Elizabeth I

• 1. The Virgin Queen

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  At Tilbury in Essex on the 8th of August 1588, Elizabeth I rode before her militias wearing a silver breastplate over a white velvet dress. She told them she had the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king. The Spanish Armada had already been scattered by English fire ships off Gravelines, though she did not yet know it. This was the queen who never married, the last of the House of Tudor, who ruled England and Ireland for 44 years. Her reign gave its name to an entire era. Yet she came to the throne as a declared bastard, the daughter of an executed mother, a woman imprisoned in the Tower on suspicion of treason. How did a child stripped of her place in the succession become the monarch whose virginity inspired a cult, whose ministers ran a secret service, and whose sea captains plundered the wealth of Spain? Some historians paint her as short-tempered and indecisive, a ruler who enjoyed more than her fair share of luck. She called one of her mottoes video et taceo, I see and say nothing.

• 2. Daughter Of A Beheaded Mother

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  Elizabeth was born on the 7th of September 1533 at Greenwich Palace, named after her grandmothers Elizabeth of York and Lady Elizabeth Howard. At birth she was heir presumptive, her elder half-sister Mary having lost legitimacy when Henry VIII annulled his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. She was two years and eight months old when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was beheaded on the 19th of May 1536. Eleven days after that execution, Henry married Jane Seymour, whose son Edward became the undisputed heir apparent. Margaret Bryan, her first governess, described her as as toward a child and as gentle of conditions as ever I knew any in my life. Catherine Champernowne, later known as Kat Ashley, became her governess in 1537 and remained her friend until death in 1565. She taught the girl French, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish. Under tutor William Grindal, and later Roger Ascham, Elizabeth grew into one of the best educated women of her generation. By the age of 12 she translated Catherine Parr's Prayers or Meditations into Italian, Latin, and French as a New Year's gift for her father. A translation of the Annals of Tacitus, held at Lambeth Palace Library, was confirmed as her own work in 2019 after analysis of the handwriting and paper.

• 3. Survival Under Suspicion

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  In the household at Chelsea, the 14-year-old Elizabeth endured an emotional crisis some historians believe affected her for life. Thomas Seymour, who had married Catherine Parr, entered her bedroom in his nightgown, tickled her, and slapped her on the buttocks. Once he held her while he cut her black gown into a thousand pieces, with Parr joining in. After Parr discovered the pair in an embrace, Elizabeth was sent away in May 1548. Seymour was arrested in January 1549 on suspicion of conspiring to depose his brother and marry Elizabeth himself. Living at Hatfield House, she admitted nothing, frustrating her interrogator Robert Tyrwhitt, who reported, I do see it in her face that she is guilty. Seymour was beheaded on the 20th of March 1549. After Edward VI died on the 6th of July 1553, his will named Lady Jane Grey queen, but Jane was deposed after nine days. When the Catholic Mary took the throne, suspicion fell on Elizabeth again. During Wyatt's rebellion in early 1554 she was imprisoned in the Tower on the 18th of March, then placed under house arrest at Woodstock Palace under Henry Bedingfeld. Crowds cheered her all along the way. Mary recognised her as heir on the 6th of November 1558, and Elizabeth became queen when Mary died on the 17th of November.

• 4. Rule By Good Counsel

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  At the age of 25, Elizabeth told the peers gathered at Hatfield that the burden fallen upon her made her amazed, and that she meant to direct all her actions by good advice and counsel. Her speech contained the first record of her adoption of the medieval theology of the sovereign's two bodies, the body natural and the body politic. On the 15th of January 1559, a date chosen by her astrologer John Dee, she was crowned in Westminster Abbey by Owen Oglethorpe, the Catholic bishop of Carlisle. She depended heavily on trusted advisers led by William Cecil, whom she created Baron Burghley. One of her first acts was to establish an English church of which she became supreme governor. The Act of Supremacy became law on the 8th of May 1559, forcing her to accept the title Supreme Governor rather than the more contentious Supreme Head, which many thought unacceptable for a woman to bear. A new Act of Uniformity made attendance at church and use of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer compulsory, though penalties for recusancy were not extreme. She kept Catholic symbols such as the crucifix and downplayed the role of sermons. She would not tolerate the Puritans, who pushed for far-reaching reforms.

