When Did Queen Elizabeth Rule
When a youthful, pretty Elizabeth II acceded to the throne in 1952, she used to be hailed through newspapers as a fairy tale queen, “the hope of our nation.” And who can deny the glamour and spectacle of carriages and costumes at her coronation the following year? Here was once a “New Elizabethan Age” that promised to chase away the shadows of postwar gloom.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth I
Tudor Elizabeth’s route to the throne had been fraught with danger. Declared illegitimate following the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn, she was once raised a Protestant and persevered imprisonment in the Tower of London throughout her Catholic sister Mary’s reign. When Elizabeth became Queen in 1558, she used to be welcomed with enthusiasm by using a state in poor health of “Bloody Mary’s” persecutions. The challenges she inherited have been breathtaking, now not least how to rule as a 25-year-old female in a man’s world. Capricious and headstrong, Elizabeth had nevertheless honed her survival skills. Urged to marry and produce an heir, she favored to coquette with grandees at domestic and abroad: The royal hand was once coveted, however never won. She introduced the selfless photograph of the Virgin Queen, married to the throne and her nation. Elizabeth additionally had an exquisite Genius for surrounding herself with clever, achieved ministers.
In non-secular matters, Elizabeth sought a “middle way” between the rampant Protestantism of her brother Edward VI’s reign and the rabid Catholicism of Mary’s rule. Compromise applicable extremists on neither side of the ideological divide, and her reign used to be barbed in part by using conspiracies and persecution. Nor did Good Queen Bess shrink from signing the loss of life warrant for Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, after the latter had been implicated in treasonable plotting.
All the while, England continued to enlarge its influence, via voyages of discovery, trade, and piracy, stimulated and every so often financed by way of the queen. Sea captains and adventurers like Francis Drake, who circumnavigated the world, and Walter Raleigh, who organized expeditions to North America, sprinkled a salty shimmer of derring-do across the times.
When England faced Catholic Spain’s “invincible” Armada in 1588, Elizabeth the Warrior Queen famously addressed her troops at Tilbury: “I understand I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the coronary heart and belly of a King, and of a King of England, too; and suppose foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe need to dare invade the border of my realm.”
