Kate Maltby | The Spectator columnists & writers

With Elizabeth Stuart as monarch, might the English civil war have been avoided?

Many girls dream about their favourite princesses. Elizabeth Stuart, a princess herself, took this fantasy a step further and modelled herself from childhood on her godmother and namesake, Elizabeth I. The young daughter of James I plucked her hairline to imitate her father’s predecessor, the great Tudor queen. Aged ten, she was painted with a vivid red wig, dripping in jewels recognisably inherited from her godmother. She even practised her signature until it was almost indistinguishable from Elizabeth I’s famous flourishes. At 13, grandeur got the better of her when she signed herself ‘Elizabeth R’, her most exact copy yet of the queen’s mark. The surviving document shows that someone — perhaps a tactful adult — erased a downstroke from the ‘R’, returning Elizabeth Stuart to her rank as ‘Elizabeth P’, or ‘Elizabeth Principessa’.

Has George III been seriously maligned?

Every British historian has a story about the witlessness of Americans when it comes to our Georgian kings. The fate of Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III is notorious — Hollywood turned it into a film entitled The Madness of King George, in part lest American audiences assume it a tertiary sequel to The Madness of George I. A few years ago I encountered a highly educated editor at a reputable American news outlet who was under the impression that George V and George VI were ‘Hanoverian’ sovereigns, for surely they had been the son and grandson of George IV. I have deep sympathy, therefore, with the impulse behind Andrew Roberts’s biography of George III. The author sets out explicitly to rescue our third Hanoverian king from wilful American ignorance — and golly, is there plenty of that around.

You be the judge

James I and VI liked to term himself Rex Pacificus. Like most politicians who talk a lot about working for peace, he was an appeaser. Inheriting the English throne after Elizabeth, whose foreign policy was defined by breaking Spanish dominance, James appears to have seen the purpose of his own Whitehall government as being to facilitate every Spanish demand. The first high-profile victim of James’s Iberophilia was the war hero and poet Sir Walter Raleigh. Within four months of Elizabeth I’s death in 1603, Raleigh was on trial for treason under the new regime. His death sentence was commuted until 1618, when it was carried out at the direct request of the Spanish ambassador. Shakespeare’s Globe is staging the trial of Walter Raleigh as a piece of theatre this month.

The Stuart supremacy

Few twists of political fortune are as discombobulating as the youngest child making off with the family inheritance. Richard III, George W. Bush, Ed Miliband: monsters all three. Sophia, Electress of Hanover — bright, lively and self-indulgent — left a no less divisive legacy. The 12th child of an exiled Mittel Europa princeling, Sophia had scarce prospects when she was born in The Hague in 1630. Yet through her mother Elizabeth, daughter of James I, Sophia was able to pass the newly unified British crown to her son George I. (She missed out on the throne herself when she predeceased her cousin Queen Anne by less than two months.) To many Catholics, she remains a symbol of the Protestant chauvinism that drove Britain’s parliamentarians to exclude 57 Catholic cousins ahead of her.

A gentle reproach to Shakespeare

A few years ago, I fell hopelessly in love with Harriet Walter. It only lasted an hour or two: she was playing Brutus in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production of Julius Caesar, and there she was, aloof, damaged, burning with pride and suppressed sorrow. The Donmar theatre’s production was set in a women’s prison, as if performed by inmates. In Walter’s mind, we learn in her latest book, she was not playing white, older, educated Brutus, but ‘Hannah’, a long-term prisoner whose presence in the jail she based on the story of Judith Clark, an anti-capitalist revolutionary imprisoned for driving the getaway car at a fatal bank robbery. It is a rare moment of political predictability in an acting memoir otherwise notable for its focused scrutiny of Shakespeare’s language.

Sorry, Jeremy, but comparing Theresa May to Henry VIII is depressingly ignorant

Another day, another Tudor throwback. This time, Jeremy Corbyn has accused Theresa May of acting like Henry VIII by avoiding a vote in Parliament over the triggering of Article 50. 'She cannot hide behind Henry VIII and the divine rights of the power of kings on this one', he told the Guardian this week. 'The idea that on something as major as this the prime minister would use the royal prerogative to bypass parliament is extraordinary – I don’t know where she’s coming from.' We’ve been here before. Our politicians are addicted to Tudor comparisons: only last August, the Labour MP Barry Gardiner accused Theresa May of seeking ‘to diminish parliament and assume the arrogant powers of a Tudor monarch.’ (Can powers be ‘arrogant’? Was this a homage to the rhetorical device of hypallage?) May prefers to compare herself to Elizabeth I: 'a woman who knew her own mind and achieved in a male environment.

