Little Bastard

Patrick Collinson

• Elizabeth: Apprenticeship by David Starkey
  Chatto, 339 pp, £20.00, April 2000, ISBN 0 7011 6939 7
• Elizabeth I: Collected Works edited by Leah Marcus and Janel Mueller
  Chicago, 436 pp, £25.00, September 2000, ISBN 0 226 50464 6

In a recent TV programme about King George VI, Peregrine Worsthorne commended his late sovereign for being a dull man, brains being the last thing the British constitution requires of a monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be hidden for ever behind the iconic mask of royalty, she apologised for her appearance, ‘the face ... I might well blush to offer’, but not for her mind, of which she would never be ashamed. It was a mind which as yet had found few opportunities for action, but ‘as a dog may have its day’, so perhaps her time would come ‘to declare it in deeds’, rather than only in words.