London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks.
Story time. History time.
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.
Or thereabouts.
Three o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, September 7th, 1533.
We’re beside the Thames at Greenwich.
And something has gone wrong.
A baby has been born.
Healthy baby.
Royal baby.
Wrong baby.
It’s a girl.
Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn had been so confident they were going to get a boy that the announcement had already been prepared.
A prince had been born.
Except he hadn’t.
So somebody had to add an S.
Prince became princess.
One letter.
One enormous disappointment.
And one of the great accidents of English history.
Because the unwanted little girl born at Greenwich 493 years ago today was Elizabeth.
Elizabeth I.
And here’s the first Well-I-never.
She was born between three and four o’clock in the afternoon.
We know almost to the hour.
And the place where it happened?
Gone.
Greenwich Palace.
The great Tudor palace beside the Thames.
Henry VIII had been born there as well.
Today you’ve got the magnificent Old Royal Naval College on and around the site. Wren. Hawksmoor. Domes. Colonnades. Painted Hall.
But underneath all that grandeur is another Greenwich.
Tudor Greenwich.
And underneath Tudor Greenwich, linguistically speaking, there’s something older still.
So, word of the day.
Greenwich.
A name that immediately separates Londoners from everybody else.
Green-witch?
No.
Gren-itch.
And the old name takes us back to Anglo-Saxon England.
Grēne wīc. Gray-nuh-weetch
Green settlement. Green trading place. Green harbour.
And that little word weetch wīc has travelled a very long way. It’s related to Latin Wee-koos vicus, a settlement or quarter.
Which means every time you say Greenwich you’re carrying a tiny piece of the Roman world around in your mouth.
Well, I never number one.
Anyway.
Back to the maternity ward.
Except there wasn’t one.
Greenwich Palace, September 7th, 1533.
Henry wanted a boy for reasons that were considerably more serious than wanting somebody to take to football.
He had broken with Katherine of Aragon.
Married Anne Boleyn.
Turned England upside down.
Helped set in motion a religious and constitutional revolution.
And after all that…
Another daughter.
The Elizabethan historian Patrick Collinson puts it with admirable economy.
Elizabeth was a bitter disappointment.
Henry had not gone through all of that just to acquire another girl.
Three days later the baby was baptised at Greenwich.
Thomas Cranmer was her godfather.
And Elizabeth was proclaimed the high and mighty Princess of England.
Heiress presumptive.
Not bad for three days old.
But keep watching.
Because if there is one thing you learn very quickly from Elizabeth’s childhood, it’s this:
Do not get too comfortable.
She’s a princess.
Then she isn’t.
She’s legitimate.
Then she isn’t.
She’s in the succession.
Then she isn’t.
Her mother is Queen of England.
Then her mother is dead.
Anne Boleyn was executed when Elizabeth was two years and eight months old.
And here’s a lovely demolition job by Patrick Collinson.
You know that dramatic story of Anne, just before her arrest, holding little Elizabeth up to Henry in one last desperate appeal?
Almost certainly nonsense.
Elizabeth wasn’t even there.
She was at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire when Anne was arrested at Greenwich.
History loves a good scene.
Sometimes rather more than history loves what actually happened.
And Elizabeth’s childhood just gets stranger.
At four she attends the christening of her new half-brother Edward.
She carries the christening robe.
Except she’s so little that while she’s carrying the robe…
somebody has to carry her.
There’s your picture.
Tiny Elizabeth.
Being carried.
Carrying the robe.
For the baby boy who has just pushed her another notch away from the throne.
And then comes the education.
And goodness, what an education.
Latin.
French.
Italian.
Greek.
Cicero.
Livy.
Isocrates.
The New Testament in Greek.
Music.
The spinet.
The lute.
At eleven she produced a translation as a New Year’s gift.
At twelve she was translating Katherine Parr’s writings into Latin, French and Italian.
At twelve I think I was still struggling with long division.
Elizabeth was essentially running a small Renaissance translation bureau.
