Gloriana
ROY STRONG
Elizabeth I compiled by John Langdon-Davies (Cape Jackdaw Publications 11s 6d) I have been crazy about Queen Elizabeth I ever since the age of sixteen, when I had my first card-index of her portraits. How thrilled I should have been at that age and earlier to have had the Jackdaw Elizabeth I pressed into my hands to pin up around the bedroom, especially the queen-size sheet labelled `Gloriana,' a veritable iconostasis of one's heroine. Anyone who does not yet know the Jackdaw series is in for a gorgeous treat.
Jackdaws are paper wallets full of facsimile goodies on an historical, scientific or other theme and aimed basically at children between the ages of ten and sixteen. The subjects range from the Great Exhibition to Sarajevo, from Magna Carta to Captain Cook. One has in one's hands reproductions of the crucial original letters, state documents, newspapers, letters, pictures, etc, on any particular subject. The folder includes transcripts, -a commentary on the documents, and a series of illustrated sheets outlining the topic in general with an abbreviated bibliography. In a way, it is such an obvious, brilliant idea that it is a wonder no one ever thought of it before. But to return to the contents of the envelope on the Virgin Queen.
Let me notch up its virtues first. It does in- include some of one's favourite pieces—among them Lady Bryan's letter lamenting the prin- cess's poverty, lacking even basic clothing for my lady—a well-known quote—but later in the letter comes something I had forgotten: `My lady had great pain with her teeth which came but slowly. This makes me give her her own way more than I would.' There is a clever, roundabout letter to Protector Somerset plead- ing for the queen's beloved servant Kate Ashley, and yet never giving one jot away about whether she herself was really entangled with Lord Thomas Seymour or not. We catch her once with her defences down en route for the Tower, imploring her sister Mary for reprieve at a moment when she thought she was very close to death. Excellent, too, is the speech to Parliament, Essex's death warrant, the ballad on her death and the glorious vision of her funeral cortege (regrettably not in colour).
And this is where my patience began to give out. Why reproduce page one of her jewel inventory with the crown jewels, when a few pages on there are idiosyncratic emblematic jewels that could have belonged only to her? Why include the miserable drawings in the British Museum of her coronation procession, instead of the infinitely superior set in the College of Arms? And the page on Gloriana, devoted as I am to the idea, has been com- piled with reckless, slaphappy carelessness. In the first place, one is never told whether one is seeing a detail of a portrait or the whole of it. Only one of the portraits is dated, and that given a certain date when only an approximate one is possible. The 'Armada Portrait' at Woburn is not by Gheeraerts, the procession Elizabeth rides in is not going to Blackfriars, and Zuccaro's famous drawing in the British Museum is not by an unknown artist. This is enough to indicate that not much trouble has been taken with the visual material, particu- larly when compared with the historical documentation. These, moreover, are not esoteric points but ones easily checked by any expert on the period. Such carelessness destroys the whole aim of the series.
None the less, a little knowledge can put this right, and I did like the little list of sug- gestions at the end, including writing a Christmas broadcast for Elizabeth I. lust imagine it.
Other Jackdaws to hand: Hadrian's Wall; The Great Exhibition 1851; Caxton and the Early Printers; Women in Revolt; The Black Death; The Monmouth Rebellion; The Conquest of Mexico; Clive of India. Science Jackdaws: Darwin and Evolution; Faraday and Elec- tricity; Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood.
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