Doing BBC World live at 1730 British time (1830 European, dunno when in the US but in about an hour and a half anyway).
Of course, the day I get to do a live TV interview is also the day I forgot to shave before coming into the office. Right, where can I find a razor…
ETA: Well, it’s been cancelled, for reasons the Beeb are somewhat embarrassed about, but I am too gentlemanly to go into detail about them here…
I am slightly surprised that you haven’t noticed Elizabeth’s somewhat heterodox religious position before. Politically, she had to be Protestant – she could never trust Catholics as, so far as the Papacy and the Spanish were concerned, Elizabeth was a bastard and thus had no right to the throne. And the best-organised English Protestants in 1558 were at least roughly Calvinist in theology (or rather what would come to be considered so). But her own views, while apparently not exactly Catholic, were certainly not Calvinist. During Elizabeth’s reign, the result of this tension between Elizabeth’s personal views and Calvinism created a space in which later Anglican theology started to take shape.
On the matter of Elizabeth’s relationship with the military – I too hadn’t consciously noticed, but it doesn’t surprise me at all. Leicester, Essex and several others were related to the Boleyns (and thus to Elizabeth) and considered themselves as of almost royal standing – the successors of the “overmighty subjects” who had fought each other in the Wars of the Roses. While they might defer to Elizabeth on other matters, they weren’t going to accept that any woman could be expert on military matters. Or, for that matter, any man of lesser rank than themselves – one of the factors that probably led to Leicester’s difficulties in the Netherlands (and the beginning of a recurring problem for the Dutch Republic – the fact that any general they might hire was unlikely to be willing to defer to anyone of lesser family than the House of Orange).