John Watkins. Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Extract

Semper eadem—always the same—was Elizabeth I's motto, but the accounts and appropriations of her legacy have been anything but. In the century after her death, as John Watkins' study shows, Elizabeth received mostly good press, but she was praised for different reasons by different people, and to greatly varying political ends. Jacobean economists linked James and Elizabeth as saviors of the English nation against Catholic threat. Parliamentarians in the 1630s and 1640s (and Whig historians thereafter) praised an Elizabeth whose supposedly moderate, constitutionalist government contrasted with the tyrannical innovations of the Stuarts; Royalists, by contrast, praised her as a defender of royal prerogative. Elizabeth made an uncomfortable model for revolutionaries, and her famous memory was invoked less during the Interregnum than before or after; but Restoration writers such as Clarendon and William Cavendish advocated a return to Elizabethan government, which Clarendon understood as a via media between tyranny and excessive popular concessions, but which Cavendish frankly praised as a successful despotism. After the Glorious Revolution, the power of the monarchy had become too limited for Elizabethan government to serve as a practical political model of any kind; but popular interest in Elizabeth flourished in “secret histories” which purported to reveal the passions of her private life, a genre which appealed to the public appetite for scandal in high places, and which endures to this day.