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If you want to see original documents, your best bet is probably to try The National Archives (though you might have some difficulty with Tudor State Papers - they're available in a microfilm surrogate and one usually has to beg and plead to see the originals). But they have vast collections of government documents almost from the year dot. More interesting literary stuff is probably easiest to see at the British Library - the Bodleian and Cambridge University Library would probably require letters of reference etc., and the BL may too. Or try your local record office - much easier to get into to look at old stuff, and probably more interesting than state papers (I am jaundiced as spent most of today looking at 1630s State Papers Spain, yawn, treaty this, treaty that).
Now, Elizabeth I at Tilbury is a bit contentious. That speech, alas, was not recorded by a contemporary, and indeed the only surviving record of it is in a printed version of a letter of 1623 written by an eyewitness. However, there are records nearer the time of a different speech given at Tilbury, which seems to have gone something like this:
'It may be they challenge my [sexe] For that I am a woman so may I charge their mould for that they are but men whose breath is in their nostrells' etc. etc.
So she definitely said something at Tilbury, but no one knows what. The 1623 account was probably heavily distorted by all the mythmaking that went on after her death (and in 1623 it became fashionable to be against Spain, after the failure of the Spanish Match negotiations, perhaps another factor).
There is an article on all this on JSTOR, here, which you might not be able to see - I can't tell whether I'm seeing it through my university account or not, apols if this is the case... |
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