Emma Rice was never as radical as she thought she was

Towards the end of Emma Rice’s recent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the mechanicals decides to give us a piece of her mind. ‘It’s a visual concept!’ screams Nandi Bhebhe’s Starveling (for it is She), as the young lords and ladies mock her costume in the play within a play. ‘Why is everybody so obsessed with text?’ This was Rice’s gauntlet, thrown to her critics as she arrived as the controversial new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. But Rice, as usual, was tilting at a straw man. None of her serious critics in theatreland have a problem with textual experiment, nor with Rice’s yen for cross gender casting. Yet Rice was determined to set the narrative: she was iconoclastic, courageous, radical, chopping up Shakespeare’s text and daring us to follow.

Donald Trump’s sinister threat to jail Hillary should worry us all

In the autumn of 2008, a gaggle of American conservatives gathered for a conference at that most godless of progressive institutions, Yale University. The mood was sombre: four days beforehand, President Obama had swept to victory; the outgoing Republican President, George Bush, was shadowed by a Middle Eastern war gone disastrously wrong. The title of the conference, ‘The Next American Conservatism’, already felt like a bad joke. Outside, protestors gathered. Iraq was a popular theme – I spotted a few 'no blood for oil' placards, recycled from Tony Blair’s latest flying visit to campus. Eventually, a pair of students invaded the main hall, cursing and spluttering a demand for both Bush and Blair to face war crimes trials.

Theresa May really is acting like a Tudor monarch over Brexit

Over the weekend, it emerged that Theresa May likes to compare herself to Elizabeth I (although as I argue in my Telegraph column today, she’s been behaving more like the young Queen Victoria lately). The PM clearly meant the association as a compliment to herself, but on Saturday, Labour MP Barry Gardiner went in for a far more negative comparison. Complaining about Theresa May’s proposed plan to trigger Article 50 without a new parliamentary vote on the matter, Gardiner went full Philippa Gregory on us, accusing May of acting 'to diminish parliament and assume the arrogant powers of a Tudor monarch.' Next he’ll be accusing her of throwing a tantrum over her wig. For a steward of the institution, Gardiner hasn’t been reading much parliamentary history recently, as historians on Twitter were quick to point out.

France’s burkini ban was an own goal for secularism

I’ve always hated the beach. The water? Great. The sunshine? Terrible. It starts with the hot trek across the sands to find a square of free ground – loaded up with factor 60, several books, a comedy floppy hat, two towels, three bottles of water and the rusty family parasol. Then there’s the bodily anxiety. Find me a woman who doesn’t fret about her body on the beach, and I’ll find you a liar. Just over a year ago, I wrote a post for The Spectator about my own fraught history with my body on the beach. I still don’t understand how it ever became acceptable to wear an itsy bitsy bikini around one’s dad. And even in a one-piece, if I don’t draw attention to my thickening waist, my mother will. For a single beach holiday, I spend a year trawling for swimmable cover-ups and loose T-shirts.

Five phrases to ban from the Tory leadership race

The race is on to get out of the bottom, as the Spice Girls never quite sang about Liam Fox. And isn’t it depressing? I don’t just mean the Conservative leadership contest itself – unlike the Labour Party, the Tories seem to be able to organise a sack-race in a nursery playpen, which will prove a plus when negotiating with Vlad from Moscow. But Lord, some of the headlines are getting lazy. Here, at least, are five phrases I’d like never to see in a headline again. 1. Lady Macbeth Has a literary character ever done more disservice to women? On Fleet Street, Lady Macbeth seems little more than a lazy shorthand for man’s worst fears about persuasive women. Look how often she crops up when a man in politics is heard actually listening – listening! – to his wife.

Forget the fighting. We’re entering a period of unparalleled opportunity for the Tories

Auf wiedersehen, Boris. He’ll be back, like a blond, bloated Voldemort inhabiting another life form – Top Gear host? Archbishop of York? Or endless BBC camping tours of Britain on a bike, the Portillo of the Portacabin? As Boris’ agent collects the offers – and his publishers are still owed a Shakespeare biography by the end of this anniversary year - he leaves behind him a Conservative Party scarred but resilient. There’ll be recriminations this week. Yet there’ll also be enduring relief, as one of Britain’s oldest institutions finds itself finally free of wrangling Etonians, chaps whose Brobdingnagian entitlement so undermined the gospel of One Nation inclusivity that both presumed to preach. It matters, then, that the final coup to Boris was delivered by the self-made son of a fish-gutter.

