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Portrait of Elizabeth I

Monarchs · Tudor

Elizabeth I

1533–1603

House of Tudor — the Elizabethan settlement and the last of the line

In office: 1558–1603

Daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, declared illegitimate as a child and imprisoned under her sister, she reigned for forty-four years. Her religious settlement of 1559 steered a deliberate middle way; her refusal to marry made her unmarriageability an instrument of policy; and her long duel with Spain produced the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the defeat of the Armada. She died childless in 1603, and the crown passed to the Scottish king she had never met.

How to spot them

  • ▸Gloriana, the Virgin Queen; portraits loaded with pearls, sieves, ermine and globes
  • ▸Clue words: 'Supreme Governor', 'Regnans in Excelsis', 'Fotheringhay', 'Golden Speech', 'Gloriana'
  • ▸Advisers: William Cecil, Lord Burghley; Francis Walsingham; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester
  • ▸The last Tudor; succeeded by the son of the cousin she executed
  • ▸Cross-reference: the Armada campaign of 1588 has its own story; this is the reign and the woman

In the reign

A settlement of 1559 making the sovereign Supreme Governor rather than Supreme Head of the church, with one prayer book for all (1559)

The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity; the wording spared the consciences of Catholics and women alike.

A papal bull of 1570 declaring a queen a heretic and absolving her subjects of their allegiance (1570)

Regnans in Excelsis, which turned English Catholics into potential traitors overnight.

An execution at Fotheringhay Castle in February 1587, the warrant signed and then furiously disowned by the signer (1587)

Mary, Queen of Scots, after nineteen years of captivity and the Babington Plot; the secretary William Davison was made the scapegoat.

A charter of December 1600 to a company of London merchants trading beyond the Cape of Good Hope (1600)

The East India Company, founded on the last day of the sixteenth century.

A rising in London in February 1601 by a disgraced favourite, preceded by a commissioned performance of a play about a deposition (1601)

Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex; his supporters paid for a staging of Shakespeare's Richard II at the Globe.

A speech to a hostile parliament in November 1601, promising to revoke the worst monopolies: 'you never had any that will love you better' (1601)

The Golden Speech, her last address to the Commons.

A statute of 1601 making each parish responsible for its own poor, the framework of English relief for two centuries (1601)

The Elizabethan Poor Law, codifying measures of 1597; not finally replaced until 1834.

A death at Richmond Palace in March 1603 and a courier's ride north with a ring, to fetch a Scottish king (1603)

Sir Robert Carey rode to Edinburgh in under three days to tell James VI he was king of England.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born at Greenwich on 7 September 1533; her mother Anne Boleyn was executed when she was two, and she was declared illegitimate.
  • •She succeeded on 17 November 1558 and was crowned on 15 January 1559; the date of her accession was kept as a national holiday for over a century.
  • •The Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 defined the doctrine of the Church of England.
  • •She never married; suitors included Philip II of Spain, Archduke Charles of Austria and Francis, Duke of Anjou, whom she called her 'frog'.
  • •Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was her lifelong favourite; his wife Amy Robsart's death in 1560 made marriage impossible.
  • •William Cecil, Lord Burghley, served her for forty years as Secretary and then Lord Treasurer; Francis Walsingham ran her intelligence network.
  • •Francis Drake completed his circumnavigation in 1580 and was knighted aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford.
  • •The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588; further armadas in 1596 and 1597 were scattered by storms.
  • •The Nine Years' War in Ireland (1594–1603) ended with Tyrone's surrender days after her death.
  • •She died on 24 March 1603 at Richmond, the last Tudor, and is buried in Westminster Abbey above her half-sister Mary I.

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