• 5. The Marriage That Never Was

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  In the spring of 1559 it became evident that Elizabeth was in love with her childhood friend Robert Dudley. His wife Amy was said to suffer a malady in one of her breasts, and Amy Dudley died in September 1560 from a fall down a flight of stairs. Though a coroner's inquest found accident, many suspected her husband had arranged her death so he could marry the queen. William Cecil and Nicholas Throckmorton made their disapproval unmistakably clear, and there were rumours the nobility would rise if the marriage took place. Elizabeth raised Dudley to the peerage as Earl of Leicester in 1564. When he married Lettice Knollys in 1578, she reacted with repeated scenes of displeasure and lifelong hatred. He died shortly after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and a note from him was found among her most personal belongings, marked his last letter in her handwriting. Marriage negotiations were a key element of her foreign policy. She entertained the proposal of King Eric XIV of Sweden, negotiated for years with Charles II, Archduke of Austria, and considered two French Valois princes. Her last courtship, with Francis, Duke of Anjou, who was 22 years her junior, involved her wearing a frog-shaped earring he had sent. In 1563 she told an imperial envoy that her inclination was this, beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married. By 1570 senior figures privately accepted she would never marry or name a successor.

• 6. A Cult Of Virginity

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  In 1559 Elizabeth told the Commons that a marble stone should declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin. Her unmarried status inspired a cult related to that of the Virgin Mary. In poetry and portraiture she was depicted as a virgin, a goddess, or both, and later as Belphoebe, Astraea, and Gloriana, the eternally youthful Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser's poem. By 1578 public tributes to the Virgin acted as coded opposition to her marriage talks with the Duke of Alencon. She insisted she was married to her kingdom, speaking in 1599 of all my husbands, my good people. The claim was not universally accepted. Henry IV of France said one of the great questions of Europe was whether Queen Elizabeth was a maid or no. In 1561 she was mysteriously bedridden with an illness that caused her body to swell. In 1587 a young man calling himself Arthur Dudley was arrested on the coast of Spain, claiming to be the illegitimate son of Elizabeth and Robert Dudley, his age consistent with birth during that 1561 illness. Examined in Madrid by Francis Englefield, secretary to King Philip II, he failed to convince the Spaniards and was never heard from again. Modern scholarship dismisses the story's premise as impossible, noting her life was too closely observed for her to hide a pregnancy.

• 7. The Reckoning With Mary

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  Mary, Queen of Scots, returned from France to Scotland in 1561 and refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. Many considered her heir to the English crown as granddaughter of Henry VIII's elder sister, Margaret. A chain of errors undid her. After Lord Darnley was murdered in February 1567 by conspirators almost certainly led by James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, Mary married Bothwell on the 15th of May 1567. Elizabeth wrote to her asking how a worse choice could be made for her honour than to marry a man whom public fame had charged with the murder of her late husband. Defeated and forced to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son James VI, Mary escaped in 1568, lost at Langside, and fled to England, where she was imprisoned for the next nineteen years. After the pope declared Elizabeth illegitimate in the 1570 bull Regnans in Excelsis, releasing her subjects from allegiance, Mary became the focus of plots. A Catholic rising in the North in 1569 saw over 750 rebels executed on Elizabeth's orders. From the Ridolfi Plot of 1571 to the Babington Plot of 1586, her spymaster Francis Walsingham assembled a case against Mary. Persuaded at last, Elizabeth sanctioned the trial, and Mary was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle on the 8th of February 1587. Afterward Elizabeth claimed she had not intended the warrant to be dispatched, blaming her secretary William Davison.

• 8. The Sea Dogs And Spain

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  On the 12th of July 1588 the Spanish Armada set sail for the channel, planning to ferry an invasion force under the Duke of Parma from the Netherlands. Elizabeth sent her navy under Francis Drake and Charles Howard, and the fire ships off Gravelines on the night of the 28th to the 29th of July dispersed the fleet, which straggled home in shattered remnants after disastrous losses on the coast of Ireland. The war it belonged to lasted another sixteen years. She had knighted Drake after his circumnavigation of the globe from 1577 to 1580, and her seafarers carried an element of piracy and self-enrichment she could little control. In 1589 the English Armada of 23,375 men and 150 ships, led by Drake and John Norreys, suffered a catastrophic defeat, with 11,000 to 15,000 killed, wounded, or dead of disease and 40 ships lost. Privateers known as the Sea Dogs, including Drake, Hawkins, and Raleigh, raided Spanish and Portuguese treasure ships. In 1592 they took the Portuguese carrack Madre de Deus off the Azores, whose cargo amounted to half the wealth of the English treasury. Elizabeth alone received nearly a third of the profits. The Earl of Essex captured Cadiz in 1596, sinking some 32 Spanish ships, and his prestige came to rival the queen's. Three more Spanish armadas were sent and each met disaster or storm. The fourth landed in Ireland in 1601 and held Kinsale for three months before surrendering.

