Abstract
In July 1593, Elizabeth I wrote to Henri IV of France remonstrating with him over his conversion to Catholicism while promising to continue as his friend. Elizabeth signed herself: “Your most assured sister, if it be after the old fashion; with the new I have nothing to do.”1 Her words referred, of course, to Henri’s altered religion, but they also serve to remind us that Elizabeth was always acutely conscious of history in her dealings with France. Her own reputation as a strong monarch and a war leader, such as it is, would come to rest largely on the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.2 Until then, however, the Tudor dynasty’s reputation and international status had been asserted most vigorously in “the old fashion” of war and peace with France.
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Notes
B{ibliothèque} N{ationale de} F{rance} MS français 17,830 fol. 86, Elizabeth I to Henri IV, July 1593. An English translation from a copy of the letter in the Cecil Papers has been published in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. L. Marcus, J. Meuller and M. B. Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 370–1.
J. Richards, Mary Tudor (London: Routledge, 2008), 203–22;
R. Titler, The Reign of Mary I (Harlow: Longman, 1991), 58–68;
G. Redworth, “Matters Impertinent to Women: Male and Female Monarchy under Philip and Mary,” EHR 112 (1997): 597–613.
B.J. Harris, “Women and Politics in Early Tudor England,” HJ 33 (1990): 259–81;
J. Richards, ‘“To Promote a Woman to Beare Rule’: Talking of Queens in Mid-Tudor England,” SCJ 28 (1997): 101–21;
A. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
N. Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) on the language and means of women’s formal and informal power in the period.
G. Richardson, “Eternal Peace, Occasional War: Anglo-French Relations under Henry VIII” in Tudor England and its Neighbours, ed. S. Doran and G. Richardson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 44–73.
P. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 62–70.
S. Doran, “Elizabeth I and Catherine de Medici” in “The Contending Kingdoms,” France and England 1420–1700, ed. G. Richardson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 117–32.
S. Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996), 99–129.
Leimon and Parker, 1139. See also G. M. Bell, “Elizabethan Diplomatic Compensation: Its Nature and Variety,” The Journal of British Studies 20 (1981): 1–25.
Foreign Intelligence and Information in Elizabethan England: Two English Treatises on the State of France, 1580–1584, ed. D. Potter, Camden Fifth Series, 25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–21.
L. F. Parmelee, Good Newes from Fraunce: French Anti-League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester and Woodbridge: Rochester University Press, 1996), 27–51;
C. Giry-Deloison, “France and Elizabethan England,” TRHS, 14 (2004): 223–42.
D. Potter and P. Roberts, “An Englishman’s View of the Court of Henri III, 1584–1585: Richard Cook’s ‘Description of the Court of France,’” French History 2 (1988): 312–44.
R. B. Waddington, “Elizabeth I and the Order of the Garter,” SCJ 24 (1993): 97–113.
R. Strong, “Festivals for the Garter Embassy at the Court of Henry III,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22 (1959): 60–70.
See also P. Begent and H. Chessyre, The Most Noble Order of the Garter, 650 Years (London: SPINK, 1999), 234. Henri was first nominated to the Order on April 23, 1575.
The Edmondes Papers, A Selection from the Correspondence of Sir Thomas Edmondes, ed. G. Butler (London: Roxburghe Club, 1913), 185–7: Sir John Norris to Edmondes at the French court, November 12, 1594;
J. B. Black, Elizabeth and Henry TV (Blackwell: Oxford, 1914), 50–80.
The Edmondes Papers, 207–11: Burghley to Edmondes, January 23, 1595; Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 175–83; D. Buisseret, Henry IV King of France (London: Routledge, 1992).
See also D. Womersley, “France in Shakespeare’s Henry V,” Renaissance Studies 9 (1995): 442–59 for an interesting account of the play’s implicit critique of Henri IV of France.
L. Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 237–8.
E. Ashmole, The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (London, 1672; repr. 1971), 395. Ashmole contrasts favourably the documents sent to Henri IV with those sent to his predecessor.
A Journal of all that was accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse, ambassador in England from King Henri IV to Queen Elizabeth, Anno Domini 1597, trans. and ed. G. B. Harrison and R. A. Jones (London: Nonesuch Press, 1931), xii–xiii, quoting a letter in the Baschet transcripts from Henri IV to Elizabeth I, Monceaux, November 15, 1597.
The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, Thomas Platter and Horatio Busino, ed. P. Razzell (London: Caliban, 1995), 58–9. Hereafter cited as Platter.
L’Ambassade de France en Angleterre sous Henri IV Mission de Jean de Thumery, sieur de Boissise 1598–1602, ed. P. Laffleur de Kermaingant, 2 vols. (Paris, 1886), II: 4–5: Henri IV to Elizabeth I, from Ansennis, April 22, 1598; and 8–9: unspecified location but from context Monceaux, September 30, 1598.
J-P. Babelon, Henri IV (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 929.
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Richardson, G. (2010). “Your most assured sister”: Elizabeth I and the Kings of France. In: Hunt, A., Whitelock, A. (eds) Tudor Queenship. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230111950_13
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