Elizabeth alone

If you’ve been watching Game of Thrones recently, you’ll have seen an old folkloric fantasy in which a bewitching young prophetess, a charismatic war leader, slips alone into her private chambers and removes an enchanted necklace. Beneath it, she’s just one more withered crone. We, the viewers, having happily feasted on her naked body, now congratulate ourselves on seeing it for what it is: another whore’s trick. This moralistic antipathy towards the over-preserved female body haunts popular studies of the last years of Queen Eliza-beth I. Nearly a century ago, Lytton Strachey kick-started the grotesquerie genre with Elizabeth and Essex: ‘As her charms grew less, her insistence on their presence grew stronger.’ Elizabeth emerges from Strachey’s text as Norma Desmond with a sceptre, clutching at that cosmetic mask of youth just as it becomes a paler mask of death.

Shakespeare400

The feeding frenzy over the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death has reached its peak. Recently we’ve had Shakespeare’s complete works performed through the puppetry of kitchenware. On books pages, you can read about everything from Edward Wilson-Lee’s Shakespeare in Swahililand (surprisingly beguiling) to Simon Andrew Stirling’s Shakespeare’s Bastard: A Life of Sir William Davenant (he wasn’t). Meanwhile, the Royal Mail is launching a set of stamps emblazoned with snappy quotations. And it’s this glib series that encapsulates the anniversary problem. Shakespeare’s beauty lies not in his maxims but in the complexity of every line; the power of context, character and plot to suggest myriad meanings, each one undercutting the last.

Is the West ever going to stand up to Vladimir Putin?

If you walk down Holland Park Avenue, down the hill to Shepherd’s Bush, you’ll come across a statue wreathed with peonies, lit by a single candle. Two years ago, in February 2014, the flowers stretched almost to the street curb; the candles were myriad, ringing the statue in ever-widening concentric circles. This is the statue of St Volodymyr, founder king of the Ukrainian nation, set up in the old heart of the British Ukrainian community. In the days around the fall of the Yanukovych government, and Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea, St Vlad was the site of nightly vigils, passionate and prayful protests, many of them led by orthodox priests. Gradually, the wreaths shrunk, the candles disappeared one by one.

There’s nothing patriotic about William Blake’s Jerusalem

In this week’s diary, Tristram Hunt puts his money behind Jerusalem as a new English National Anthem. 'God Save the Queen' isn’t going anywhere as the United Kingdom’s theme, but there’s room for a local melody when Team England take to the field (as the MP Toby Perkins pointed out, it’s hard to square English rugby fans singing 'God Save The Queen' as we face off against the Welsh). But Tristram, for the love of the Holy Lamb of God, please don’t let it be Jerusalem. The truth about Jerusalem is that it isn’t a patriotic poem at all. Parry’s music gives the hymn an upbeat tempo - especially with the booming orchestration by Edward Elgar - but William Blake’s original words are as laced with resentful irony as Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony.

There’s nothing confusing about a black actress playing Hermione Granger

A news producer rang up this morning, asking me to talk about ‘colour-blind casting’. Noma Dumezweni has just been cast as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the stage sequel to JK Rowling’s novels. So there I was, listening to a hack ask ‘isn’t it confusing when black actresses play white roles?’ When I was too stunned to answer, he added, encouragingly, 'we thought you’d be happy to come on and criticise Sonia Friedman'. True, if you follow theatre, you’ll know that Sonia Friedman, the super-producer who brings Hollywood’s most commercial franchises to the West End stage, won’t be sending me a Christmas card this year. But for very different reasons. Friedman knows how to pack her houses, and when she brought Benedict Cumberbatch to the Barbican in this year’s Hamlet, I described the cinematic result as 'a production cut to frame its star'.

