Abstract
Archbishop Matthew Parker feared that Elizabeth would be ‘strangely chronicled’. From her death to the screening of the film ‘Elizabeth’, the life of ‘Gloriana’ has been a subject for all kinds of imaginative fiction. History, too, has traded as much in myth as fact. Elizabeth's first historian, William Camden, was not responsible for the myth, although his translators were. The nineteenth century invented a ‘whiggish’ Elizabeth who identified herself with the destiny of her people, although the leading Tudor historian, A. J. Froude, was not a fan. Post-J. E. Neale and A. L. Rowse, Froude's critical interrogation of the reign has been revived in the latest Elizabethan historiography.