Love‐making and Diplomacy: Elizabeth I and the Anjou Marriage Negotiations, c.1578–1582

Abstract

The marriage negotiations between Elizabeth and Francis, duke of Anjou, have provided an important lens for exploring the nature of the Elizabethan polity. Conyers Read argued that Elizabeth deliberately exploited courtship rituals to gain ascendancy over ministers and foreign princes. Wallace MacCaffrey and Susan Doran argued that Elizabeth's commitment to the match was genuine, but that she was prevented from concluding the match because she lacked conciliar support. This article re‐examines these arguments in the light of recent research on the language of courtship and archival study into the nature of the political agenda and crown‐council relations. It suggests that English interest in the negotiations evolved from growing anxiety about the unresolved succession and that the relationship between Elizabeth and her councillors, especially over her marriage, was more nuanced than has been conventionally thought. Courtship rituals were adopted to express relationships between Elizabeth and her courtiers, but these reflected a revival of chivalric court culture and were not adopted as forms of political action. The article suggests that the twists and turns of the negotiations have to be seen in the context of the active role that Elizabeth took in policy‐making, the personal and political issues the marriage raised and Elizabeth's own conception of how effectively an alternative (political) resolution would work. Elizabeth was shrewd enough to see that rules framed for chivalrous love‐making might very aptly be applied to diplomatic purposes, and very probably for that reason she always liked to mingle an element of love‐making in her diplomacy.