77 Facts About Queen Elizabeth I

Sometimes referred to as the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth was the last of the five monarchs of the House of Tudor.

Queen Elizabeth I depended heavily on a group of trusted advisers led by William Cecil, whom she created 1st Baron Burghley.

Queen Elizabeth I was eventually succeeded by her first cousin twice removed, James VI of Scotland; this laid the foundation for the Kingdom of Great Britain.

Queen Elizabeth I had earlier been reluctantly responsible for the imprisonment and execution of James's mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.

In government, Queen Elizabeth I was more moderate than her father and half-siblings had been.

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Queen Elizabeth I was cautious in foreign affairs, manoeuvring between the major powers of France and Spain.

Queen Elizabeth I was the second child of Henry VIII of England born in wedlock to survive infancy.

Queen Elizabeth I was declared illegitimate and deprived of her place in the royal succession.

Queen Elizabeth I Jane died the next year shortly after the birth of their son, Edward, who was undisputed heir apparent to the throne.

Queen Elizabeth I was placed in her half-brother's household and carried the chrisom, or baptismal cloth, at his christening.

Thomas Seymour engaged in romps and horseplay with the 14-year-old Queen Elizabeth I, including entering her bedroom in his nightgown, tickling her, and slapping her on the buttocks.

Queen Elizabeth I rose early and surrounded herself with maids to avoid his unwelcome morning visits.

Queen Elizabeth I tried to convince Elizabeth to write to Seymour and "comfort him in his sorrow", but Elizabeth claimed that Thomas was not so saddened by her stepmother's death as to need comfort.

Queen Elizabeth I's will ignored the Succession to the Crown Act 1543, excluded both Mary and Elizabeth from the succession, and instead declared as his heir Lady Jane Grey, granddaughter of Henry VIII's younger sister Mary.

Mary, a devout Catholic, was determined to crush the Protestant faith in which Queen Elizabeth I had been educated, and she ordered that everyone attend Catholic Mass; Queen Elizabeth I had to outwardly conform.

Mary's closest confidant, Charles V's ambassador Simon Renard, argued that her throne would never be safe while Queen Elizabeth I lived; and Lord Chancellor Stephen Gardiner, worked to have Queen Elizabeth I put on trial.

Queen Elizabeth I was a better ally than the chief alternative, Mary, Queen of Scots, who had grown up in France and was betrothed to the Dauphin of France.

Queen Elizabeth I was then presented for the people's acceptance, amidst a deafening noise of organs, fifes, trumpets, drums, and bells.

Queen Elizabeth I was a Protestant, but kept Catholic symbols, and downplayed the role of sermons in defiance of a key Protestant belief.

Queen Elizabeth I was fortunate that many bishoprics were vacant at the time, including the Archbishopric of Canterbury.

Nevertheless, Queen Elizabeth I was forced to accept the title of Supreme Governor of the Church of England rather than the more contentious title of Supreme Head, which many thought unacceptable for a woman to bear.

Queen Elizabeth I considered several suitors until she was about fifty.

Queen Elizabeth I was extremely jealous of his affections, even when she no longer meant to marry him herself.

Queen Elizabeth I raised Dudley to the peerage as Earl of Leicester in 1564.

Queen Elizabeth I died shortly after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

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Queen Elizabeth I turned down the hand of Philip, her half-sister's widower, early in 1559 but for several years entertained the proposal of King Eric XIV of Sweden.

Queen Elizabeth I considered marriage to two French Valois princes in turn, first Henry, Duke of Anjou, and then from 1572 to 1581 his brother Francis, Duke of Anjou, formerly Duke of Alencon.

Queen Elizabeth I seems to have taken the courtship seriously for a time, and wore a frog-shaped earring that Francis had sent her.

In 1563, Elizabeth told an imperial envoy: "If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married".

Queen Elizabeth I's silence strengthened her own political security: she knew that if she named an heir, her throne would be vulnerable to a coup; she remembered the way that "a second person, as I have been" had been used as the focus of plots against her predecessor.

At first, only Elizabeth made a virtue of her ostensible virginity: in 1559, she told the Commons, "And, in the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin".

Ultimately, Queen Elizabeth I would insist she was married to her kingdom and subjects, under divine protection.

Catholics accused Queen Elizabeth I of engaging in "filthy lust" that symbolically defiled the nation along with her body.

Henry IV of France said that one of the great questions of Europe was "whether Queen Elizabeth was a maid or no".

Queen Elizabeth I was taken to Madrid for investigation, where he was examined by Francis Englefield, a Catholic aristocrat exiled to Spain and secretary to King Philip II.

Queen Elizabeth I feared that the French planned to invade England and put her Catholic cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne.

In 1563 Queen Elizabeth I proposed her own suitor, Robert Dudley, as a husband for Mary, without asking either of the two people concerned.

In 1581, to convert English subjects to Catholicism with "the intent" to withdraw them from their allegiance to Queen Elizabeth I was made a treasonable offence, carrying the death penalty.

