Hampton Court Palace Kitchens, Musicians

If anyone stubles on this via google, I am trying to remind myself in this post to try and track down some of the photos I took of the HCP living history exhibit in the Tudor Kitchens. One of the most awesome parts of this was that the guys that were dressed up in real Tudor threads and demonstrating delicious looking authentic recipes talked with me for about three hours after their rather grueling shift dealing with other ignorant questions from tourists like myself.

But one of the gentleman that I ran into was the soul other human being that I have run into in my life that thinks Elizabeth I was a total disaster of a monarch and witch of a person. The only thing about her that keeps her from having the tyrannical reputation of her father (ok because he was a man) and her sister (not ok because she was no) is that history is written by the winners, and if you are the absolute monarch for a long enough time during a relatively stable period of English history, you have a fairly good name going for yourself. Unless you are Charles I, in the which case, ouch.

But very few other monarchs who reigned as long as Elizabeth I did have similarly diferent reputations. Even her father bluff Hal everyone knew was a disaster but he was clearly in charge so he earned some good press for himself even if it was bought and paid for. You didn't cross Elizabeth. She said that she wasn't going to make windows into men's souls, but that is because in her opinion if you were Catholic you didn't even deserve a window and had to live in what was called a 'priest hole' or a small hovel behind false Tudor panneling.

Her father also spent the entire treasury entertaining the royal court lavishly, and Elizabeth developed the very shrewd idea of being continually on 'Progress' which means that your terrified host basically bankrupts himsef to make sure you have a very good stay. And add to that if you are Catholic hide the crucifixes because she is also personally (she was too cheap not to do it herself) spying on you so she can more readily apply usurous extortion rates for your expensive scruples.

Her sister Mary being one clear example of the fact that if you aren't in charge for long enough you aren't in charge at all (ex all American one term presidents), and eventually people will wipe you off the map altogether.