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On March 24, 1603, Elizabeth I Tudor, Queen of England and Ireland (1558-1603) and daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, died at the age of 69. From the article:
"Elizabeth I of England
Queen Mary suspected Elizabeth of treason & had her detained in the Tower of London in 1554 CE.
During the reign of her brother Edward, Elizabeth kept a low profile and resided at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. When Edward died in July 1553 CE and left no heir, his eldest half-sister Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536 CE), became queen. Both Henry VIII and Edward VI had pursued the Protestant reformation of the Church of England but Mary, like her mother, was a staunch Catholic. Mary reversed the reformist legislation that had been passed by Parliament since 1529 CE and earned her lasting nickname 'Bloody Mary' by burning prominent Protestants at the stake. Mary also departed from Tudor tradition and married Prince Philip (l. 1527-1598 CE), son of King Charles V of Spain (r. 1516-1556 CE). Philip became the King of Spain in 1556 CE and so Mary its queen.
Spain was England's great enemy, and many in the country were concerned that England's wealth would be used to fund Spanish ambitions abroad. A rising level of popular discontent with Mary's political and religious choices broke out in the form of the Wyatt Rebellion of January 1554 CE. The rebels perhaps even hoped to put Elizabeth on the throne and then have her marry Edward Courtenay, the great-grandson of Edward IV of (r. 1461-1470 CE). The rebellion was quashed, but it demonstrated that, for many, Elizabeth represented the new sense of nationalism that was developing in England. Mary suspected her sister of being involved in the rebellion - even if Elizabeth had made no public statements on either the Reformation or Spanish Marriage - and so she was detained in the Tower on 17 March 1554 CE. Two months later, Elizabeth was moved on to Woodstock in Oxfordshire where she was kept under house arrest. The next year the two sisters reconciled and Elizabeth was allowed her freedom back.
Succession
When Mary died of stomach cancer in November 1558 CE and left no heir, then her half-sister Elizabeth became queen. Elizabeth, who was just 25, was crowned in one of the most magnificent ceremonies ever held at Westminster Abbey on 15 January 1559 CE. Henry VIII's three children had all inherited the throne in sequence, just as he had wished it in 1544 CE (if none had any heirs). Elizabeth inherited a fragile kingdom surrounded by enemies. All territory in France had now been lost, the state was almost bankrupt, and politics was still very much a male-dominated arena where a queen was expected to marry as soon as possible. Consequently, Elizabeth had to tread carefully in these first years of her reign, and she surrounded herself with capable advisors.
Government
To advise her in government, Elizabeth chose William Cecil, Lord Burghley (l. 1520-1598 CE) to act as her personal secretary. Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1530-1590 CE) was another who held the prime post of Secretary of State and whose invaluable network of spies spread across Europe. Robert Dudley (l. c. 1532-1588 CE), who would become the Earl of Leicester, was another favourite. These men would remain at the queen's side for most of her reign although the relationship with Dudley was rumoured to have gone beyond professional bounds. Certainly, it was unusual to give a non-royal an earldom and Dudley had apartments next to the queen's in most of her major residences. Dudley was married, and when his wife was discovered at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a broken neck, many suspected he had pushed her. The ensuing scandal ruled out any prospect of marriage to the queen, but he was, in any case, of too lowly a birth to be acceptable as a queen's consort.
The queen found herself in the man's world of government, but her ministers were about to find out their sovereign had no intention of being pushed around. Elizabeth changed the entire approach to regal policy-making, as the historian J. Morrill explains:
…the dithering, prevarication, and generally dismissive behaviour which was understood to be archetypical of the conventional 'mistress' provided Elizabeth with her weapons of political manipulation and manoeuvre. In order to beat her male courtiers at their own game, she changed the rules and capitalized on the power granted to her by virtue of her gender. (234)
Elizabeth was fiercely independent and ministers literally had to woo her to come around to their ideas, if she ever did. The queen had few preconceptions of monarchy. She did not, like so many of her predecessors, hanker after territory in France or Scotland, she was careful over royal spending and seemed not to care at all about securing the Tudor Dynasty after her death. Exasperated ministers could not even turn to Parliament which met only 13 times during her reign.
Elizabeth became known as the Virgin Queen, & for those eager to see divine confirmation of their beliefs, she was the living embodiment of the Virgin Mary.
One of the primary concerns of Elizabeth's advisors was that she should marry and produce an heir or two as quickly as possible. It was taken for granted she should marry, but Elizabeth had other ideas and seemed determined to remain single. Elizabeth was married to her country, so she said, and certainly no monarch had ever toured her kingdom so frequently and shown herself to so many of her people as Elizabeth did.