And she never really stopped.
In her sixties she was still translating Bo-ee-thee-us Boethius, Horace and Plutarch.
But scholarship wasn’t the most important thing she learned.
She learned survival.
That was the real subject.
Survival Studies.
Advanced level.
And London was where she sat the final examination.
March 1554.
Her half-sister Mary is queen.
Wyatt’s rebellion has failed.
Elizabeth is suspected.
And on March 18th she’s put aboard a barge and taken down the Thames.
Destination?
Think about that journey.
Because Elizabeth certainly knew what the Tower meant.
Her mother had been imprisoned there.
Her mother had been tried there.
Her mother had walked from there to the scaffold.
And now the daughter arrives.
Patrick Collinson gives us the chilling detail.
Elizabeth was lodged in the very same royal apartments from which Anne Boleyn had gone out to her trial and execution.
She was twenty years old.
Twenty.
There were powerful people who wanted her dead.
And this, I think, is one of the keys to Elizabeth.
She learned very young that one badly chosen sentence could kill you.
So she became extraordinarily good at not quite saying things.
At waiting.
At watching.
At giving people enough but not too much.
At leaving doors open.
At surviving until tomorrow.
Four years later…
everything changes.
Mary dies.
Elizabeth becomes queen.
And London goes mad for her.
On November 23rd, 1558, she rides towards the capital accompanied by more than a thousand lords, ladies and gentlemen.
Then comes one of the great pieces of London theatre.
The coronation procession.
January 1559.
Elizabeth comes through the City from the Tower towards Westminster.
And London becomes a stage.
Literally.
Pageants.
Children speaking verses.
Music.
Crowds.
Noise.
Symbolism everywhere.
At one pageant there’s a figure representing Time.
And Elizabeth cries out:
“Time hath brought me hither.”
What a line.
Time certainly had.
Greenwich baby.
Motherless toddler.
Illegitimate princess.
Potential traitor.
Tower prisoner.
Queen.
Twenty-five years old.
And now London is roaring.
But here’s the Elizabeth I sometimes prefer to Gloriana.
The mischievous one.
The difficult one.
The funny one.
The woman rather than the portrait.
She was not a morning person.
There’s something reassuring about that.
And getting Queen Elizabeth ready apparently took about two hours.
Two hours to put her together.
And about two hours to take her apart again at night.
The Tudor Formula One pit stop.
Ruff.
Pearls.
Sleeves.
Jewels.
Hair.
More pearls.
More jewels.
Somebody find the crown.
She could be wonderfully cheeky.
When Leicester needed to lose weight, Elizabeth prescribed him a special diet.
On feast days he could have the shoulder of a wren for dinner.
And the leg of the same wren for supper.
His brother Warwick was fatter.
So Elizabeth suggested taking the leg away altogether.
WeightWatchers, Tudor division.
Another time a Scottish ambassador, James Melville, caught her playing the virginals.
Elizabeth stopped.
Pretended to slap him.
And explained that she didn’t normally play in front of men.
She played when she was alone to drive away melancholy.
And there’s something suddenly rather touching there.
Because beneath the ruffs and jewels and theatricality there was loneliness.
She never married.
She never had children.
And for decades practically everybody with a diplomatic passport tried to marry her to somebody.
Philip of Spain.
Erik of Sweden.
Archdukes.
French princes.
Parliament kept asking.
Foreign ambassadors kept asking.
Her councillors kept asking.
Elizabeth turned not getting married into one of the longest-running cliffhangers in European history.
And, brilliantly, she weaponised it.
Maybe I’ll marry your prince.
Maybe I won’t.
Perhaps I’m interested.
Perhaps I’m not.
Do keep negotiating.
Do keep sending presents.
And then there was Robert Dudley.
The great favourite.
The great might-have-been.
And there was the Duke of Anjou.
Her “frog”.
Yes.
Elizabeth I called one of her French suitors her frog.
Diplomacy used to be much more fun.
And then, of course, 1588.
