In the last decade of Elizabeth I reign, many of the besetting preoccupations of earlier

decades had abated. Mary Queen of Scots had finally been executed in 1587. The Spanish

Armada had been defeated in 1588, albeit more by the wind and the waves than the English,

and the question of Elizabeth's marriage had been shelved. And yet, these were years

of extraordinary challenge to the crown and to the country, when the person at the helm

was an elderly and apparently indecisive woman, although the poets and painters of Elizabeth's

court were busy creating the image of a perfect goddess of the Queen, Loriana. Opinion on

the ground seems to have been markedly different. In the early 17th century, Bishop Goodman remarked

that the people were generally very weary of an old woman's government. So what can we make

of Elizabeth I's last decade and her legacy? How have immediate histories of her reign continued

to shape the popular narrative right up to the present day? And what should her reputation

rightly be? To discuss these questions, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Alex Guider,

Associate Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Oxford and John Walsh Fellow

and Tutor at Jesus College. Dr. Guider is the author of among other things, the Earl of

Essex and late Elizabethan culture. Dr. Guider, Alex, thank you so much for joining me. We're

here at St. Cross College, Oxford, where we're going to talk about Elizabeth's Fandicecler

and it's such an interesting period that last decade of Elizabeth's life, isn't it? She

dies of course in 1603 and many people were referred to that last decade as her second

reign, John Guider in his book, recently famously called it the Forgotten Years. And it's

only true that a number of the threats that we most associate with Elizabeth, the O'Marder

perhaps, 58, Mary Kunnusska's are over. Do you think of this decade being a kind of new

phase of her role? What do you make of it? The sort of notion that we divide historical

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