Elizabeth (film) - Plot

Plot

In 1558, the Roman Catholic Mary I of England dies of a cancerous tumour in her uterus, leaving her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth as queen. Elizabeth had previously been jailed for a supposed conspiracy to murder Mary but has now been freed for her coronation. The film shows Elizabeth being courted by suitors (including Henri, Duc d'Anjou, the future King Henry III of France, whom she rejects) and urged by William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley to marry, which, as he states, would secure her throne. Instead, she has a secret affair with her childhood sweetheart, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The affair is, however, no secret from Cecil—who makes it clear that a monarch has no private life.

Elizabeth deals with various threats to her reign, including The Duke of Norfolk; her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, who conspires to have her murdered; Mary, Queen of Scots' mother, Mary of Guise, who brings French troops into Scotland to attack Elizabeth's forces when they invade.

Elizabeth permanently banishes Dudley from her private presence when she finds out that he is married. Elizabeth feels that such relations could give a man too much power over her. Moreover, cutting off her relations with Dudley is part of the process by which she becomes increasingly tough and assertive—in one scene she carefully prepares and rehearses the speech she would deliver to a recalcitrant Parliament and force through her religious reforms, the Act of Uniformity.

She also becomes capable of occasional ruthless behaviour—as in unflinchingly ordering the execution of those who she considers dangerous to her rule, as well as taking up as her right-hand man the Machiavellian Walsingham, who thinks nothing of torturing or killing people. At the end of the film, Norfolk is executed for his conspiracy and Mary of Guise is assassinated by Elizabeth's advisor, Francis Walsingham.

All this is a considerable change from the warm-hearted, rather romantic girl which Elizabeth was in the early parts of the film; remaining such would have been incompatible with being a queen who actually ruled and dominated the men around her, and her transformation is a major theme of the film.

The film ends with Elizabeth having her hair cut by Kat and assuming the white-faced and gowned persona of the 'Virgin Queen', and initiating England's Golden Age. She sits down and the screen cuts to black.