A Renaissance Woman

This book puts one in mind of Macaulay on Horace Walpole, that maniacal collector of trifles: “Having indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions, he returned to more important pursuits, to researches after Queen Mary’s comb, Wolsey’s red hat, the pipe’ which Van Tromp smoked during his last sea fight, and the spur which King William struck into the flank of Sorrel.”

Paul Johnson does not scant political or economic essentials, indeed he handles them with aplomb. But one has the feeling, all along, that his heart lies in the intriguing catalogues of minutiae about Elizabeth the Great which he seems to have been compiling since the year one: her clothes (usually white or black and white), her houses and castles (dozens), her portraiture (carefully regulated, cm grounds that her image was an appurtenance of sovereignty to be carefully shaped), her dancing and music and scholarship (impressive). We are not told of the Queen’s toilet habits: but we are told that her constant courtly “progresses” arose, in part, from considerations of sanitation; for as her entourage moved through the land the fields were stripped of food and the streams filled with sewage.

EY

About the Author

Edwin M. Yoder Jr.

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This book puts one in mind of Macaulay on Horace Walpole, that maniacal collector of trifles: “Having indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions, he returned to more important pursuits, to researches after Queen Mary’s comb, Wolsey’s red hat, the pipe’ which Van Tromp smoked during his last sea fight, and the spur which King William struck into the flank of Sorrel.”

Paul Johnson does not scant political or economic essentials, indeed he handles them with aplomb. But one has the feeling, all along, that his heart lies in the intriguing catalogues of minutiae about Elizabeth the Great which he seems to have been compiling since the year one: her clothes (usually white or black and white), her houses and castles (dozens), her portraiture (carefully regulated, cm grounds that her image was an appurtenance of sovereignty to be carefully shaped), her dancing and music and scholarship (impressive). We are not told of the Queen’s toilet habits: but we are told that her constant courtly “progresses” arose, in part, from considerations of sanitation; for as her entourage moved through the land the fields were stripped of food and the streams filled with sewage.