Kinlight · The British Royal Line

Queen Elizabeth I

1533 – 1603 · Generation XXIII · Queen of England and Ireland (r. 1558–1603) · House of Tudor

Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudor monarchs, was born at Greenwich Palace on 7 September 1533, the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. She was two years and eight months old when her mother was beheaded in May 1536. Her parents’ marriage was annulled and she was declared illegitimate, and the birth of her half-brother Edward the following year pushed her further from the throne. Her schooling, at least, was excellent. Taught by William Grindal and then by Roger Ascham, she learned Latin, Greek, French and Italian, and at twelve she translated a devotional work by her stepmother Catherine Parr into three languages as a gift for her father.

Her youth was a string of dangers. After Henry’s death in 1547 she lived at Chelsea with Catherine Parr and her new husband Thomas Seymour, who was arrested in January 1549 and beheaded that March, accused among other things of plotting to marry Elizabeth. Under her Catholic half-sister Mary I the risk was greater still. When Wyatt’s rebellion broke out in early 1554 she was questioned and sent to the Tower of London on 18 March, and she came close to execution. In May she was moved to Woodstock, where she spent almost a year under house arrest.

Mary died in November 1558 and Elizabeth succeeded her. She was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 15 January 1559 by Owen Oglethorpe, Bishop of Carlisle, since Canterbury had no archbishop and the Archbishop of York would not officiate. Her religious settlement came quickly. The Act of Supremacy of 1559 made her Supreme Governor, rather than Supreme Head, of the Church of England, an Act of Uniformity made the new Book of Common Prayer compulsory, and the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 set out a middle way in doctrine that most of her subjects could live with. She asked for outward conformity and showed little appetite for probing private belief. To run the kingdom she chose able men and kept them, above all William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, alongside Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Christopher Hatton.

Elizabeth never married, and she made the question itself an instrument of policy. A foreign husband could drag England into his own quarrels, as Philip of Spain had done in her sister’s reign, while an English one would have tied her to a court faction. In 1559 she was plainly in love with Robert Dudley, whom she made Earl of Leicester in 1564. She later entertained two French princes in turn, the last being Francis, Duke of Anjou, whose courtship ran until 1581. Her attack of smallpox in 1562 made the succession a pressing concern in Parliament, but she would not name an heir.

The threats multiplied as her reign went on. The north of England rose in 1569–70, and in 1570 Pope Pius V’s bull Regnans in Excelsis excommunicated her and released her subjects from their allegiance. Mary, Queen of Scots, who had fled to England in 1568, became the focus of Catholic plotting, from the Ridolfi Plot of 1571 to the Babington Plot of 1586, and Walsingham’s agents built the case that led to Mary’s trial. Elizabeth agreed to her cousin’s execution only reluctantly, and it was carried out at Fotheringhay in February 1587. In 1588 Philip II sent the Armada of about 130 ships to overthrow her, and the English fleet, helped by storms, defeated it. That August she addressed her troops at Tilbury in a silver breastplate.

The last fifteen years were harder. The war with Spain dragged on at great cost, the 1590s brought high prices and rural depression, and in Ireland the Nine Years’ War against Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, became the gravest test of her reign. Her last great favourite, the Earl of Essex, was executed in 1601 after his failed rising. Yet the age that took her name also produced the plays of Shakespeare and the poetry of Spenser, the music of William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, and the voyages of Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, whose Virginia was perhaps named for the Virgin Queen. In her “Golden Speech” of November 1601 she told members of the Commons that she valued their love above any jewel.

Elizabeth died at Richmond Palace on 24 March 1603, aged 69, and was succeeded by James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots. After a funeral at Westminster Abbey on 28 April she was laid in the vault of her grandfather Henry VII. In 1606 her coffin was moved beneath the marble monument that James raised for her in Henry VII’s chapel, where it rests on that of her half-sister Mary I. The anniversary of her accession was kept as a public holiday for two hundred years.

Place in the family

  • Queen Elizabeth I was a daughter of King Henry VIII.

Images

One of 11 people of House of Tudor (1485–1603) in this archive. Welsh in origin and only a handful of monarchs long — it broke with Rome and ended with Elizabeth I.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → King Henry VIII → Queen Elizabeth I.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

Siblings

Life

  • 1533 — Born
  • 1558 — Elizabeth becomes Queen on the death of her half-sister, Mary.
  • 1559 — Elizabeth is crowned Queen of England at Westminster Abbey in January.
  • 1559 — Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity restore the Protestant Church in England and make Elizabeth Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
  • 1559 — The Revised Prayer Book of Elizabeth I is issued. It is less extreme than its predecessors
  • 1560 — Elizabeth founds Westminster School
  • 1562 — Elizabeth gives aid to the Protestant Huguenots in the French Wars of Religion. English troops occupy Dieppe and Le Havre.
  • 1566 — Elizabeth forbids Parliament to discuss her marriage prospects.
  • 1568 — Mary Queen of Scots, flees to England from Scotland and is imprisoned by Elizabeth.
  • 1569 — Elizabeth I approves Sunday sports
  • 1570 — Pope Pius V excommunicates Queen Elizabeth from the Catholic Church.
  • 1579 — Francis, Duke of Alencon, secretly comes to England to try and marry Elizabeth.
  • 1581 — Francis Drake knighted by Queen Elizabeth on the deck of _The Golden Hind_.
  • 1584 — Sir Walter Raleigh founds the first American colony and names it Virginia after Elizabeth the Virgin Queen
  • 1586 — Babington Catholic plot to assassinate Elizabeth I
  • 1588 — Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and a favourite of Elizabeth, dies.
  • 1589 — John Harrington invents the first flushing water closet at his house at Kelston, Bath. He calls it 'Ajax' a pun on the Elizabethan slang word 'Jakes' for a privy. Elizabeth I orders a Harrington WC to be installed at Richmond Palace.
  • 1601 — Earl of Essex is executed for leading a revolt against Elizabeth.
  • 1603 — Died
  • 1603 — Elizabeth I dies at Richmond Palace, Surrey.

Sources

  1. Elizabeth I · Wikipedia
  2. Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. Elizabeth I · Westminster Abbey

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