Who wrote Elizabeth I's most scathing letters? (smithsonianmag.com)
29 points by benbreen 4 hours ago
K0balt 3 hours ago
Back in the day when a strongly worded letter actually carried some weight….
advisedwang 3 hours ago
I suspect the author having the authority to execute people on a whim may have contributed somewhat
K0balt 2 hours ago
I always try to insinuate this possibility in mine, but it doesn’t seem to work the same.
twic an hour ago
dsjoerg 4 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 3 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 3 hours 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.)