Elizabeth I gave her name to a golden age of poets, statesmen and adventurers. Known as the Virgin Queen, or Gloriana, her union with her people became a substitute for the marriage she never made.
Her reign, known as the Elizabethan Age, is remembered for many reasons… the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and for many great men, Shakespeare, Raleigh, Hawkins, Drake, Walsingham, Essex and Burleigh.
She was endowed with great courage. As a young woman she had been imprisoned in the Tower of London on the orders of her half-sister, Queen Mary I, and lived in daily fear that she would be executed as her mother, Anne Boleyn had been.
Elizabeth, unlike her sister Mary de ella, was a Protestant and declared when she became Queen 'that she did not make windows into men's souls' and that her people could follow any religion they wished.
She was a great beauty in her youth. She had hazel eyes, auburn hair and a white skin, a striking combination. But in her old de ella she became quite grotesque in appearance in a red wig, with a white pockmarked face and a few black rotten teeth!
She was also noted for her learning from her, and although she was sometimes wayward, she was generally considered wise.
She loved jewels and beautiful clothes and had a hard skeptical intellect, which helped her steer a moderate course through all the conflicts of her reign, and there were many!
Her speech de ella in 1588 to her troops de ella at Tilbury, drawn up to repel the Duke of Parma's army in the year of the Spanish Armada, is often quoted. One part of the speech is well known, and the section that starts… 'I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King of England too and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm', is stirring stuff even today, many centuries later.