‘National security’ has become our main justification for war

I’ve been in touch with Anisa for just over a year, ever since I met her in a dingy refugee compound on the outskirts of Amman. She’s a super-educated young woman from Damascus (most of the early wave of refugees were) and she’s never had much time for self-styled IS ('none of them are actually Syrian, they’re invaders,' she insists). Today Anisa is more depressed than ever. If Britain joins the coalition of airstrikes against IS territory in Syria, it will largely be symbolic, as The Spectator’s leader explains. The US has already been bombing Raqqa for nearly a year and a half. As the analyst Shashank Joshi suggests, we have a limited airforce, and 'neither Cameron nor Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has explained whether or how British air strikes in Syria might dilute current efforts in Iraq.

How can we defend our liberal heritage by abandoning its values?

Yusuf, when I last saw him, was still smiling, a middle-aged man with the greying pony-tail of a rock roadie. He described himself as a feminist: he met his wife through work, where, he told me proudly, she was a better computer engineer than he. Yusuf had the stoop of a tall man who’d spent most of his life under ceilings too low for him, and the corrugated iron hut his family now called home was no exception. So we sat cross-legged on the floor, while I asked him about religious tensions in a southern Turkish refugee camp. 'If you want to know, I’m an atheist. I mean, in Damascus, my friends all were - it’s not like you’re living in a village, your grandfather checking you’re in mosque. I don’t believe in any of it.

Boris shows a hint of Euroscepticism — but he still can’t beat Mary Beard

Thank God for Mary Beard. Sure, she’s wrong about Jeremy Corbyn. She was wrong about 9/11. She’s wrong about plenty. But let’s talk about what matters. She’s right about Ancient Rome. It’s rare to see Boris Johnson lose a popular vote. Last night, Beard trounced him at the Intelligence Squared Greece vs Rome debate, winning the day for Rome with a 9% swing. This was also a fundraiser for one of the most worthy educational charities I know: Classics for All encourages access to ‘elite’ classical subjects in state schools, teaching teens that you don’t have to be Bullingdon material to 'get' Boethius. So there was something uncomfortable, not just about Boris’ presence, but in the showbizzy nature of such a celebrity wrestling match, all this intellect as conspicuous consumption (2000 tickets flogged at £50, the price of looking cultured).

Why I’m not sorry to see FHM go

So, farewell then, FHM. As Adrian Mole, 13 3/4 (years, not inches) and perhaps their target market, might have put it. Finally cowed, not by feminist protest, but by the big beast of the teen consumer market: internet pornography. Yesterday, the soft-core ‘lifestyle’ magazine announced that it was shutting up shop, along with fellow wank-bank supplier, Zoo. According to some sections of the internet, as a woman, I’m supposed to regret this. The argument goes something as follows. Teenage boys are now watching online porn (true). Online porn is ever-more hardcore, and as an industry, hardly gentle to women (true). By comparison, the days of FHM were a feminist idyll (not true). And with this approach comes a wave of revisionist comment articles.

Will the free speech lobby accept Jeremy Corbyn’s right to be a republican?

On Wednesday night, Jeremy Corbyn brought to an end one of the most undignified sagas in recent politics, cobbling together a shuffled compromise on his induction into the Privy Council. The Privy Council, as we’ve been told so often now, is the body of senior politicians that is allowed to receive security briefings. Membership would have required Corbyn - the life-long republican - to vow 'not to know or understand of any manner of thing to be attempted, done, or spoken against Her Majesty’s person, honour, crown, or dignity royal'. Did he kneel, bob, or grab the royal paw in an firm egalitarian handshake? Does it matter? Meanwhile, America’s college campuses remain the epicentre of a febrile national debate: what price free speech, when it threatens to uproot the very foundations of a society? And who on God’s green earth is entitled to police it? Over in the States, much clucking - much of it well founded - about students who can’t handle challenging ideas.

Yale students have exercised their right to be treated like children

Shrieking girl. There it is. I’ve been trying to think of a less gendered, less belittling phrase for the subject of a video that went viral this weekend, a black female student at my alma mater, Yale University, letting rip her frustrations at a mobbed college master. But shrieking she is, and not like an adult. 'It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here!' (that’s one of the less expletive-laden sections). The trigger for this was Halloween, the subject at hand the question of who gets to judge potentially offensive costumes, and how. But how did we get to the point where students are brought to tears at the suggestion a leading university 'should be an intellectual space'? https://www.

