Catherine de’ Medici, the portly and pudgy-faced Queen Mother of France, once wrote to Elizabeth I of England that it would surely be easy for them to meet, since a journey of a mere three hours could bring them together. She was, or at least appeared to be, an enthusiastic advocate for that most rare of early modern royal events, a face-to-face conference between monarchs. And, in certain respects, the two women had much in common, from difficult childhoods and an unlikely rise to power to the absolute determination to hold on to what they had achieved.
They were, for the second half of the 16th century, the visible faces of female rule in Europe. Yet the fraught relationship between Elizabeth and her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots is still viewed as one of the key aspects of her reign, its drama and tragic outcome emphasized in a recent exhibition at the British Library. Surely nothing else in Elizabeth’s 45 years of rule could come close to replacing the interest of this rivalry? The historian Estelle Paranque begs to differ. In a story written with verve and passion, she shows us the other woman in Elizabeth’s life.
