On February 10 1586, Elizabeth I wrote one of her most famous letters: a furious rebuke to her favourite, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. She sharply reprimanded him for disobeying her.

“How contemptuously we conceive ourself to have been used by you,” Elizabeth rages. “We could never have imagined that a man […] extraordinarily favoured by us would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment.” She demands that Leicester obey her directions, and warns him: “Fail you not as you will answer the contrary at your uttermost peril.”

The queen’s fury jumps off the page. Yet the only surviving copy of this letter is written in the hand of a secretary: Francis Mylles, servant to Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Francis Walsingham. Were Mylles and Walsingham involved in writing this apparently personal communication of the queen’s?

Without the original copy of this letter, we cannot say for certain. However, through careful analysis of over 500 other letters of Elizabeth’s, I have discovered that the expression of emotion in her letters was often carefully constructed by her secretaries.

Around 3,000 of Elizabeth’s letters survive, of which the overwhelming majority were penned by scribes. These so-called “scribal letters” have been severely neglected by historians, with priority given to those written in Elizabeth’s own hand.

Work on Elizabeth’s letters has focused on identifying the queen’s “voice” within them. Yet they were often the products of collaboration between Elizabeth and her secretariat.

Disentangling these collaborations, and recovering the contributions of........

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