Elizabeth I

Queen Elizabeth I’s right to the throne wasn’t always guaranteed. Her father, King Henry VIII, had Parliament annul his marriage to Elizabeth’s mother—his second wife, Anne Boleyn—thus making Elizabeth an illegitimate child and removing her from the line of succession (although a later parliamentary act would return her to it). After Henry’s death in 1547, two of Elizabeth’s half-siblings would sit on the throne: first the young Edward VI, who reigned for six years, and then Mary I (“Bloody Mary”), who reigned for five years. Suspicious that her half-sister would try to seize power, Mary placed Elizabeth under what amounted to constant surveillance, even jailing her in the Tower of London for a short period of time. Elizabeth skillfully avoided doing anything that Mary might have used as grounds for her execution and, upon Mary’s death in 1558, went on to become one of England’s most illustrious monarchs.

• Queen Elizabeth I inherited several issues from the reign of her predecessor, Queen Mary I, including an unpopular war with France and the religious divisions that Mary’s campaign against Protestantism had left behind.
• The threat posed by the former subsided with the 1562 outbreak of the War of Religion in France, and Elizabeth responded to the latter by returning England to Protestantism and having Parliament formalize certain aspects of the Church of England’s doctrine.
• An issue that troubled her reign for its entirety was her lack of a husband and heir, a situation which she and others realized could potentially ignite a successional crisis upon her death. Still, she never married, perhaps because she preferred to keep power to herself.
• One of her biggest trials—at least in the foreign policy realm—came when Spain tried to invade England in 1588. The ensuing naval battle would go down as one of the most famous ones ever and ended with England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, which had until then been supposed invincible.

Upon assuming the throne, Queen Elizabeth I restored England to Protestantism. This broke with the policy of her predecessor and half-sister, Queen Mary I, a Catholic monarch who ruthlessly tried to eliminate Protestantism from English society. Elizabeth undertook her own campaign to suppress Catholicism in England, although hers was more moderate and less bloody than the one enacted by Mary. In fact, Elizabeth’s religious moderateness earned her the ire of some of the more radical Protestants, who were convinced that her reforms were inadequate for cleansing English society of what they saw as the vestiges of Catholicism. In reality, Elizabeth wasn’t interested in catering to either Protestantism or Catholicism, the zeal of both having the potential to disrupt the kind of law and order she was trying to establish. Her religious policies, such as the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity, went a lot further to consolidate the power of the church under her and to regularize the practice of the faith.

Queen Elizabeth I was the daughter of King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. When Elizabeth was three years old, Henry had Anne beheaded and their marriage declared invalid, thus rendering Elizabeth an illegitimate child and removing her from the line of succession (to which Parliament would later restore her). Two of Elizabeth’s half-siblings sat on the throne after Henry’s death in 1547: Edward VI, who acceded at the age of nine and died six years later; and Mary I, who operated under the belief that Elizabeth was trying to seize power from her for the entirety of her own five-year reign. When Elizabeth was crowned monarch in 1558, her lack of a husband and heir became one of the defining issues for the remainder of her rule. As the end of her life approached, she forestalled the successional crisis that might otherwise have arisen by designating King James VI of Scotland as the next in line to the throne. The rule of the Tudor dynasty ended with the death of Elizabeth.

For the most part, Elizabeth I was a popular queen, both during and after her lifetime. This is evident from the affectionate monikers she earned, her often (although not always) cordial relationship with Parliament, and the celebratory representations made of her in the art of her contemporaries—the character Gloriana in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene being best known of these. The admiration Elizabeth I garnered had a lot to do with her skills as a rhetorician and an image-maker, which she used to style herself as a magnificent female authority figure devoted to the well-being of England and its subjects above all else. She wasn’t popular with everyone, however. Catholics weren’t happy that she restored England to Protestantism, while some Protestants felt she didn’t go far enough in purging Catholic elements from the Church of England’s doctrine. Her public image also suffered in the last decade of her reign, when England was pressed by issues including scant harvests, unemployment, and economic inflation.