‘Rome condemns Queen Elizabeth again – this time over film of her reign’, says The Times headline today. If only…
The story is altogether less exciting. Franco Cardini, who holds the chair of medieval history at Florence University and once taught at the Lateran University, has said that the new film, ‘Elizabeth: the Golden Age’, ‘profoundly and perversely falsifies history’ and is part of a “concerted attack on Catholicism” by atheists and “apocalyptic Christians”. I haven’t seen the film, but that sounds about right to me. Any account of those years that depicts Elizabeth as the good guy and Philip as the bad guy is comic-book history. What happened in the middle of the 16th century was that to satisfy his ‘beastly lust’ (William Cobbett) Henry VIII imported a foreign religion and nationalised the Church. His bastard daughter Elizabeth continued this work, persecuting the old religion — the religion that had been England’s for a thousand years — and turning what until then had been known (by me at any rate) as Mary’s Dowry into a land of thieves, pirates and bankers.
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