over the weekend I got Elizabeth out .. a movie with cate blanchet and geoffrey rush..
cate blanchet put in a performance I thought. not an easy character to play.. and structurally the movie is well, good...
in fact Elizabeth is quite an extraordinary character. a whole ‘age’ is named after her. very interesting times. (elizabethan times maybe said to continue in the fantasy of some.)
but was/is it all actually as rosy as the cheeks of cate blanchet??
i think not.
daughter of henry VIII. and anne boleyn. kinda harsh childhood.( henry had anne’s head off when Elizabeth was 2 .) it was a thing for which her father developed a penchant.)
she secured an education of sorts (at the time a good one for an english girl), was appointed to the throne at the age of 25 after an upbringing on court intrigue.
England was in a position of extreme luck.. start of the more enlightened age of the industrial revolution…many of the developments started in England....the rest of europe exhausted by war (100 year war).. .. the renaissance blooming.. in Elizabethan England..
Protestantism seems to have delivered a flowering of culture sheltered from the stifling religiosity from rome and its proxies.…
.. it was a period of change…rapid progress intense intellectual activity in so many fields..
as the movie portrays .. john dee, the occultist, indicates that it was a time for one empire to take off..it was to be either the Spanish or the English..
well.. with the benefit of hindsight we know what happened.
one of the more remarkable events of her time was the defeat of the Spanish 'amarda'. this is a pivotal point in the history of international relations.
12 july 1588 a combination of bad Spanish strategy, miscalculation had the Spanish fleet destroyed. a huge blow to the trumped up pomp of the spaniards fresh from a glut of new murders and pillage in south America.(subsequent to the inquisition.) they also probably got more fight than they were used to after the pathetic efforts of the moors and the asymmetrically armed incas. etc. ( it could be something that started the urban rumours of cursed spanish gold.. as the fleet was bought with gold i suspect... from abroad.....)
what the movie doesn’t mention is the brutality of the scorched earth policy of elizabeth’s ‘protestant’ armies in ireland.. the confiscation and appropriation of the entire country from its people.... (this is the point I want to make.) elizabeth 1 seems to have had a more than mild race hatred for the irish. (she even murdered mary queen of scotts . it does come out though melodramatically in the movie.)
still…. out of sight .. out of mind. as they say. but ..its actually very much alive in the minds of people with an irish background ..
speaking from experience (humbly I hasten to add) …of the intimations passed down in a family.. through the generations.. the blighter who mostly gets the finger pointed at him is Cromwell rather than elizabeth.. ….
it was cromwell’s armies in the mid 17th century (half a century after the end of elizabeth’s reign) that were responsible for the murder of thousands of irish civilians .. even some 50000 sold into slavery in burma and Barbados.. (check the record if you don’t believe me.)
Elizabeth tudor wasn’t directly responsible for cromwells psychopathy but it was in her time that the policy encouraging the like was launched. it was elizabeth tudor's british crown that started with a scorched earth policy in ireland.
these were policies that were set to starve a million odd to death and destroy the prospects of millions more.. as the next 200 years unrolled.
and she was directly responsible for starting it.
people are reported to say ‘malacht cromail ort’ ..’the curse of Cromwell on you’ but even then it maybe not just a reference to oliver but to the earlier Cromwell Thomas 1485-1540 an uncle of oliver…. the architect of the English reformation. (for whom henry the 8th was arguably just a front.)
they’re old wounds .. septic basically. gangrenous.. on the body politic (a phrase Elizabeth used)
shekur kapur , the director of the movie, argues that the movie portrays Elizabeth against fanatical Spanish intolerance.. but it is not that simple.. he is way out of touch with what was really going on .. way out of his depth.
still truth never sold dvds .. probably never will. kapur obviously has no understanding of the wounds Elizabeth tudor and her father opened and was probably chosen for the job on account of his qualification. its not just about eye candy and pretty costumes. this is spreading misinformation and ignorance about the root of a certain leviathan…. and should be snubbed heartily (as it has been in reviews and the boxoffice.)
shekur if you’re reading this, maybe he should try bollywood mate. but I guess that if you could get a gig there, you wouldn’t have gone to universal pictures.
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