

The date and circumstances of Vivien Leigh's acquisition of this document are unknown, but it is listed in a 1948 inventory of her country home Notley Abbey. It may have been a gift associated with a performance, most likely her first major film role in the 1937 Elizabethan romance Fire Over England, in which Vivien played a lady-in-waiting to the ageing Queen, whose heroic lover (Laurence Olivier, in their first pairing) engaged himself in uncovering perfidious traitors and (not entirely single-handedly) thwarting the Spanish Armada. Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth had the best lines, mostly taken as they were from genuine speeches by the Queen.