The Heart of a King

ELIZABETH THE GREAT (336 pp.)--Elizabeth Jenkins--Coward-McCann ($5).

Was Elizabeth I illegitimate? Was she capable of pregnancy? Was she bald? How did she stand with the Pope? These were some of the questions that obsessed the minds of Britons 400 years ago, a time when high policy revolved about the person of the monarch. The answers did much to determine the shape of the modern world, and they lend a womanly interest to Elizabeth Jenkins' sprightly new biography of Elizabeth I.

The answers: Elizabeth was illegitimate in the sense that her father, Henry VIII, had his marriage with her mother, Anne Boleyn, declared invalid; 2) evidence is that Elizabeth was barren; 3) she had fine red-gold hair, and if she wore a wig, it was for reasons of fashion; 4) her relations with nine successive Popes were stormy, but she showed some signs of restraint. In the Prayer Book, designed for worship in the church of which she was the head, Protestant Elizabeth with her own hand struck out the words:"From the Bishop of Rome and his detestable enormities. Good Lord, deliver us."

Statecraft & Stagecraft. With a female eye for pageantry and a female solidarity with a woman both hated and admired by historians. British Biographer Jenkins has painted a string of brilliant miniatures of her heroine. She maintains that the Queen had a kind of magic ("a quality of incantation") about her by which she managed to unite state, nation and the reformed religion in one person. How else explain the almost mystical response by the London mob to her coronation progress through the streets? Elizabeth, crying "God 'a mercy" to her people from beneath a canopy held by knights, and keeping a sprig of rosemary thrown into her chariot, was a superb performer in the stagecraft of statecraft. She was also, according to Biographer Jenkins, a beautiful woman with golden-brown eyes of great brilliance. "Goddess, excellently bright," one ballad called her.

It was a time of ballads rather than newspapers, and of myths rather than statistics. In London's squalid streets magnificence belonged alone to the church and state, and genius lived in the persons of the statesmen--Sir Philip Sidney, Cecil and Raleigh--as much as in Shakespeare, who celebrated the glory of Elizabeth's monarchy. It was also a time of all-embracing religious conflict; when religion then walked not only the hairline of individual faith but the tightrope of policy. Catholic and Protestant were "in a state of mind near insanity" over the tortures they inflicted on each other.

In the end, the excesses of her more diligent henchmen sickened even Elizabeth, the Queen who presided over the liquidation of Roman Catholicism in England. After about 180 executions, including the Jesuit Robert Southwell, Elizabeth said that if her council wanted to convert more Catholics to the Established Church, they should do so by the example of their lives. "For I," she cried, "will persecute no more than I have done."

Blood & Theory. Not that she hesitated to be brutal when she deemed it necessary. Her favorites could never be quite sure whether to expect a caress or the ax. When Elizabeth fastened an earl's mantle on Leicester's shoulders, she could not resist tickling his neck; when Leicester's successor, the Earl of Essex, became a political embarrassment, she could not resist chopping his neck.

This is not surprising, since Elizabeth's rule was often tenuous; as Anne Boleyn's daughter, she had been dealt from the bottom of her father's well-stacked deck, and many of her noble subjects had more legitimate claims to rule than she. But Elizabeth was a realist. To her, the most important thing about the British throne, for which so much blood and theory had been squandered, was that she sat on it.

As Biographer Jenkins traces the fabulous complexities of Elizabeth's life and rule--loves, intrigues, wars patiently avoided, campaigns narrowly won--the reader clearly feels the mettle of a Queen who addressed her troops on the eve of an expected Spanish invasion: "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too."

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