Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland

Person

Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland

• The Virgin Queen, Good Queen Bess

1533-1603

Queen of England (1558–1603) during a period, often called the Elizabethan Age, when England asserted itself as a major European power in politics, commerce, and the arts.
Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533 at Greenwich Palace, the only child of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.
She was proclaimed to be heiress presumptive to the throne, displacing her seventeen-year-old half-sister Mary (1516–1558), now deemed illegitimate.
Elizabeth received the rigorous education normally reserved for male heirs, consisting of a course of studies centring on classical languages, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. Elizabeth's education came through her tutor William Grindal, a favourite pupil of the greatest educationist of the age, Roger Ascham, who had himself been taught by John Cheke, now tutor to Prince Edward. These men were all products of St John's College, Cambridge, which was a leading centre of humanist erudition. As queen, Elizabeth appointed as her secretary and leading counsellor William Cecil, whose mind and rhetorical skills, the essence of his statesmanship, had been formed at the same Cambridge college.
Mary's accession on 19 July 1553 soon proved bad news for Elizabeth. Mary made a decision to marry her Spanish cousin, Philip of Spain. It was an unpopular choice, and by late January 1554 provoked a rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger. It was in her name that Wyatt rebelled and Elizabeth was taken to the Tower and only narrowly escaped execution. Two months later, she was released from the Tower and placed in close custody for a year at Woodstock.
From 1555, when Mary's health began to break down and on 6 November 1558 Mary acknowledged Elizabeth as her heir. After the death of Mary on November 17, 1558, Elizabeth came to the throne. Her great coronation procession was a masterpiece of political courtship. As queen, Elizabeth reduced the size of the Privy Council and restructured the royal household. She carefully balanced the need for substantial administrative and judicial continuity with the desire for change; and she assembled a core of experienced and trustworthy advisers, including William Cecil, Nicholas Bacon, Francis Walsingham, and Nicholas Throckmorton.
Through the 1559 Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity she began to restore England to Protestantism. Elizabeth’s government moved cautiously but steadily to transfer these structural and liturgical reforms from the statute books to the local parishes throughout the kingdom. Her religious settlement was under threat throughout her reign from both Protestant dissidents and from English Catholics. The Catholic threat took the form of a number of plots against her life, the most serious of which were in 1569, 1571 and 1586. Both earlier threats were linked at least indirectly to Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been driven from her own kingdom in 1568 and had taken refuge in England. However, In the Babington plot of 1586 Mary’s involvement was clearly proved and she was tried and sentenced to death. She was executed in 1588.
Elizabeth never married and many scholars think it unlikely that Elizabeth ever seriously intended to marry, for the dangers always outweighed the possible benefits, but she skilfully played one off against another and kept the marriage negotiations going for months, even years.
She also cannily played a complex diplomatic game with the rival interests of France and Spain. State-sanctioned raids, led by Sir Francis Drake and others, on Spanish shipping and ports alternated with conciliatory gestures and peace talks. But by the mid-1580s it became clear that England could not avoid a direct military confrontation with Spain. Word reached London that the Spanish king, Philip II, had begun to assemble an enormous fleet that would sail to the Netherlands, join forces with a waiting Spanish army led by the duke of Parma, and then proceed to an invasion and conquest of Protestant England. When in July 1588 the Invincible Armada reached English waters, the queen’s ships, in one of the most famous naval encounters of history, defeated the enemy fleet.
In the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, her control over her country’s political, religious, and economic forces and over her representation of herself began to show severe strains. Bad harvests, persistent inflation, and unemployment caused hardship and a loss of public morale. Charges of corruption and greed led to widespread popular hatred of many of the queen’s favourites to whom she had given lucrative and much-resented monopolies. A series of disastrous military attempts to subjugate the Irish culminated in a crisis of authority with her last great favourite, Robert Devereux, when he returned from Ireland against the queen’s orders and then made an attempt to raise an insurrection. He was tried for treason and executed on February 25, 1601.
By 1603 Elizabeth was suffering from a chronic melancholy. She was refusing food and unable to sleep, not even going to bed, and not speaking much. In this condition she died a slow death, succumbing to bronchitis and, perhaps, pneumonia on 24 March 1603 at Richmond Palace, Surrey. The throne was handed to James I whose path of succession was smoothed by Cecil, but it is not known for certain whether Elizabeth actually named James as her successor. Elizabeth's funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on 28 April.

Patrick Collinson, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2012)
John Morrill and Stephen S. Greenblatt, Encyclopaedia Britannica (1999)