In 1588 CE the king of Spain assembled a massive fleet, an 'armada' of 132 ships, which sailed from Lisbon to the Netherlands to pick up an army led by the Duke of Parma that would then invade England, the so-called 'Enterprise of England'. Fortunately, Henry VIII and Mary I had invested in the Royal Navy, and this now reaped its reward. The large Spanish galleons - designed for transportation, not warfare - were much less nimble than the fleet of some 130 mostly smaller English ships which were able to dash in and out of the Spanish fleet and cause havoc. In addition, the 20 English royal galleons were better armed than the best of the Spanish ships and their guns could fire further. The English also benefitted from such experienced commanders as Drake whom the Spanish called 'El Draque' ('the Dragon').
There were three separate engagements as the navies battled each other and storms. Meanwhile, Elizabeth visited her land army in person, gathered at Tilbury in order to defend London should the armada make landfall. The queen, wearing armour and riding a grey gelding, roused her troops with the following speech:
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too, and think it foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe, should dare invade the borders of my realm.
Fireships were sent into the Spanish when they anchored their ships, bad weather did the rest. Half of the armada was destroyed, its remnants forced to sail around Scotland. England was saved. 11-15,000 Spaniards had died compared to around 100 Englishmen. Philip did not give up and tried twice more to invade England (1596 and 1597 CE), but each time his fleet was repelled by storms. The defeat of the Spanish Armada gave England great confidence and showed the importance of sea power. The Tudors had built and tested the foundations of the Royal Navy which would go on to change world history from Tahiti to Trafalgar.
Elizabethan Culture
The arts, as so often when peace is established, positively boomed in the Elizabethan age. In 1576 CE London received its first playhouse, founded by James Burbage and simply known as The Theatre. Around 1593 CE William Shakespeare wrote his play Romeo and Juliet. The great bard's historical plays such as Richard III were aimed at massaging the Tudor royal ego and so painted a darker picture of pre-Tudor times than was the reality. Meanwhile, plays like Henry V glorified England's past and contributed to an ever-growing sense of nationalism. The queen enjoyed watching plays and outdoor spectacles and actively patronised artists and playwrights. Other notable writers of the period include Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593 CE) and Ben Jonson (1572-1637 CE).
The Elizabethan era saw the world open up to Europe, which was not of any great benefit to the world but certainly to the wealth of European powers. In 1562-3 CE John Hawkins (1532-1595 CE) explored Guinea in West Africa and the Spanish West Indies, and so commenced England's involvement in the slave trade. Elizabeth handed out charters to companies which allowed them exclusive trade rights in a given area in return for paying the Crown a cut of the profits. The most famous of these would be the East India Company, given a charter to trade in India and the Indian Ocean in 1600 CE. In 1572 CE Francis Drake explored Panama, and in 1577-80 CE he circumnavigated the world in his ship the Golden Hind. In 1576-8 CE Martin Frobisher (c. 1535-1594 CE) explored Labrador in search of the fabled North-West Passage to China. In 1595 CE Walter Raleigh explored what is today Venezuela in his search for El Dorado, the legendary ruler of a city called Manoa, said to have been paved in gold.
One final cultural phenomenon of the period was the veneration of the queen herself as a semi-divine figure. Elizabeth's date of succession, 17 November, was declared a national holiday and was celebrated each year with great festivities, church services and bell-ringing. Elizabeth became known as the great empress 'Gloriana', after the central figure of the 1590 CE poem The Fairie Queen by Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599 CE). Comparisons were made with Artemis/Diana, the virgin huntress goddess of antiquity. One court spectacle in 1581 CE depicted the queen as the 'Fortress of Perfect Beauty' successfully withstanding a siege by a cannon representing 'Desire' but which could only fire sweets at its target. Walter Raleigh named a portion of North America (Roanoke Island, modern North Carolina), England's first overseas colony after his queen: Virginia.
An important element in the growing legend that the queen herself cultivated was her appearance. Elizabeth spent two hours squeezing into majestic dresses with extravagant collars and jewelled embellishments. She also wore a striking array of wigs, unfortunately, necessitated by an attack of smallpox in December 1562 CE which had left her with bald patches. The disease had also left Elizabeth with facial scars, which explains her use of thick white makeup. The queen knew full well the value of imagery, and so from 1563 CE the production of unofficial portraits was banned. Elizabeth's success at managing her own image is perhaps best illustrated in the fact that the cult of her persona has never really gone away despite the best attempts of revisionist historians.
