her, especially Spain and France. Renaissance Prince, then, is not so much a biography as a thematic history of, perhaps, England’s greatest ruler.

Hilton, then, spends a considerable amount of time explaining Elizabeth in terms of the iconography and conventions of courtly love during the period she was ruler of England. While the political winds were rapidly changing all across Europe, Elizabeth established herself as the symbolic, as well as the actual, ruler of her country, at least partly through the manipulation of the symbols legitimizing her divine right to govern (as the quote from the old lady above illustrates). Hilton describes the details in contemporary paintings and descriptions of elaborate tableaux and pageants as support, with references to then-common allusions to Greek and Roman mythology support her contentions. The other major support for Hilton’s portrait of Elizabeth lies in her description of the uses of the conventions of courtly love in Court relationships; this conventional behavior relied upon symbolic language and elaborate flirtation to develop and maintain relationships which actually had no recourse to ever being acted upon in private liaisons. While Hilton refuses to be categorical in this contention, she suggests that Elizabeth did, indeed, die a Virgin Queen while successfully establishing herself as being beyond gender…except when it suited her to appear weak and feminine.

In this way Hilton shows how Elizabeth’s long reign changed English politics and the country’s place in the world: “What Elizabeth did was to negotiate her way between two differing and incompatible ideologies, which we might call ‘chivalric kingship’ and ‘statecraft’, leaving England a markedly different place on her death in 1603 from her accession in 1558”. Hilton’s major point here is to show just how Machiavellian Queen Bess was (and she uses this term positively) in that Elizabeth grasped that which her great rival, Mary Queen of Scots, did not: that a ruler’s primary duty is not to herself but to the state that she governs, and that all other desires, needs and concerns must be subjugated to this. Furthermore, Hilton hammers away at the concept of Elizabeth – and, indeed, all monarchs – having “two bodies”; not literary, of course, but of there being her official, public self – the Prince, the ruler who, through wise counsel, oratorical skill, strong will and common sense strengthens her contested claim to the throne – and the private self – the woman who subsumed all of her baser instincts for the good of her people.

Oh, there are faults to be found, for sure. First are a fair share of convoluted sentences that any editor worth his salt should have parsed. Then there are instances of people suddenly appearing without being identified (i.e. Don John, who is probably the one from the Battle of Lepanto, but who knows?) Elizabeth’s principle French suitor first appears as the Duke of Alençon on page 233 with his older brother the Duke of Anjou, who scorned the prospect of courting the Virgin Queen; yet a few pages later, there’s Anjou paying court to Elizabeth (other books on Elizabeth’s suitors make clear that this is Alençon who had inherited the title of Anjou, but Hilton leaves us to guess). William Cecil, Lord Burghley, is referred to as one of the three most important men in Elizabeth’s life, but his death is barely mentioned (on page 312 he’s referred to as “evidently in declining health”, while five pages later it’s “with Cecil gone” with no comment on his death or its effect on Elizabeth; thereafter, “Cecil” apparently refers to his son, Robert). And Hilton’s deliberate anachronisms – such as referring despairingly to Fox News – can also get a bit wearing (although calling the matchmaking Katherine Ashley a “kamikaze Emma” was a hoot).

But make no mistake: Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince is a sharp and insightful look at Elizabeth I. Too often, I have found, English history feels isolated and often forgets how intricately bound, in some ways, European society was for quite some time. Most studies of Elizabeth have an Us-vs.-Them feel to them, partly stemming from the religious struggles and wars, as well as her sex and birth. With Hilton’s work, I found much more to the person of Elizabeth and her reign, and it was very interesting seeing the Virgin Queen defined not as the exception, in so many cases, but as a bit of an exemplification of the rulers of her day, as well – especially of the new-fangled, Machiavellian-type.