The Elizabeth Icon, 1603-2003

Surveying four-hundred years of British history, Walker examines how the memory - the icon - of Queen Elizabeth has been used as a marker for Englishness in disputes political and social, in art, literature and popular culture. From her second Westminster tomb to the pseudo-secret histories of the Restoration, from Georgian ballads to Victorian paintings, biographies, children's books, Suffragette banners, novels and films, trends in scholarship and rubber bath ducks, the icon becomes more powerful as the idea of Englishness becomes more arbitrary.