Death & Successor
It is true that the reality of the final years of Elizabeth's reign was rather less romantic than her legendary image. A run of poor harvests, inflation, and high taxes, needed to pay to fight Spain, and an increase in unemployment and petty crimes, all took their toll on a population which had increased from 3 million at the start of Elizabeth's reign to 4 million by the end of it. Poverty was growing at such a rate that Poor Laws were passed in 1597 and 1601 CE to try and alleviate the problem by providing houses of correction for vagrants and apprenticeships for children. There were food riots in London and East Anglia in the 1595-7 CE but, significantly, none of the popular uprisings which had challenged previous Tudor monarchs.
Elizabeth died, likely from a mix of bronchitis and pneumonia, on 24 March 1603 CE at Richmond Palace. She was 69 years old and had outlived all her friends and favourites; she was buried in Westminster Abbey. As the queen had once said to Parliament, and through that body, spoken to her people:
And though you have had, and may have, many mightier and wiser princes…yet you never had, nor shall have, any that will love you better.
The queen's reign may have been assessed less favourably in recent times, particularly its final years, but she still compares well to her immediate predecessors and successors. The queen's greatest failing was perhaps having no children and never nominating an heir. Consequently, she was succeeded by her closest relative, James I of England (aka James VI of Scotland), the son of Mary, Queen of Scots. James would reign until 1625 CE and so be the first Stuart to rule England. The Stuarts would survive the brief republic of Oliver Cromwell, 1649-1660 CE, and so they remained in power until 1714 CE."
COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen F. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen SPC Woody Bullard 1SG Steven Imerman SFC William Farrell Lt Col Charlie Brown Col Carl Whicker SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth SP5 Geoffrey Vannerson MSG Felipe De Leon Brown LTC Stephen C. Maj William W. 'Bill' Price PO1 H Gene Lawrence LTC Jeff Shearer ] LTC Wayne Brandon PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SPC Douglas Bolton PVT Mark Zehner
"Elizabeth I of England
Queen Mary suspected Elizabeth of treason & had her detained in the Tower of London in 1554 CE.
During the reign of her brother Edward, Elizabeth kept a low profile and resided at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. When Edward died in July 1553 CE and left no heir, his eldest half-sister Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536 CE), became queen. Both Henry VIII and Edward VI had pursued the Protestant reformation of the Church of England but Mary, like her mother, was a staunch Catholic. Mary reversed the reformist legislation that had been passed by Parliament since 1529 CE and earned her lasting nickname 'Bloody Mary' by burning prominent Protestants at the stake. Mary also departed from Tudor tradition and married Prince Philip (l. 1527-1598 CE), son of King Charles V of Spain (r. 1516-1556 CE). Philip became the King of Spain in 1556 CE and so Mary its queen.
Spain was England's great enemy, and many in the country were concerned that England's wealth would be used to fund Spanish ambitions abroad. A rising level of popular discontent with Mary's political and religious choices broke out in the form of the Wyatt Rebellion of January 1554 CE. The rebels perhaps even hoped to put Elizabeth on the throne and then have her marry Edward Courtenay, the great-grandson of Edward IV of (r. 1461-1470 CE). The rebellion was quashed, but it demonstrated that, for many, Elizabeth represented the new sense of nationalism that was developing in England. Mary suspected her sister of being involved in the rebellion - even if Elizabeth had made no public statements on either the Reformation or Spanish Marriage - and so she was detained in the Tower on 17 March 1554 CE. Two months later, Elizabeth was moved on to Woodstock in Oxfordshire where she was kept under house arrest. The next year the two sisters reconciled and Elizabeth was allowed her freedom back.
Succession
When Mary died of stomach cancer in November 1558 CE and left no heir, then her half-sister Elizabeth became queen. Elizabeth, who was just 25, was crowned in one of the most magnificent ceremonies ever held at Westminster Abbey on 15 January 1559 CE. Henry VIII's three children had all inherited the throne in sequence, just as he had wished it in 1544 CE (if none had any heirs). Elizabeth inherited a fragile kingdom surrounded by enemies. All territory in France had now been lost, the state was almost bankrupt, and politics was still very much a male-dominated arena where a queen was expected to marry as soon as possible. Consequently, Elizabeth had to tread carefully in these first years of her reign, and she surrounded herself with capable advisors.
