Elizabeth 1

Project #EuropeanBios 47 is Queen Elizabeth 1, a tragic figure whose formidable talents were smothered by sexism. Her life was deeply tangled with that of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, who I'll be covering as #48 very soon after this, so stay tuned!

Liz, as I would have been executed for calling her, was born in 1533, one of the children of Henry 8, yes that one with all the wives, who I am not covering because there are more than enough bastard men in this project.

Speaking of bastards, Liz had a complicated childhood. Because Henry went through wives like other people go through socks, he tired of Liz's mother, Anne Boleyn. To get rid of her, he falsely accused her of adultery and had her executed, making Elizabeth an illegitimate child.

This meant Liz, aged 3, went from being a literal princess to just an uncomfortable reminder of a dead ex-wife overnight. Her various stepmothers (Henry had several more wives to go) treated her with varying degrees of kindness but she lived in constant fear of being eliminated.

There was a great deal of royal intrigue in Elizabeth's early life, most of it dull. So very quickly: when Henry 8 died Liz's brother Edward 6 became king. Edward died and left the kingdom to Lady Jane Grey, grand-daughter of Henry, but she was unpopular so it didn't happen.

Instead Elizabeth's sister Mary became queen in 1553 but made a series of unpopular decisions, such as marrying the unpopular, Catholic king Philip of Spain. There was a rebellion that she brutally suppressed, earning her nickname "Bloody Mary". But then Mary died in 1558 anyway.

Elizabeth was eligible to become queen because Henry 8 had belatedly recognized her as legitimate and then Mary had recognized her as heir. The idea that the queen had a choice about who came after her (rather than it being decided by blood ties) was novel and not fully accepted.

But now Liz, aged 25, was queen of England, and by the standards of royalty unusually qualified to be so. She had been well educated and was by all accounts brilliant, especially at languages. She could read English, Italian, Latin and Greek and translated books for fun.

She was also psychologically extremely messed up, as one might expect from someone whose father murdered their mother to marry someone else. All her life she suffered from anxiety and what would now be described as panic attacks.

In particular, she was not a fan of marriage. One does not need Freud to see why the daughter of Henry 8, player of the world's most literal fuck-marry-kill game, might not feel great about the institution, but there was another more practical reason related to sexism.

England had established that a woman could be Queen in her own right, but only recently, with Bloody Mary. However, if she married, her husband became king. Not just in title; all her powers went to him and she became subject to him. For Liz, marrying was the same as abdicating.

But the ruling classes of England really, REALLY wanted Liz to get married. Firstly, they were sexist and preferred kings per se. Secondly, they needed her to have a baby to establish the line of succession, because they were *very* worried about religion.

Our earlier subject Martin Luther is responsible for this one. Europe was in turmoil, gigantic upheaval was going on everywhere across the continent as Catholicism battled it out, literally and metaphorically, with protestantism.

This is why Bloody Mary marrying a catholic had been such a problem, as England was rapidly converting to protestantism, especially in London. Liz herself was... well, not Catholic. She left it kind of ambiguous whether she was protestant, which was politically convenient.

But the nobles who were Liz's real constituency wanted a protestant monarch, and they had a new authority. It was they who had decided that Lady Jane Grey didn't get to be Queen, a novel reversal of power in the way royalty worked in English history.

(They regretted their choice of Mary enormously; Bloody Mary had tried with a great deal of violence to reverse the conversion of England to protestantism and they didn't want it to happen again. So they wanted Liz to have a very obviously protestant successor lined up.)

But having a child would mean marrying, and marrying meant giving up power, and Liz absolutely did not want to do this. So she forswore marriage and apparently sex entirely, earning the nickname "the Virgin Queen".

This created a major political problem for her, however, because she needed a successor. Marriage was out, because it meant losing power. But if she even nominated another adult successor, chances were high the nobles would switch allegiance to the new, protestant ruler.

So Elizabeth, to maintain power, had to keep the question of succession open. But this was itself a problem because she had to devote nearly all of her massive reserves of energy and intelligence to fending off attempts to get her to birth or nominate a successor.

It is HARD to overstate the degree to which the ruling classes were obsessed with getting Elizabeth to name a successor. It was a question across the ruling classes of Europe; it was the focus of all her diplomacy; it colored every governing decision she made; it was exhausting.

