One Virgin Replaces Another

Rating: 9/10 (21 August 1999)

`She had such power over men's hearts,' a young Elizabeth I tells her remaining true adviser, Sir Francis Walsingham, nodding toward a statue of the Virgin Mary at whose feet she kneels, and wondering aloud why her own heart has ceased to be touched. Though it is late in the movie `Elizabeth' with Cate Blanchett in the title role, it is early in what would be the monarch's long reign to come.
`They have found nothing to replace her,' Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush) replies, nothing to connect their worldly hopes to the sphere of the divine since the English Reformation ended Catholicism as the dominant faith in the realm. Despite the success of a bloody Catholic reaction under Elizabeth's half-sister and predecessor as monarch, Mary Tudor, with hundreds of Protestants burned at the stake, Elizabeth in conscience will sever the whole Church of England from papal authority yet again. But what will take its place, not in canon or conscience, but in the depths of men's hearts?
It is now when Elizabeth realizes it must be she. `I have become a virgin,' she announces not long after. She paints her face white and embarks on her long career as the icon an appreciative history would come to call the Virgin Queen.
The movie, taking many liberties from the true text of history, chronicles Elizabeth's passage from the uncrowned, gamboling romantic who encouraged the repeated embraces of Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes), to the severe, chaste monarch revered eternally by English people. During this period in her mid- to late twenties she authorizes much spillage of blood as she gathers authority to her and deals mercilessly with those who would dispute it. The dirty work is Walsingham's; the onus is hers.
When it is done, she knows she will never marry for geopolitics, as at first she was pressed to do. More sadly, nor will she do so for love, for her heart is dead, ground away in the forward lurch of history. She will instead sit resignedly and heroically, proxy in heaven for the hearts of her folk.