Government
To advise her in government, Elizabeth chose William Cecil, Lord Burghley (l. 1520-1598 CE) to act as her personal secretary. Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1530-1590 CE) was another who held the prime post of Secretary of State and whose invaluable network of spies spread across Europe. Robert Dudley (l. c. 1532-1588 CE), who would become the Earl of Leicester, was another favourite. These men would remain at the queen's side for most of her reign although the relationship with Dudley was rumoured to have gone beyond professional bounds. Certainly, it was unusual to give a non-royal an earldom and Dudley had apartments next to the queen's in most of her major residences. Dudley was married, and when his wife was discovered at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a broken neck, many suspected he had pushed her. The ensuing scandal ruled out any prospect of marriage to the queen, but he was, in any case, of too lowly a birth to be acceptable as a queen's consort.
The queen found herself in the man's world of government, but her ministers were about to find out their sovereign had no intention of being pushed around. Elizabeth changed the entire approach to regal policy-making, as the historian J. Morrill explains:
…the dithering, prevarication, and generally dismissive behaviour which was understood to be archetypical of the conventional 'mistress' provided Elizabeth with her weapons of political manipulation and manoeuvre. In order to beat her male courtiers at their own game, she changed the rules and capitalized on the power granted to her by virtue of her gender. (234)
Elizabeth was fiercely independent and ministers literally had to woo her to come around to their ideas, if she ever did. The queen had few preconceptions of monarchy. She did not, like so many of her predecessors, hanker after territory in France or Scotland, she was careful over royal spending and seemed not to care at all about securing the Tudor Dynasty after her death. Exasperated ministers could not even turn to Parliament which met only 13 times during her reign.
Elizabeth became known as the Virgin Queen, & for those eager to see divine confirmation of their beliefs, she was the living embodiment of the Virgin Mary.
One of the primary concerns of Elizabeth's advisors was that she should marry and produce an heir or two as quickly as possible. It was taken for granted she should marry, but Elizabeth had other ideas and seemed determined to remain single. Elizabeth was married to her country, so she said, and certainly no monarch had ever toured her kingdom so frequently and shown herself to so many of her people as Elizabeth did.
In 1588 CE the king of Spain assembled a massive fleet, an 'armada' of 132 ships, which sailed from Lisbon to the Netherlands to pick up an army led by the Duke of Parma that would then invade England, the so-called 'Enterprise of England'. Fortunately, Henry VIII and Mary I had invested in the Royal Navy, and this now reaped its reward. The large Spanish galleons - designed for transportation, not warfare - were much less nimble than the fleet of some 130 mostly smaller English ships which were able to dash in and out of the Spanish fleet and cause havoc. In addition, the 20 English royal galleons were better armed than the best of the Spanish ships and their guns could fire further. The English also benefitted from such experienced commanders as Drake whom the Spanish called 'El Draque' ('the Dragon').
There were three separate engagements as the navies battled each other and storms. Meanwhile, Elizabeth visited her land army in person, gathered at Tilbury in order to defend London should the armada make landfall. The queen, wearing armour and riding a grey gelding, roused her troops with the following speech:
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too, and think it foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe, should dare invade the borders of my realm.
Fireships were sent into the Spanish when they anchored their ships, bad weather did the rest. Half of the armada was destroyed, its remnants forced to sail around Scotland. England was saved. 11-15,000 Spaniards had died compared to around 100 Englishmen. Philip did not give up and tried twice more to invade England (1596 and 1597 CE), but each time his fleet was repelled by storms. The defeat of the Spanish Armada gave England great confidence and showed the importance of sea power. The Tudors had built and tested the foundations of the Royal Navy which would go on to change world history from Tahiti to Trafalgar.
Elizabethan Culture
The arts, as so often when peace is established, positively boomed in the Elizabethan age. In 1576 CE London received its first playhouse, founded by James Burbage and simply known as The Theatre. Around 1593 CE William Shakespeare wrote his play Romeo and Juliet. The great bard's historical plays such as Richard III were aimed at massaging the Tudor royal ego and so painted a darker picture of pre-Tudor times than was the reality. Meanwhile, plays like Henry V glorified England's past and contributed to an ever-growing sense of nationalism. The queen enjoyed watching plays and outdoor spectacles and actively patronised artists and playwrights. Other notable writers of the period include Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593 CE) and Ben Jonson (1572-1637 CE).
