ABSTRACT
Historians and literary critics have caught glimpses of Elizabeth I’s private feelings toward her family: she purportedly carried a girdle book featuring her brother Edward VI’s death-bed prayer, and regarding her father Henry VIII, her version of a devotional text by Marguerite de Navarre displays mistranslations and gender-reversed pronouns that some, writing from this side of the age of analysis, would call simply, ‘suggestive’.1 If Elizabeth’s private feelings toward her father were complicated and conflicted, her public association with Henry VIII was usually far clearer, more affirming. During her royal progress through London on the eve of her coronation (her first great occasion for political theatre), she was repeatedly associated with Henry, as in the opening tableau’s multi-story, Tree-of-Jesse-like Tudor genealogy. From the red and white roses of the first stage, ‘two branches gathered into one, which were directed upward to the second stage or degree wherein was placed one representing the valiant and noble prince King Henry the eighth … and … the right worthy Lady Queen Anne, … and two tables surmounting their heads wherein were written their names and titles’.2 Richard Mulcaster, likely the author of the printed account of the progress The Quenes majesties passage (1559) reinforced such moments of royal association by including late in the narrative a rare moment of Elizabeth’s interaction with the London crowd:
The passage emphasizes the most politically important aspect of Henry’s and Elizabeth’s relationship – the royal blood inheritance from Tudor father to daughter. Elizabeth was Henry’s ‘natural child’. And if it was natural for her to take great joy in her father’s name, the passage also promises that the new queen will resemble her father not only in consanguinity but also in monarchical action and achievement.