The Tories can’t allow Corbyn a monopoly on morality

Amber Rudd will be keeping a low profile this weekend. The sight of a working mother on Question Time, tearfully confronting the Energy Secretary over cuts to working tax credits, won’t have made easy viewing for the Tory press machine. Earlier this month, at Conservative Party Conference, George Osborne reiterated again and again that core Tory message, so ardently championed by Harlow MP Robert Halfon and groups like Bright Blue: this is the (real) party of hard-working people. So last night’s former Tory voter was heavily on message, until suddenly, she wasn’t. 'I work bloody hard for my money to provide for my children, to give them everything they've got… and you're going to take it away from me and them.' It was supposed to be redistributive Jeremy Corbyn who was accused of raiding the family kitty, not the sensible men in suits.

Will Michael Gove dare to bring Christianity into his prison reform plans?

This April, Michael Gove wrote in The Spectator: 'To call yourself a Christian in contemporary Britain is to invite pity, condescension or cool dismissal.' Certainly, the titters it provoked in the more left-wing corners of Twitter rather proved his point (a white man? complaining of prejudice?). On faith, as in everything else, Britain today erodes into fragments, small landscapes inhabited by the mutually deaf. I carry no brief for the man: my instinctive sympathy with his school reforms is matched only by my frustration with what Ian Leslie, in a profile published this week, calls the temperament by which Gove 'is drawn irresistibly to the theatre of battle'. But even his greatest enemies don't deny that Gove is a man of conviction.

Banning provocateurs doesn’t silence them – it only amplifies their voices

I write about free speech. And I’m tired of writing about free speech. I’m tired of needing to write about free speech. I’m tired of needing to defend women’s freedom to discuss our long-contested bodies without being plucked and waxed into acceptable, tidy language, bland and inoffensive as a Playboy Bunny’s perky smile. I’m tired of needing to defend a blogger or cartoonist’s freedom to poke fun at other people’s idols, when it’s men with guns in Paris, not roués with ink, who make me feel ‘unsafe’. I’m tired of the death of irony; I’m tired of the death of good faith. But most of all, I'm tired of student unions. This week, the story is the University of Manchester's student union (next week, it’ll be another).

Maggie’s great, but can’t the US find an inspiring American woman to go on their banknote?

Banknotes, again. Now it’s America’s turn to suffer the unintended consequences of an ill-implemented campaign to inject some XX chromosomes into currency. In June, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that he was knocking founding father Alexander Hamilton, a self-made, illegitimate boy from the West Indies, off the $10 bill. There’s a nationwide hunt for a woman whose image could replace him: in this week’s Republican debate, Jeb Bush suggested Margaret Thatcher. You can even tweet your own suggestions to the Treasury, with the hashtag #TheNew10. Now, I’m pretty keen on Margaret Thatcher. (If Jeremy Corbyn wants to end the scourge of personal abuse in politics, he could talk to her family, for starters). And I think women’s representation is pretty important.

Like Cameron, Corbyn also believes in the merits of ‘token women’

In the early hours of Monday, it dawned on Jeremy Corbyn that no women in his team would be shadowing the four Great Offices of State. ‘We are taking a fair amount of shit out there about women,' his advisor Simon Fletcher was heard saying. ‘We need to do a Mandelson. Let’s make Angela shadow first minister of state. Like Mandelson was. She can cover PMQs.’ Of course, if you’re reading this, and you’re a deep-set Corbynista, I doubt you believe a word of it: it’s the testimony of Darren McCaffrey, Sky reporter, spawn of the evil Murdoch empire. Therein lies the central challenge of our polarised body politic. How can any of us attempt the open debate a healthy society requires, when we have ceased to speak the same language, let alone trust the same sources? In this maelstrom of bad faith, the left are understandably bemused when anyone even associated with the right raises concerns about the representation of women in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet.

In defence of doping

Apparently, I’m supposed to be shocked by doping. This weekend, the Sunday Times published files from the International Association of Athletics Federations, suggesting that hundreds of athletes had been awarded medals at top events, despite receiving suspicious blood test results. It seems that if you’re groomed from childhood in an ultra-competitive, winner-takes-all fight for glory, you’ll stop at nothing to get an edge over your fellows. I, for one, am gobsmacked. Who are we kidding when we try to crack down? Athletes, of course, push their bodies to the limit all the time. Blood doping, specifically, is banned because unlike elite gymnastics, muscle-sports or NFL training (which merely bestow distorted skeletons, post-retirement obesity and lifelong brain damage), techniques to increase the levels of haemoglobin in the blood are thought to also increase risks for stroke or heart attack (though, as Haroon Siddique points out, it’s hard to be sure whether anyone has actually died amid of this particular moral panic).

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