Elizabeth's flamboyant knighting of Drake aboard the Golden Hind was a calculated act of 'four-dimensional chess' that both burnished her own Gloriana image with English subjects and publicly signaled a Franco-English entente to Spain.

19:35Anyway, so the the question is why has the inveterately cautious Elizabeth taken such a bold and flamboyant step? Now, we've said she is clearly very impressed with Drake. She thinks he's he's tremendous. >> You know, she's always inviting him in for chats, >> but I think she is also playing four-dimensional chess and she is very good at playing four-dimensional chess and her move works on a kind of couple

19:59of levels. So, first of all, it obviously plays well with her subjects. Drake is the great national hero and Elizabeth knows that by having him kned um it guilds her own brand. >> And this is really important because she has to worry that war is threatening. England does remain riven by sectarian divisions and its future as a Protestant kingdom hangs by the single thread that is Elizabeth's own life. And so, you

20:24know, she's always getting intelligence briefings from Warsingham saying that there are assassins out there. So she wants to she wants to woo her subjects, you know, she wants to make herself the great beloved of the English people. And so therefore, it is desperately important to her to project a sense of her rule as something glamorous and golden and self-confident to kind of portray herself as Gloriana. And to that end, having Drake knighted

20:53works superbly because to this day, I think the image of Elizabeth personally dubbing Drake a knight on the deck of the Golden Hind remains one of the great iconic scenes of English history. Overseas listeners won't get this, but when we were growing up in the sort of 70s and 80s, there were these books called Ladybird Books that everybody in England read. They were the guides to history. And this is your classic

21:17ladybird book illustration, isn't it? Yes. You know, people cheering with great roughs, huzzars from the crowd. They didn't have the people falling in the mud. The good Queen Bess who looks gorgeous kniting a very handsome swashbucklings of Francis Drake. Makes you proud to be English. >> And unfortunately, it didn't actually happen. Elizabeth didn't dub Drake herself, but she got a Frenchman. >> Oh my god. This is literally the worst

21:41moment in the history [laughter] of the podcast. a guy called Msieur de Mashimmore to do it. Um, but obviously Elizabeth wouldn't have asked Mashimmore to night Drake had she not been confident that Mashimmore would do it. Um, and it was also Mashimmore who picks up Elizabeth's fallen garter which he'd um coily let slip. And it's all very flirty. So it's, you know, it's a proper onto cordial between England and France.

22:05And so here I think is another reason for all these tremendous theatrics aboard the golden hind. Elizabeth is sending a public message to Spain about the strength of her relationship with France. And listeners who heard our second episode, which was all about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, may find this odd. Why is a Protestant queen flirting with the ambassador of a Catholic country in which only a decade

22:34before thousands of Protestants had been massacred in pograms across the country and most particularly in the capital in France and it's a very good question and to answer it we just need to do a quick retrospective to look at what has been happening in France since that terrible day on St. Bartholomew's day in August 1572 because France like Spain is always a prepoundonderant influence on English foreign policy. What happens across the