2000, Hyperion, NY, pages 330-95

“…despite the garish wig and the blackened teeth and the withered breast (uncovered to the end, as befitted a virgin), foreigners like Venetian ambassador Scarinelli, who saw her with pearls and pears roped about her brow, did indeed think that Elizabeth’s beauty ‘though past’ had not entirely faded.”

The last seventh of Schama’s monumental book is devoted to one of the oddest of ages in any nation, the age of the woman called “Gloriana” among other things, who had married a nation rather than a man and was its symbol of purity, providing something of a counterbalance to the reeking actuality.

The military successes and economic failures of the age—including the quest to turn Ireland into “plantation Ireland,” enslaving the entire island in place, as well as the schemes to ship religious discontents over to Virginia to form military support plantations—all seem to have stemmed from various would be kings attempting to earn this lady’s favor. While the greatest fleet in history sailed against her island nation, her sea dogs were so jealous over her approval that Drake saw to it that Grenville’s 51 ships sat out the conflict upon which the nation’s survival hinged.

Never have so few men slaughtered so many for the favor of one woman. It is an irony that in a land of would be kings that the favor of the queen was the fuel for so much military adventure, including a circumnavigation of the globe and one nut riding a stag to her doorstep and then plunging his sword into the animal’s heart. The specific obsession with her physicality into her advanced old age is particularly loathsome in retrospect, but seemed an expression of sacrificial innocence in her time.

The mania of Queen Elizabeth’s cult, expressed so stridently through war, as well as proposals for conquest and the exploitation of subject peoples, provides a dark glimpse into the hearts of men.