‘Ma plume vous pourra exprimer’: Elizabeth’s French Correspondence

Abstract

Queen Elizabeth wrote more letters in French than in any other foreign language and for this reason alone, her French correspondence deserves to be more widely read. Judging by the number of letters in French in London, Guildhall Library, MS 1752, a letter-book dated 1595–99, contemporaries took them as seriously as they did her letters in Latin and English, and a provisional estimate suggests the existence of around five hundred items of this kind. Like Latin, French was a diplomatic lingua franca and was used just as frequently. If one discounts letters to Mary, Queen of Scots, the French correspondence concerns essentially two main groups of addressees: those in France and those in the Low Countries. A smaller number of letters were also addressed to a handful of Italian, German and Portuguese rulers. The letters to Queen Mary prove that French was not only a language reserved for diplomatic exchanges but was also favoured whenever sensitive decisions bearing directly on who was to rule the kingdom needed to be discussed. The Queen started writing in French at a young age and never stopped. More significantly still, it was in this language that she recorded her impressions of events that she deemed of particular note, as in her letter to Mary, Queen of Scots, dated 24 February 1567, on the subject of Lord Darnley’s murder (Elizabeth I, 2003, pp. 126–7). The present study is based on a relatively small sample of letters in French: those included in the Chicago edition of Elizabeth’s collected works, and some unchartered and unedited letters kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter BnF) and in the Guildhall letter-book.