So to placate those endlessly demanding she marry somebody, Elizabeth engaged in constant, absurd levels of pretending she was going to marry people. She engaged in multi-year courtships, one after another, none of which she was taking seriously, to stall for time. For decades.

She claimed to consider more than a dozen suitors over the years, everyone from the kings of Spain and Sweden to the princes of France, including Henry, Duke of Anjou, yes, the gay one, whom we covered briefly in the thread about his mother, Catherine de Medici.

It is a credit to Elizabeth's amazing powers of persuasion and political wrangling that she pulled this off. They genuinely believed she was going to marry one of these dudes, even when it was the 10th time in a row she pulled off this trick and the dude in question was gay.

This was exhausting but must have been made even more horrible because the entire time she was very much actually in love with somebody else, Robert Dudley. However, the nobles were dead-set against him, partly because he wasn't royal enough but also because he was married.

But two years after Liz became queen, Dudley's wife died, under mysterious circumstances, apparently from a fall down a not-very-long flight of stairs. This was so incredibly convenient for Dudley politically that suspicion was immediately raised that she'd been murdered.

Dudley's wife may actually have killed herself; she was sick with what was probably breast cancer, and prior to her death she herself expelled all her servants from the house so she could be alone. But the suspicion of murder was enough to ruin Dudley's chances with Liz forever.

In a final attempt to persuade Liz to marry him, Dudley threw an enormous, 19-day party for her at Kenilworth Castle, including a play during which the stage collapsed, killing three of the actors. Determined, he ran the play again the next day, presumably with understudies.

Unable to marry Dudley, Elizabeth instead kept him hanging around her, forever. He was always at court. They flirted constantly. She awarded him with honors and expensive estates. When he eventually remarried she flew into a jealous rage, but she always forgave him eventually.

The other major problem of her reign was what to do about her cousin Mary, Queen of Scotland. I will be covering Mary next, so I won't go into detail here, but her constant presence and scheming was a huge problem for Elizabeth, who eventually, reluctantly, had her executed

In between frustrated love and fake marriage proposals, Elizabeth was doing a pretty great job of governing. England was enjoying unparalleled peace and prosperity and she was incredibly popular with the public. She met people in crowds regularly and charmed their pants off.

Elizabeth was a *very* skilled politician. She used sexism as a weapon when it suited her, claiming weakness of mind "due to her sex", but other times demanded people ignore gender entirely, regularly referring to herself as a "prince" in diplomatic negotiations.

Within the limits of the times, she even played with gender. She was an excellent dancer, but also a fan of bear baiting. She mostly drank beer, but also wore elaborate gowns whenever she was in public. She used her virginity as a shield and a source of national pride.

She was also, like most powerful fucked-up people, kind of a lot. She was massively vain; no realistic portraits of her were ever made in her lifetime. She would fly into rages at her servants, screaming at them and once breaking a maid's finger.

Her death was distressing. After the deaths of several friends, she fell into a deep depression and became nearly catatonic with grief, sitting motionless and silent on cushions for hours on end, not eating or sleeping. The nobles did nothing but wait impatiently for her to die.

The reason for their impatience was they had a successor: young, male and extremely protestant, Edward 6 of Scotland was what they'd always wanted. Ironically, he was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, whom Liz had spent her entire life keeping away from the throne of England.

Elizabeth spent her whole life clinging to power despite endless sexist attempts to dislodge her, governed well despite endless distraction, and won the approval of a public who weren't sure they wanted a lady to rule them. For her efforts, she got no thanks at all.

Elizabeth's legacy was a changed monarchy: one who ruled at the will of the nobles, one for whom public pageantry was considered an essential part of the job, but also one where nobody would question whether a woman could rule in her own right ever again.

Correction: in this tweet I mean James 6 not Edward 6. Maybe the royals could give their kids more than one of 5 first names to avoid this.

P.S. Dudley's big gesture at the end was supposed to be a poet he hired reading a sonnet that asked Elizabeth to marry him but it started to rain so she took off early. The poet tried to run after her carriage while quoting the poem but ran out of breath. It was farcical.

Correction 2: Lady Jane Grey was grand daughter of Henry 7, not Henry 8, not that it makes much difference, they still bumped her off.