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Who wrote Elizabeth I's most scathing letters?

15 points by benbreen 3 hours ago | 10 comments

dsjoerg 2 hours ago

The podcast "The Rest is History" did a series in the past year on Elizabeth I. Highly recommended, and their take is highly compatible with this research take -- Elizabeth seems to have been quite masterful and deliberate both in her choice of what she would communicate, and in composing and marshalling her team.

sherr 2 hours ago

Yes, that podcast series is excellent. Elizabeth was lucky in having an excellent team of people working for her. Their lives depended on keeping her alive of course. They were also lucky that she didn't inherit her father's habit of decapitating the most able ministers.

roughly 60 minutes ago

Any time you see a female monarch who's in power for half a century, it's worth looking into, because you're gonna see a beautiful story about how to wield power. When you can't rely on being able to physically overpower your opponents directly - when "I'm the biggest guy in the room, so fuck you" isn't in your toolkit - anyone who gets and keeps power does so by some really, really sharp tactics.

(and yeah, napoleon, et al, but those are in the same vein - short guy runs the world, probably an interesting story there too.)

hnfong 43 minutes ago

At the level of monarchs, personal physical strength rarely matters regardless of gender anyway. Occasionally it is useful to be able to overpower an adversary in a fight, but that's only either when you risk being assassinated, or you want to assassinate somebody else. Other than those situations, it's just political games all the way. (And like another commenter says, it's usually not "beautiful")

techjamie 42 minutes ago

Napoleon was actually average height for the time period and locality. Claims he was especially short were English propaganda that got accepted and survived to the modern day. He was actually 5'6 (168cm).

xp84 11 minutes ago

That’s funny, because the increase in stature for males in the modern day has resulted in 5’6” being “short king” territory today (no pun intended)

So it’s simultaneously true that he was “only 5’6”” and false that he was short for his time.

sherr 52 minutes ago

Her half-sister's story wasn't so beautiful ...

kitd 31 minutes ago

She wasn't in power very long though.

K0balt 2 hours ago

Back in the day when a strongly worded letter actually carried some weight….

advisedwang 60 minutes ago

I suspect the author having the authority to execute people on a whim may have contributed somewhat