The Teen Before the Queen

Happy July! I hope the next few weeks bring you some summertime joy. I think we could all use it.

Some book news: The editing continues – Young Queens has made it through two rounds of structural edits and will soon advance to copy-editing. I have a mock-up of a cover for the UK edition. We’re still going back and forth over little details, so I’m not quite ready to share, but look forward to doing so soon. It’s a beauty!

It’s been a tough (enraging? despair-inducing?) week for pro-choice Americans. I’ve had a hard time finding words to articulate how I’m feeling about all of it. Am I angry? Yes. Am I determined to help in the fight? Also, yes. In Young Queens I write a lot about how young women’s bodies are at the mercy of the state – in their case, the ‘state’ is a kingdom. It’s mind-boggling to realize how far we haven’t come.

Along these lines, my mind has drifted again this week to Elizabeth Tudor. In last month’s letter, I mentioned having to cut Elizabeth from Young Queens. She’s not entirely gone, but her role is drastically reduced. I can’t help it though: I’m still obsessed with her. Why is that? Maybe it’s because her face and image have been so reproduced, so marketed and branded – becoming almost synonymous with England itself – that she is almost meme-like. It is fair to say that Elizabeth I of England enjoys something close to Mona Lisa status. Virgin Queen! Patron of Shakespeare! Vanquisher of the Spanish Armada! Yet occasionally, you get a glimpse of the living, breathing, loving, and suffering woman behind the larger-than-life portrait. And when you do, you see what a complicated person she was. How could she not be when her mother was beheaded by her father, and that same father refused to see her until she was nine years old?

Queen Elizabeth I at the height of her reign. At fifty-five years old in this picture, she had just defeated the Spanish Armada. Here, her ego is as big as her sleeves. See how she rests her had on the globe? The world belongs to the Queen of England now.

I’ve just learned that Starz has released an 8-episode series called “Becoming Elizabeth.” Per IMDB, it follows “Elizabeth Tudor, an orphaned teenager, who becomes embroiled in the political and sexual politics of the English court on her journey to secure the crown.” The premise gets it right: the young Elizabeth, barely in her teens, did become tangled in the sexual politics of the court when Thomas Seymour (the husband of Elizabeth’s last stepmother, Katherine Parr) began to pay a tad too much attention to her. Hollywood being Hollywood, Starz’s show promises to deliver steamy episodes, with the teenaged Elizabeth making her first forays into love and sexual desire. I like it, to a point. To all evidence, Elizabeth did have a crush on Thomas Seymour. There’s something authentic to it, the portrait of the ‘real’ girl behind the Virgin Queen.

I wonder, though, how much they explore the darker side of that episode in Elizabeth’s life. I’ve always believed that Seymour took advantage of his role as the father-figure Elizabeth never really had. He was grooming and coercing her sexually to serve his own ambitions – Elizabeth’s younger brother was king, and Seymour wanted a piece of the action. Part of the tragedy is that Elizabeth might have fallen in love with Seymour, unaware of how he was abusing her. It is also possible that Katherine Parr, Seymour’s wife, and Elizabeth’s former stepmother – a woman she had loved and trusted – was abusing her too, or at least turning a blind eye to what Seymour was doing. Of course, by seducing Elizabeth, Thomas Seymour was also hurting his wife, who happened to be pregnant at the time. The whole affair is ugly.

Alicia von Rittberg as Elizabeth in “Becoming Elizabeth”

And there were horrible, real-life consequences. Seymour was eventually beheaded once the government realized he was using Elizabeth to get close to the crown. Rumors circulated that Elizabeth was pregnant by Seymour and for the better part of the year, she had to keep her head down until the gossip dissipated. Happily for her, she avoided a worse fate. But what if she had slept with him? (And we don’t know for sure that didn’t happen). What if she had gotten pregnant? There would have been no Queen Elizabeth, then. Elizabeth got lucky that things didn’t go any further.

            I’ve been thinking a lot about her this week -- a teen with a crush, unaware of how vulnerable she was, her mind and body a kind of tool for one man’s ambitions. She was thinking about love; she wasn’t thinking about how politics were being written through her body.

And so it goes for so many teenaged girls, even now.

I will have more to say about Elizabeth Tudor in the coming weeks. In the meantime, let me know if you catch any of the Starz episodes and what you think.