Six Holograph Letters in French from Queen Elizabeth I to the Duke of Anjou: Texts and Analysis

Abstract

Comparatively few holographs survive in the vast body of Queen Elizabeth I’s correspondence. Understandably, most letters dealing with the run-of-the-mill tasks of ruling a kingdom and diplomacy were composed and written by court ministers and officials. By comparison with the Queen’s other holograph correspondences, such as her letters to James VI and Henry IV, the collection of letters written to Francis, Duke of Anjou (1555–84), or, as he was universally known, “Monsieur,” heir to the French throne, is particularly significant, since it bears on private just as much as public matters. In it, it is to be hoped that the queen’s intimate voice will be heard, one which is not mediated by officials, translators and scribes. That the queen was greatly attached to these letters is beyond doubt, and is best shown by her careful correction and selection of letters to Anjou copied in other hands.¹ The letters edited below are not the texts of the letters as received by Anjou, but copies retained in England, part of the archive of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the queen’s first minister, now at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire: Anjou’s copies of Elizabeth’s letters do not seem to have survived.² The texts of the letters are framed within a short outline of the progress of the protracted and complicated negotiations for a marriage between Elizabeth and Anjou that took place intermittently between 1578 and 1584.