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One to watch If this film, a sequel, is half as good as Elizabeth, then it will be one to wait for. Blanchett was simply outstanding in the first movie.
I was interested in the comment by the actor, Clive Owen, who said he was not bitter at being passed over for the role of 007. I am not sure I entirely believe him – but then there was a lot of spying going on in Elizabethan England, so instead of holding a Walther PPK, he gets to use a rapier sword instead. Arguably, M16 and its cousins can trace some of their origins back to that period.
And let’s face it, Cate Blanchett is certainly easy on the eye.
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Yes, and Clive Owen is even more so:-)
Movie was alrght.
Thanks Robert. Truly insightful.
I know that it’s bad manners to leave your link on someone else’s site instead of making comments that stand on their own. I thought the movie was great, having walked in the theatre with no idea that I would get to see the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
I wrote a post the next evening, trying to tie the film to our current practice of “Extraordinary Rendition” – the subject of another movie that will be released soon.
http://thewhitedsepulchre.blogspot.com/2007/10/elizabeth-golden-age-alan-dershowitz.html
The boring “Rendition” film has actually been out for some time (even in Britain) – but hardly anyone has noticed. I suspect because yet another death-to-America film is too much even for all the leftist film reviewers.
On “Elizabeth” – I will be going to see the film with friends up in York next weekend, so there is nothing I can say about it yet.
As for the historical context.
Evidence gained from torture was acceptable in Spanish (and other European) courts. This was so because they followed the late Roman ideas in the area – so “putting the question” was fine.
The Common Law lawyers of England objected that words from torture might simply be said to stop the pain – and so English courts did not place weight on such stuff.
F.W. may well have used torture (indeed a man in his employ later boasted of using torture), but the evidence he used against Mary Queen of Scots was provided quite voluntarily (if rather stupidly) by the lady herself.
Queen Mary wrote letters that F.W. intercepted – and the lady wrote them in a code that F.W.s people broke.
It is rather similar to a person (K.S.M.) who was being held prisoner by the Americans – he passed on instructions (in a crude code) to various terrorists contracts in the Middle East.
As he gave the instructions to his lawyer and his lawyer was Jewish (one of George Soros’ self hating Jews) he thought that his instructions would not be intercepted – but they were (both he and the lawyer are now in jail – Mr Soros have failed to get them out).
Still back to the 16th century:
For all the faults of the rule of Elizabeth the struggle with Spain was indeed a struggle for freedom.
For example, the late (mostly after 1588) collectivist statutes that were passed under Elizabeth (trying to make people take up the occupation of their father and so on) could not be enforced as there was no great administrative structure in England – there was in Spain and the other Catholic powers (copied from the Church).
Philip II was like a spider sitting at the centre of a vast administrarive web, in his monastary like palace. The endless documents he and his administrators produced were how tried to run operations in his kingdom and outside it – including military operations where the round trip of information to him and orders from him was measured in weeks. Many of his sailors and soldiers were both brave and highly intelligent but it did not really matter – as the administration made all the most basic judgements.
These days computers and instant communications would have just convinced Philip even more that his skilled and hard working administrators could run everything from mine operations in the New World to naval battles in the north. And he would still have been wrong – for reasons that are hard to put into words (these reasons include both the private ownership and freely set prices of the means of production of Ludwig Von Mises, and the tacit knowledge of M.J. Oakeshott and F.A. Hayek).
Also the Church of England (for all its faults) did not produce weight rulings on economic policy demanding compulsory guilds (“Spanish practices”) and so on. Partly because even in the 16th century the words of a Church of England Archbishop carried a lot less punch than the words of a Pope.
Even the actual combat (which was NOT all about the weather) shows some things of note.
More than half the English ships were privately owned. And there is also a technological point.
Most of the Spanish ships could not even reload their cannons during battle.
Canons at sea in 1588 were not as effective as they were to become – but canons that could only fire once were even less effective.
This was just one of the technolgical advantages that the relative freedom of England (as opposed to Spain and some other nations) had produced.
Had the struggle gone the other way not just the merchant-pirates of England would have been defeated.
No landowner in England would have been safe – for anyone, even the most sincere Roman Catholic was open to false charges laid against them to the “Holy Office”, false charges made by people who wanted their wealth. Torture would have provided the “evidence” needed to steal their wealth. And please remember that the later industrial revolution was NOT based upon the wealth of the slave trade (as the progressives teach) it was mostly based on the profits of domestic farming – strong confident landowers who were not afraid to act as they wished (the so called “agrecultural revolution”)
Elizabeth was not interested in making “widows into men’s souls”, who objection to Roman Catholics was not theological but political. If someone was not plotting against the realm the power-that-be in England were not interested in their opinion of such things as the number of sacrements, and the nuture of the Eucharist.
And one must not forget Holland – in those days “Dutch freedom” was not really about drugs and naked women in shop windows.
Had the commercial Republic fallen many ideals would have fallen with it.
And it was not just Protestants who understood this. For although the treatment of Catholics in Holland was far from perfect at least the idea of toleration existed – it did not under Philip II and people like him.
This the Catholics of the elite Blue Guard of the Prince of Orange came to understand.
Had both Holland and England fell (and the stood or fell together) all of Europe would have fallen.
A form centralized and activist Roman Catholic rule (VERY different from the Roman Catholic church before the Reformation) would have dominated all of Europe – snuffing out ideas of liberty (including Catholic ideas of liberty).
I am told yet another Hollywood death-to-America film is comming out this weekend (with the normal pretense of loving America but being against the evil Bush/Hitler and his Blackshirts – in reality Mr Robert Redford’s “liberalism” is spelt S O C I A L I S M, which puts him a bit closer to Mr Hitler than Republicans are).
But, as I have mentioned, I will be going to see Elizabeth the Golden Age.