Who Wrote Elizabeth I's Most Scathing Letters?

Clodagh Murphy’s forensic study of more than 500 letters attributed to Elizabeth I, carried out as part of the Feathers project, disentangles queenly authorship from scribal intervention using handwriting analysis, draft reassembly and close textual comparison. Of roughly 3,000 surviving letters, the majority are copies produced by secretaries; Murphy traces revisions by figures such as Francis Walsingham and his clerk Francis Mylles, showing that many supposedly personal royal missives exist only in secretarial hands and that secretaries routinely emended drafts rather than merely transcribing them.

Those emendations systematically shaped emotional tone to achieve political ends. Walsingham’s deletions and insertions intensified an angry rebuke to Mary, Queen of Scots and her son James VI in a 1584 letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury, while the same secretary later added conciliatory, nostalgic language to a letter intended to soothe Mary via Ralph Sadler. Murphy demonstrates that secretaries crafted both anger and conciliation as instruments of policy, producing a deliberately performative “Elizabethan voice.” The findings revise the image of an impulsive, temperament-driven queen: emotional language in correspondence was often strategic and collaborative, reflecting Elizabeth’s political savvy and the creative role of her male secretariat.