Elizabeth: The Golden Age

‘The enterprise of England’

ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE

Cert. 12A

Director: Shekhar Kapur

In itself, this is not a great film. It is meant to relate the goings on in the years of the reign of Elizabeth I from 1586-88, covering such matters as the Catholic Babbington Plot, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the deliverance from the Spanish Armada.

But the history is so mangled and the focus so much on costumes, wigs and jogs that it can only be assessed in terms of either an exploration of human psychology or a contemporary tract. Psychologically it gives a picture of the loneliness, vulnerability and political demands upon the Virgin Queen which ever seem to clip her adventurous wings. The crisis with the Armada seems to provide her finally with an outlet for her suppressed spirit of courage. As a comment on contemporary society, it portrays religion (historically Catholicism, for today hard-line Islam?) as presenting an immense threat to freedom of thought and conscience which has to be faced-down by brave-hearted lovers of liberty. In the film, Protestantism is remoulded and stands for a thinly disguised humanistic secularism. ‘Defend your freedom against repressive religion’ is probably the film’s main message. As evangelicals who treasure a relationship with God rather than ‘religion’ we can half agree. Though, of course, the world rejects us as ‘religious’ too.

Counter Reformation

The movie has already upset Catholic historians. But whether caricatured or not, the nature of the forces of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation has to be acknowledged. The award-winning historian Derek Wilson has recently written (in his book Sir Francis Walsingham: a courtier in an age of terror, Constable): ‘The failure to eradicate by torture, fire and military might the beliefs of Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists and fringe sectaries had led governments to hope that some theological accommodation could be made but successive popes had set their faces against compromise and when the final session of [the Council of] Trent ended in December 1563 every major tenet of Protestant belief had been vehemently rejected. To cheers and applause from the assembled bishops and cardinals...the pope closed the final session with the ringing cry, “Anathema to all heretics! Anathema! Anathema!” There was to be no truce, no peace treaty.’ That spirit certainly comes across in the film.