An analysis of more than 500 missives found that Elizabeth’s advisers crafted and even intensified the expression of emotion in her messages to such figures as Mary, Queen of Scots, and James VI of Scotland

Clodagh Murphy, The Conversation

September 28, 2026 7:45 a.m.

On February 10, 1586, Elizabeth I wrote one of her most famous letters: a furious rebuke to her favorite, Robert Dudley, First Earl of Leicester. The Tudor queen sharply reprimanded Leicester for disobeying her.

“How contemptuously we conceive ourself to have been used by you,” Elizabeth raged. “We could never have imagined had we not seen it fall out in experience that a man raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favored by us above any other subject of this land would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment.” She demanded that Leicester obey her directions and issued a stark warning: “Fail you not, as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.”

The queen’s fury jumps off the page. Yet the only surviving copy of this letter is written in the hand of a secretary: Francis Mylles, servant to Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Francis Walsingham. Were Mylles and Walsingham involved in writing this apparently personal royal communication?

Without the original copy of this letter, we cannot say for certain. However, through careful analysis of more than 500 of Elizabeth’s other letters, I have discovered that the expression of emotion in her correspondence was often carefully constructed by her secretaries.

Around 3,000 of Elizabeth’s letters survive, the overwhelming majority of which were penned by scribes. These so-called “scribal letters” have been severely neglected by historians, with priority given to those written in Elizabeth’s own hand.

Work on Elizabeth’s letters has focused on identifying the English queen’s “voice” within them. Yet they were often the products of collaboration between Elizabeth and her secretariat.

Disentangling these collaborations and recovering the contributions of Elizabeth’s secretaries was the focus of my PhD research, part of the Feathers project led by Nadine Akkerman, a scholar of early modern literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Feathers sought to distinguish between authorial and scribal voices in collaboratively produced manuscripts from the early modern period (from around 1500 to 1800).

Finding Elizabeth’s voice

How can we distinguish between Elizabeth’s voice and those of her secretaries? It might be assumed that the more personal elements of her letters, including the expression of emotion, can be safely attributed to the monarch herself.

This is logical enough: Daring to communicate or presume to know the queen’s feelings without her prior instruction would have been bold indeed. Additionally, early modern secretaries were expected to employ formal and impassive language and exert a tempering influence, moderating emotion to ensure the goodwill of the addressee.

However, as I dug into the archival material, a more complicated reality emerged. Elizabeth’s letters survive in a dizzying array of versions, including drafts, sent letters and copies. Through the reassembly of these different manuscripts, painstaking handwriting analysis and close textual comparison, I found evidence that the expression of emotion in Elizabeth’s letters was carefully crafted by her secretaries.

One example is a letter from Elizabeth to George Talbot, Sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, written in May 1584. At the time, Shrewsbury was the custodian of Mary, Queen of Scots, claimant to the English throne and a thorn in Elizabeth’s side. Elizabeth would have expected Shrewsbury to share the missive with his royal prisoner.

In the letter, Elizabeth strongly rebukes Mary. Elizabeth writes that Mary “shall never live to see those days that the crown of England shall depend upon the crown of Scotland.” She also criticizes Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, claiming that he was “ill counseled when at the first entry into his government the same was seasoned with blood” (a reference to the 1581 execution of his regent James Douglas, Fourth Earl of Morton).

Identifying the draft of this letter, I discovered that it was substantially edited by Walsingham, whose handwritten revisions remain on the manuscript.

Walsingham’s edits intensify, rather than temper, Elizabeth’s criticisms of Mary and James. The vocabulary of these revisions bears significant overlap with the phrasing of the secretary’s own writings. Evidently, it is Walsingham’s voice, not Elizabeth’s, that speaks in this letter—and possibly his emotion that spills out of it.

In an October 1584 letter written to another one of Mary’s custodians, Ralph Sadler—and also intended for the Scottish queen’s eyes—Elizabeth again criticizes her cousin but is now more conciliatory. She describes the “liking we had for a time” of Mary’s friendship and raises the potential for “a thorough reconciliation.”

Historians have generally assumed that Elizabeth composed this letter; however, my recovery of a hitherto unnoticed draft—which is littered with Walsingham’s scribbled emendations—revealed that these expressions of goodwill were his additions.

I argue that Walsingham’s alterations to both letters were intended to manipulate Mary’s impression of her relationship with Elizabeth and move her to act in English interests.

By crafting an “angry” Elizabeth in the letter to Shrewsbury, Walsingham hoped to show Mary that refusing to cooperate with the English government would get her nowhere. By constructing a “nostalgic” Elizabeth in the letter to Sadler, he sought to convince Mary that the English queen’s favor could be regained in the hope of dissuading the former from plotting against the latter.

That Walsingham crafted and even intensified the expression of emotion in Elizabeth’s letters is remarkable and sheds important new light on this iconic monarch. It provides an important corrective, for example, to Elizabeth’s reputation for emotional outburst.

Many anecdotes of Elizabeth’s short temper survive, and there is an inherited idea from the early modern period that these outbursts were evidence of female irrationality. That the expression of anger in some of Elizabeth’s letters was crafted by her male secretaries reveals that, far from being overly emotional or irrational, the queen strategically deployed emotion to achieve particular political goals.

She did so, crucially, through collaboration with secretaries such as Walsingham, who evidently had a far greater and more creative hand in constructing her letters than has been realized.

What does this mean for Elizabeth’s voice? As I unpicked these collaborations with her secretaries, I began to see that the voice we encounter in her letters is a carefully—and collaboratively—constructed rhetorical performance.

Rather than search for Elizabeth’s authentic voice, we might instead appreciate her political savvy and willingness to incorporate the suggestions of her advisers—qualities of a strong monarch indeed.

This article is republished from the Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Clodagh Murphy is an early modernist specializing in manuscript culture, authorship and epistolary culture. She completed her PhD at Leiden University, exploring the collaborative production of Elizabeth I’s English scribal letters.