In an interview on Elizabeth I

Tell me about your first choice, Elizabeth I: The Exhibition Catalogue, edited by David Starkey and Susan Doran.

I chose this one because it is a catalogue of an excellent exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in 2003. That was one of a whole lot of events and publications for the 400-year anniversary of Elizabeth’s death in 1603. This volume is particularly interesting because it is a really rich, full, broad catalogue where they tried to present some unusual things that people haven’t seen before, because, of course, Elizabeth I is so familiar to us. 

There were lots of really unusual things like a locket ring that belonged to Elizabeth which contains two pictures. It has a jewel on the front that opens up and you see one picture of Elizabeth in profile and another which appears to be her mother Anne Boleyn. And that’s very interesting because Elizabeth never publicly mentioned or acknowledged her mother, for obvious reasons because she had been beheaded for adultery and incest by Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII. The ring suggests that in private she did like to maintain a memory of her mother. 

There were also portraits of Elizabeth in the exhibition that hadn’t been widely seen before, that might have hung in civic buildings halls and even people’s homes. And there were coins, because of course Elizabeth’s subjects would have mainly seen her portrait on coins. There were items from wrecks of Armada ships, such as a wonderful toothpick in the shape of a dolphin; so it gave us a much fuller, richer sense of Elizabethan England than people had had before. It wasn’t just about Elizabeth and her court but there was a great sense of the domestic life of Elizabethan England as well.