  From October 1562 to June 1563 the English occupied Le Havre, intending to exchange it for Calais, lost to France in January 1558, but the venture ended in failure when Elizabeth's Huguenot allies joined the Catholics to retake the port. In 1585 she sent an army to aid the Protestant Dutch under the Treaty of Nonsuch, which marked the beginning of the Anglo-Spanish War. She never really backed this course, wanting her commander the Earl of Leicester to avoid at all costs any decisive action with the enemy. When he accepted the post of Governor-General from the Dutch, she wrote that she could never have imagined a man raised up by herself would so contemptibly break her commandment. His replacement, Francis Vere, worked closely with Maurice of Nassau and shattered the myth of Spanish invincibility. In France she supported the Protestant Henry IV from 1589, but the early campaigns were disorganised and ineffective. When Henry converted to Catholicism in Paris in March 1593, she was distraught and shocked. In Ireland she faced a hostile and virtually autonomous population. During the revolt led by the Earl of Desmond in 1582, an estimated 30,000 Irish people starved to death. The Nine Years' War from 1593 to 1603, backed by Spain behind Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, was her most severe test there. Walter Raleigh later claimed her caution had impeded the war, saying she did all by halves. She distrusted commanders who in action tended to be transported with an haviour of vainglory.

  Elizabeth often wrote to Tsar Ivan the Terrible on amicable terms, though he was annoyed by her focus on commerce over a military alliance. Ivan even proposed to her once and asked for a guarantee of asylum in England should his rule be jeopardised. Anthony Jenkinson, who began as a representative of the Muscovy Company, became her special ambassador to the Russian court. England established trade with Morocco against Spain, selling armour, ammunition, timber, and metal for Moroccan sugar despite a papal ban. In 1600 Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, principal secretary to Mulai Ahmad al-Mansur, visited England to negotiate an Anglo-Moroccan alliance. Diplomatic relations opened with the Ottoman Empire through the Levant Company and the ambassador William Harborne, sent in 1578, with a treaty of commerce signed in 1580. In correspondence, Sultan Murad III suggested Protestantism and Islam had much more in common than either did with Roman Catholicism, since both rejected the worship of idols. In 1583 Humphrey Gilbert sailed to establish a colony in Newfoundland and never returned. His half-brother Walter Raleigh claimed Virginia, perhaps named for the Virgin Queen, and the lost Roanoke Colony became the first English settlement in North America. On the 31st of December 1600 the East India Company received its charter, formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region and China.

  Walter Raleigh called Elizabeth a lady whom time had surprised. Her skin had been scarred by smallpox in 1562, leaving her half bald and dependent on wigs and cosmetics. Her love of sweets and fear of dentists caused severe tooth decay, so that foreign ambassadors struggled to understand her speech. Andre Hurault de Maisse, ambassador from Henry IV, noted her teeth were very yellow and unequal, with many missing, yet added that her figure was fair and tall and graceful in whatever she does. The years after 1588 brought heavier taxes, poor harvests, and a falling standard of living. With William Cecil the exception, the great politicians died around 1590, Leicester in 1588, Walsingham in 1590, and Christopher Hatton in 1591. Factional strife rose between Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and Robert Cecil. Granting monopolies bred price-fixing and resentment, prompting her Golden Speech of the 30th of November 1601 to 140 members at Whitehall Palace. She became fond and indulgent of the petulant young Essex, but after he tried to raise a rebellion in London he was beheaded on the 25th of February 1601. An observer wrote in 1602 that her delight was to sit in the dark and sometimes with shedding tears to bewail Essex.

  Lord Burghley died on the 4th of August 1598, and his son Robert Cecil quietly prepared for a smooth succession. Since Elizabeth would never name an heir, he entered a coded negotiation with James VI of Scotland, coaching him to humour the queen. James's tone delighted her, and she replied that her thanks could not be lacking. Her health held until autumn 1602, when a series of deaths among her friends sank her into severe depression. The death in February 1603 of Catherine Carey, Countess of Nottingham, came as a particular blow. She fell into a settled and unremovable melancholy and sat motionless on a cushion for hours. When Robert Cecil told her she must go to bed, she snapped, Must is not a word to use to princes, little man. She died on the 24th of March 1603, aged 69, at Richmond Palace, between two and three in the morning. By the old calendar, in which England observed New Year on the 25th of March, she died on the last day of the year 1602. Her coffin was carried downriver at night to Whitehall on a barge lit with torches. At her funeral on the 28th of April, the chronicler John Stow recorded such a general sighing, groaning and weeping as the like hath not been seen. She was succeeded by her first cousin twice removed, the king of Scotland she had helped raise as a Protestant.