GlowingAtDawn

Reading about how the Victorians viewed Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth (her literal daughter) is almost like having whiplash 😭 they’ll be like “sweet innocent angel 😍🥰” when it comes to Anne and when you read about Elizabeth it’s all of a sudden “ugly barren jealous monster 😒🤬🤢” all bc they liked MQOS 😭

I’m no expert on the Victorians but generally their views on these three women seem to hold up a mirror to their society at large. The Victorians relished stories of tragic victims and found distasteful (and even dangerous) women who broke the status quo. Anne and Mary Stuart’s more ambitious sides are ignored in favour of their respective tragedies while Elizabeth is villainised because she had the audacity of not only ruling in a masculine way and consciously deciding to not marry and have children - but being successful at it. In the eyes of mainstream Victorian society (including Victoria herself) she didn’t get her deserved comeuppance. She rejected the traditional role of femininity and got away with it.

Guaranteed if she had been executed under Mary I for example, or assassinated early in her reign, she’d be as belovedly victimised as the likes of Anne, MQOS, and Lady Jane Grey. In the same vein, if she had gotten married and had children after all, I think her Victorian legacy would have been much more positive, perhaps with Victoria even drawing comparisons between them. I don’t think this is me being overly harsh on the victorians either - look at how they treated their suffragettes, who were also women who dared to broke the mould.

In a strange oxymoron, Elizabeth’s reign was still glorified during the Victorian age, but only because its credit was given instead to Elizabeth’s male councillors - namely Cecil (ironically one of the male councillors who was also disproportionately slated? You guess it - Robert). Lo and behold, Elizabethan historiography became more positive about the Queen herself when Elizabeth II came to the throne.

Says more about the changing nature of society than Elizabeth herself.