eliza1

I consider her to be the greatest ruler in world history, and the irony, of course, is that she was never meant to be a ruler. Her father considered her birth to be a disaster, and her mother paid for her failure to deliver a male heir with her life. Ultimately, Henry did have a son, who reigned a mere five years. It was the least of his children, the last in succession, who turned out to be Henry's true legacy..."a chip off the old block."

Unlike Henry, however, she did her people mostly good. She was intelligent, stubborn, wily, and the greatest flirt in England. She reigned for almost half a century and oversaw the beginning of England's great era of exploration. History's greatest playwright flourished in the free artistic climate she created, and those who did not agree with her in the matter of faith were still free to practice as long as they didn't make a big deal about it.

Several years ago, I wrote a historiography seminar paper on Elizabeth called England's Eliza and the Rule of Personality, in which I tried to set down my theory that Elizabeth invented England...the sense of Englishness that has always set the English apart from Europe. The idea of rule by personality cult has fallen into disfavor in this century, but Elizabeth is history's prime example of how to do it right.

From the time she ascended the throne in 1558 until her death in 1603, Elizabeth I of England reigned in firm control of her kingdom, fashioning into the English nation a powerful and historically independent nobility, various dissident religious factions, a disenchanted middle class, and a disenfranchised peasantry. That she accomplished this is undisputed; why she was able to do so, a lone woman in a century of change, is debated among those historians who have studied her reign. Some put it down to luck; she reigned in an auspicious time, when the rise of the middle class combined with the Reformation to change the character of all of Europe, not just England. Others mark her as a political genius who parlayed her much-sought hand and supposed virginity into a position of power, strength, and prosperity for England among the nations of Europe.

My own interpretation is that Elizabeth came to the throne with certain well-defined personal goals of her own. As it turned out, over the course of forty-five years, her goals for herself completed the centralizing work started by her predecessors, notably her grandfather, Henry VII, and proved to be the best course of action and inaction for England.

The Coronation Portrait

By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, England had been transformed from an essentially medieval country into a modern nation. The price of coming of age under a strong and beloved personality would not be known until nearly a half-century after Elizabeth’s death, when England completed her journey into the new age by placing a not so well-loved monarch on the scaffold.By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, England had been transformed from an essentially medieval country into a modern nation. The price of coming of age under a strong and beloved personality would not be known until nearly a half-century after Elizabeth’s death, when England completed her journey into the new age by placing a not so well-loved monarch on the scaffold.

Next