The Armada.
Here we have to be careful because the schoolbook Elizabeth can take over.
The white horse.
The armour.
Tilbury.
“I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman…”
Magnificent.
But there’s a small correction.
By the time Elizabeth rode out among the troops at Tilbury on August 8th, the immediate danger from the Armada had largely passed.
The Spanish fleet had already been driven up the Channel and away.
Doesn’t make the moment unimportant.
Far from it.
Because Elizabeth understood something enormously important about monarchy.
You have to be seen.
You have to make the picture.
And boy, did she make pictures.
Which brings us back to Greenwich.
Because today, in the Queen’s House at Greenwich, just a few minutes’ walk from where Elizabeth was born, hangs one of the most famous images of monarchy ever made.
The Armada Portrait.
There she is.
Pearls everywhere.
Hand on the globe.
The Armada being smashed in the background.
Elizabeth not merely as a woman.
Elizabeth as an idea.
England.
Power.
Sea power.
Providence.
Victory.
And eternal youth.
Because Elizabeth became increasingly determined that while she might age, her image absolutely would not.
The woman became the icon.
And there’s something else about September 7th.
A strange echo.
Because September 7th is another enormous date in London history.
September 7th, 1940.
Black Saturday.
The day the Blitz began.
Hundreds of German bombers came over London.
The docks and the East End were hammered.
Warehouses burned.
Homes burned.
The Thames reflected an enormous red glow.
Four hundred and thirty Londoners were killed.
Sixteen hundred were injured.
And London was about to endure 57 consecutive nights of bombing.
Now, I’m not going to turn Elizabeth into some sort of patron saint of the Blitz.
That would be laying it on with a trowel.
But there is an echo.
Three and a half centuries earlier, another invasion threatened England.
And Elizabeth rode out to Tilbury.
The body of a weak and feeble woman, she said.
But the heart and stomach of a king.
And there’s another part of that speech that perhaps matters even more here.
She told them that her greatest strength and safeguard lay in the loyal hearts and goodwill of her people.
Different enemy.
Different England.
Different London.
Different war.
But something recognisable there.
Defiance.
Fortitude.
You’ll have to come through us.
September 7th, 1533.
September 7th, 1940.
The birth of Elizabeth.
The beginning of the Blitz.
Quite a day in the London calendar.
And perhaps that’s why it’s worth going back today to the beginning.
Before Gloriana.
Before the Virgin Queen.
Before Shakespeare.
Before Raleigh.
Before Drake.
Before the Armada.
Before the portraits.
Before the ruffs.
Back to Greenwich.
Sunday afternoon.
September 7th, 1533.
Between three and four o’clock.
A woman has just given birth.
People are waiting for news.
Boy or girl?
Boy, surely.
It has to be a boy.
Henry VIII has overturned heaven and earth for a boy.
And then comes the answer.
Girl.
Disappointment.
The announcement has to be altered.
Add the S.
Prince.
Princess.
And there she is.
Elizabeth.
The palace she was born in has disappeared.
The dynasty disappeared.
The world she knew disappeared.
But walk through London and she’s everywhere.
Greenwich.
The Tower.
Whitehall.
St James’s.
Westminster Abbey.
Richmond.
London contains her life.
And there’s one final London twist.
When Elizabeth died at Richmond Palace in March 1603, she was nearly seventy, the first English sovereign to reach that age.
She was buried at Westminster Abbey.
And who lies with her?
Mary.
The half-sister who had imprisoned her in the Tower.
The two daughters of Henry VIII.
Catholic Mary.
Protestant Elizabeth.
Rivals.
Queens.
Half-sisters.
Together at Westminster.
History has a sense of humour.
So happy birthday, Elizabeth.
Four hundred and ninety-three today.
The girl they didn’t want.
The princess who became illegitimate.
The prisoner who became queen.
The woman who turned herself into an icon.
And it all began beside the Thames at Greenwich.
With an S.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
Streets Ahead.
See you tomorrow.