The Elizabethan era saw the world open up to Europe, which was not of any great benefit to the world but certainly to the wealth of European powers. In 1562-3 CE John Hawkins (1532-1595 CE) explored Guinea in West Africa and the Spanish West Indies, and so commenced England's involvement in the slave trade. Elizabeth handed out charters to companies which allowed them exclusive trade rights in a given area in return for paying the Crown a cut of the profits. The most famous of these would be the East India Company, given a charter to trade in India and the Indian Ocean in 1600 CE. In 1572 CE Francis Drake explored Panama, and in 1577-80 CE he circumnavigated the world in his ship the Golden Hind. In 1576-8 CE Martin Frobisher (c. 1535-1594 CE) explored Labrador in search of the fabled North-West Passage to China. In 1595 CE Walter Raleigh explored what is today Venezuela in his search for El Dorado, the legendary ruler of a city called Manoa, said to have been paved in gold.
One final cultural phenomenon of the period was the veneration of the queen herself as a semi-divine figure. Elizabeth's date of succession, 17 November, was declared a national holiday and was celebrated each year with great festivities, church services and bell-ringing. Elizabeth became known as the great empress 'Gloriana', after the central figure of the 1590 CE poem The Fairie Queen by Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599 CE). Comparisons were made with Artemis/Diana, the virgin huntress goddess of antiquity. One court spectacle in 1581 CE depicted the queen as the 'Fortress of Perfect Beauty' successfully withstanding a siege by a cannon representing 'Desire' but which could only fire sweets at its target. Walter Raleigh named a portion of North America (Roanoke Island, modern North Carolina), England's first overseas colony after his queen: Virginia.
An important element in the growing legend that the queen herself cultivated was her appearance. Elizabeth spent two hours squeezing into majestic dresses with extravagant collars and jewelled embellishments. She also wore a striking array of wigs, unfortunately, necessitated by an attack of smallpox in December 1562 CE which had left her with bald patches. The disease had also left Elizabeth with facial scars, which explains her use of thick white makeup. The queen knew full well the value of imagery, and so from 1563 CE the production of unofficial portraits was banned. Elizabeth's success at managing her own image is perhaps best illustrated in the fact that the cult of her persona has never really gone away despite the best attempts of revisionist historians.
Death & Successor
It is true that the reality of the final years of Elizabeth's reign was rather less romantic than her legendary image. A run of poor harvests, inflation, and high taxes, needed to pay to fight Spain, and an increase in unemployment and petty crimes, all took their toll on a population which had increased from 3 million at the start of Elizabeth's reign to 4 million by the end of it. Poverty was growing at such a rate that Poor Laws were passed in 1597 and 1601 CE to try and alleviate the problem by providing houses of correction for vagrants and apprenticeships for children. There were food riots in London and East Anglia in the 1595-7 CE but, significantly, none of the popular uprisings which had challenged previous Tudor monarchs.
Elizabeth died, likely from a mix of bronchitis and pneumonia, on 24 March 1603 CE at Richmond Palace. She was 69 years old and had outlived all her friends and favourites; she was buried in Westminster Abbey. As the queen had once said to Parliament, and through that body, spoken to her people:
And though you have had, and may have, many mightier and wiser princes…yet you never had, nor shall have, any that will love you better.
The queen's reign may have been assessed less favourably in recent times, particularly its final years, but she still compares well to her immediate predecessors and successors. The queen's greatest failing was perhaps having no children and never nominating an heir. Consequently, she was succeeded by her closest relative, James I of England (aka James VI of Scotland), the son of Mary, Queen of Scots. James would reign until 1625 CE and so be the first Stuart to rule England. The Stuarts would survive the brief republic of Oliver Cromwell, 1649-1660 CE, and so they remained in power until 1714 CE."
COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen F. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen SPC Woody Bullard 1SG Steven Imerman SFC William Farrell Lt Col Charlie Brown Col Carl Whicker SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth SP5 Geoffrey Vannerson MSG Felipe De Leon Brown LTC Stephen C. Maj William W. 'Bill' Price PO1 H Gene Lawrence LTC Jeff Shearer ] LTC Wayne Brandon PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SPC Douglas Bolton PVT Mark Zehner
Elizabeth I of England
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Monarchy
Posted >1 y ago
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Excellent old world history share brother SGT (Join to see) , I have read different accounts on this.
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SGT (Join to see) One of the Smartest, Most Astute, Leaders of Her Age. Learned well from Observation. The Virgin Queen (Learned that Sex in the Tudor Period just Complicates Everything, Had to Look No further than Her Father, Sister Mary and Cousin Mary). Lived a Long Time Too.
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