Elizabeth I gave her name to a golden age of poets, statesmen and
adventurers. Known as the Virgin Queen, or Gloriana, her union with her
people became a substitute for the marriage she never made.
Her reign, known as the Elizabethan Age, is remembered for many reasons
…the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and for many great men,
Shakespeare, Raleigh, Hawkins, Drake, Walsingham, Essex and Burleigh.
She was endowed with
great courage. As a young woman she had been imprisoned in the Tower of
London on the orders of her half-sister, Queen
Mary I, and lived in daily fear that she would be executed as her
mother, Anne Boleyn had been.
Elizabeth, unlike her
sister Mary, was a Protestant and declared, when she became Queen 'That
she did not make windows into men's souls' and that her people could
follow any religion they wished.
She
was a great beauty in her youth. She had hazel eyes, auburn hair and a
white skin, a striking combination. But in her old age she became quite
grotesque in appearance in a red wig, with a white pockmarked face and a
few black rotten teeth!
She was also noted
for her learning, and although she was sometimes wayward, she was
generally considered wise.
She loved jewels and
beautiful clothes and had a hard sceptical intellect, which helped her
steer a moderate course through all the conflicts of her reign, and
there were many!
Her speech in 1588 to
her troops at Tilbury, drawn up to repel the Duke of Parma's army in the
year of the Spanish Armada, is often quoted. One part of the speech is
well known, and the section that starts …'I know I have the body of a
weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King of
England too and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of
Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm', is stirring stuff
even today, many centuries later.
Her courtiers, and to
some extent her country, expected her to marry and provide an heir to
the throne.
It
is said that Elizabeth's great love was Lord Dudley, later to become the
Earl of Leicester, but her faithful, brilliant minister and close
advisor, Sir William Cecil, advised against it.
Elizabeth could be
hard when the circumstances needed a strong hand, and when Mary
Queen of Scots was found to be involved in a plot to usurp the
throne, she signed Mary's death warrant, and Mary was beheaded at
Fotheringhay Castle in 1587.
She could be
forgiving too. John Aubrey, the diarist, tells a story about the Earl of
Oxford. When the Earl made a low obeisance to the Queen, he happened to
let go a fart, at which he was so ashamed that he left the country for 7
years. At his return the Queen welcomed him and said, "My lord, I
had forgot the fart"!
There are many
stories about Elizabeth that reveal her strengths and very occasionally
her weaknesses.
When the Earl of
Leicester gave the Queen his excuses for failing to subdue Cork in
Ireland, Elizabeth's comment was 'Blarney'!
Her comments on
marriage were straight to the point "I should call the wedding-ring
the yoke-ring!"
On
her descent from Henry VIII, she said, "Although I may not be a
lioness, I am a lion's cub, and inherit many of his qualities."
When she was told of
the birth of James, son of Mary Queen of Scots in 1566, Elizabeth said,
"Alack, the Queen of Scots is lighter of a bony son and I am but
barren stock."
At her death in 1603
Elizabeth left a country that was secure, and all the religious troubles
had largely disappeared. England was now a first class power, and
Elizabeth had created and molded a country that was the envy of Europe.