{"id":1340,"date":"2026-08-10T10:29:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T10:29:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/08\/10\/who-really-wrote-elizabeth-is-angriest-letter-new-research-reveals-a-hidden-hand\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T10:29:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T10:29:38","slug":"who-really-wrote-elizabeth-is-angriest-letter-new-research-reveals-a-hidden-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/08\/10\/who-really-wrote-elizabeth-is-angriest-letter-new-research-reveals-a-hidden-hand\/","title":{"rendered":"Who really wrote Elizabeth I\u2019s angriest letter? New research reveals a hidden hand"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Ermine Portrait of Elizabeth I of England (1585) and a signed letter from Queen Elizabeth I to her future successor James I.<\/span> Wiki Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On February 10 1586, Elizabeth I wrote one of her most famous letters: a furious rebuke to her favourite, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. She sharply reprimanded him for disobeying her.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow contemptuously we conceive ourself to have been used by you,\u201d Elizabeth rages. \u201cWe could never have imagined that a man [\u2026] extraordinarily favoured by us would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment.\u201d She demands that Leicester obey her directions, and warns him: \u201cFail you not as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.\u201d<\/p>\n

The queen\u2019s<\/a> fury jumps off the page. Yet the only surviving copy of this letter is written in the hand of a secretary: Francis Mylles, servant to Elizabeth\u2019s principal secretary, Francis Walsingham. Were Mylles and Walsingham involved in writing this apparently personal communication of the queen\u2019s?<\/p>\n

Without the original copy of this letter, we cannot say for certain. However, through careful analysis of over 500 other letters of Elizabeth\u2019s, I have discovered<\/a> that the expression of emotion in her letters was often carefully constructed by her secretaries. <\/p>\n

Around 3,000 of Elizabeth\u2019s letters survive, of which the overwhelming majority were penned by scribes. These so-called \u201cscribal letters\u201d have been severely neglected by historians, with priority given to those written in Elizabeth\u2019s own hand. <\/p>\n

Work on Elizabeth\u2019s letters has focused on identifying the queen\u2019s \u201cvoice\u201d within them<\/a>. Yet they were often the products of collaboration between Elizabeth and her secretariat.<\/p>\n

Disentangling these collaborations, and recovering the contributions of Elizabeth\u2019s secretaries, was the focus of my PhD research \u2013 part of the Feathers<\/a> project. Led by Nadine Akkerman, professor of early modern literature at Leiden University, Feathers sought to distinguish between authorial and scribal voices in collaboratively produced manuscripts from the early modern period (around 1500-1800).<\/p>\n

Finding Elizabeth\u2019s voice<\/h2>\n

How can we distinguish between Elizabeth\u2019s voice and that of her secretaries? It might be assumed that the more personal elements of her letters, including the expression of emotion, can be safely attributed to Elizabeth herself. <\/p>\n

\n \"A<\/a>
\n Sir Francis Walsingham by John de Critz (1589).<\/span>
\n National Portrait Gallery<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is logical enough: daring to communicate or presume to know the queen\u2019s feeling without her prior instruction would have been bold indeed. Further, early modern secretaries were expected to employ formal and impassive language and exert a tempering influence, moderating emotion to ensure the goodwill of the addressee.<\/p>\n

However, as I dug into the archival material, a more complicated reality emerged. Elizabeth\u2019s letters survive in a dizzying array of versions, including drafts, sent letters and copies. Through the reassembly of these different manuscripts, painstaking handwriting analysis and close textual comparison, I found evidence<\/a> that the expression of emotion in Elizabeth\u2019s letters was carefully crafted by her secretaries.<\/p>\n

One example is a letter from Elizabeth to the Earl of Shrewsbury, written in May 1584. At this time, Shrewsbury was the custodian of Mary, Queen of Scots: claimant to the English throne and thorn in Elizabeth\u2019s side. <\/p>\n

In the letter, Elizabeth strongly criticises Mary and her son, James VI of Scotland. Elizabeth writes that Mary \u201cshall never live to see those days that the Crown of England shall depend upon the Crown of Scotland\u201d. She also criticises James heavily, claiming that he was \u201cevil counselled when at the first entry into his government the same was seasoned with blood\u201d (a reference to the 1581 execution of his regent James Douglas, Earl of Morton).<\/p>\n

Identifying the draft of this letter, I discovered that it was substantially edited by Walsingham, whose handwritten revisions remain on the manuscript. <\/p>\n

Walsingham\u2019s edits intensify, rather than temper, Elizabeth\u2019s criticisms of Mary and James. The vocabulary of these revisions bears significant overlap with that in Walsingham\u2019s own writings. Evidently, it is Walsingham\u2019s voice, not Elizabeth\u2019s, that speaks in this letter \u2013 and possibly his emotion that spills out of it.<\/p>\n

In another letter \u2013 written to Ralph Sadler, another of Mary Stuart\u2019s custodians, and also intended for Mary\u2019s eyes \u2013 Elizabeth again criticises Mary, but is more conciliatory. She describes the \u201cliking we had for a time\u201d of Mary\u2019s friendship, and raises the potential for \u201ca thorough reconciliation\u201d.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth has been assumed to have composed this letter; however, my recovery of a hitherto unnoticed draft \u2013 which is littered with Walsingham\u2019s scribbled emendations \u2013 revealed that these expressions of goodwill were not Elizabeth\u2019s, but Walsingham\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\n \"Engraving
\n Queen Elizabeth I; Sir Francis Walsingham; William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, by William Faithorne (1655).<\/span>
\n National Portrait Gallery<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Walsingham\u2019s alterations to both letters were made to manipulate Mary\u2019s impression of her relationship with Elizabeth and move her to act in English interests.<\/p>\n

By crafting an \u201cangry\u201d Elizabeth in the letter to Shrewsbury, Walsingham hoped to show Mary that refusing to cooperate with the English government would get her nowhere. By constructing a \u201cnostalgic\u201d Elizabeth in the letter to Sadler, he sought to convince Mary that Elizabeth\u2019s favour could be regained, in the hope of dissuading the former from plotting against the latter.<\/p>\n

That Walsingham crafted and even intensified the expression of emotion in Elizabeth\u2019s letters is remarkable, and sheds important new light on this iconic queen. It provides an important corrective, for example, to Elizabeth\u2019s reputation for emotional outburst. <\/p>\n

Many anecdotes of Elizabeth\u2019s short temper survive, and there is an inherited idea from the early modern period that these outbursts were evidence of a female irrationality. That the expression of anger in Elizabeth\u2019s letters was crafted by her male secretaries reveals that, far from being overly emotional or irrational, Elizabeth strategically deployed emotion to achieve particular political goals.<\/p>\n

She did so, crucially, through collaboration with secretaries such as Walsingham, who evidently had a far greater and more creative hand in constructing her letters than has been realised.<\/p>\n

What does this mean for Elizabeth\u2019s voice? As I unpicked these collaborations with her secretaries, I began to see that the voice we encounter in her letters is a carefully \u2013 and collaboratively \u2013 constructed rhetorical performance.<\/p>\n

Rather than search for Elizabeth\u2019s authentic voice, we might instead appreciate her political savvy and willingness to incorporate the suggestions of her advisors \u2013 qualities of a strong monarch indeed.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Clodagh Murphy’s PhD research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC). <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ermine Portrait of Elizabeth I of England (1585) and a signed letter from Queen Elizabeth I to her future successor James I. Wiki Commons On February 10 1586, Elizabeth I wrote one of her most famous letters: a furious rebuke to her favourite, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. She sharply reprimanded him for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}