Queen Elizabeth I knighted Francis Drake after his circumnavigation of the globe from 1577 to 1580, and he won fame for his raids on Spanish ports and fleets.

Queen Elizabeth I enraged Elizabeth by accepting the post of Governor-General from the Dutch States General.

Queen Elizabeth I saw this as a Dutch ploy to force her to accept sovereignty over the Netherlands, which so far she had always declined.

Queen Elizabeth I's "commandment" was that her emissary read out her letters of disapproval publicly before the Dutch Council of State, Leicester having to stand nearby.

The military campaign was severely hampered by Queen Elizabeth I's repeated refusals to send promised funds for her starving soldiers.

Queen Elizabeth I had good reason not to place too much trust in her commanders, who once in action tended, as she put it herself, "to be transported with an haviour of vainglory".

In 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada, Queen Elizabeth I sent to Spain the English Armada or Counter Armada with 23,375 men and 150 ships, led by Sir Francis Drake as admiral and Sir John Norreys as general.

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Peregrine Bertie, 13th Baron Willoughby de Eresby, largely ignoring Queen Elizabeth I's orders, roamed northern France to little effect, with an army of 4,000 men.

Between 1594 and 1603, Queen Elizabeth I faced her most severe test in Ireland during the Nine Years' War, a revolt that took place at the height of hostilities with Spain, who backed the rebel leader, Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone.

In spring 1599, Queen Elizabeth I sent Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, to put the revolt down.

Queen Elizabeth I was replaced by Charles Blount, 8th Baron Mountjoy, who took three years to defeat the rebels.

Queen Elizabeth I continued to maintain the diplomatic relations with the Tsardom of Russia that were originally established by her half-brother, Edward VI.

Queen Elizabeth I often wrote to Tsar Ivan the Terrible on amicable terms, though the Tsar was often annoyed by her focus on commerce rather than on the possibility of a military alliance.

Queen Elizabeth I declared his kingdom open to all foreigners, and dismissed the English ambassador Sir Jerome Bowes, whose pomposity had been tolerated by Ivan.

Queen Elizabeth I continued to appeal to Feodor in half appealing, half reproachful letters.

Queen Elizabeth I proposed an alliance, something which she had refused to do when offered one by Feodor's father, but was turned down.

Queen Elizabeth I "agreed to sell munitions supplies to Morocco, and she and Mulai Ahmad al-Mansur talked on and off about mounting a joint operation against the Spanish".

Queen Elizabeth I was portrayed as Belphoebe or Astraea, and after the Armada, as Gloriana, the eternally youthful Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser's poem.

Queen Elizabeth I gave Edmund Spenser a pension; as this was unusual for her, it indicates that she liked his work.

Queen Elizabeth I's painted portraits became less realistic and more a set of enigmatic icons that made her look much younger than she was.

Queen Elizabeth I was happy to play the part, but it is possible that in the last decade of her life she began to believe her own performance.

Queen Elizabeth I became fond and indulgent of the charming but petulant young Earl of Essex, who was Leicester's stepson and took liberties with her for which she forgave him.

Queen Elizabeth I repeatedly appointed him to military posts despite his growing record of irresponsibility.

Queen Elizabeth I knew that her own misjudgements were partly to blame for this turn of events.

Queen Elizabeth I therefore entered into a coded negotiation with James VI of Scotland, who had a strong but unrecognised claim.

James's tone delighted Queen Elizabeth I, who responded: "So trust I that you will not doubt but that your last letters are so acceptably taken as my thanks cannot be lacking for the same, but yield them to you in grateful sort".

Queen Elizabeth I's health remained fair until the autumn of 1602, when a series of deaths among her friends plunged her into a severe depression.

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Queen Elizabeth I's coffin was carried downriver at night to Whitehall, on a barge lit with torches.

Queen Elizabeth I was lamented by many of her subjects, but others were relieved at her death.

Queen Elizabeth I was praised as a heroine of the Protestant cause and the ruler of a golden age.

The triumphalist image that Queen Elizabeth I had cultivated towards the end of her reign, against a background of factionalism and military and economic difficulties, was taken at face value and her reputation inflated.

Picture of Queen Elizabeth I painted by her Protestant admirers of the early 17th century has proved lasting and influential.

Queen Elizabeth I's memory was revived during the Napoleonic Wars, when the nation again found itself on the brink of invasion.

Queen Elizabeth I's reign is famous for the defeat of the Armada, and for successful raids against the Spanish, such as those on Cadiz in 1587 and 1596, but some historians point to military failures on land and at sea.

Queen Elizabeth I offered very limited aid to foreign Protestants and failed to provide her commanders with the funds to make a difference abroad.

Queen Elizabeth I established an English church that helped shape a national identity and remains in place today.

Queen Elizabeth I believed that faith was personal and did not wish, as Francis Bacon put it, to "make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts".

Queen Elizabeth I was the first Tudor to recognise that a monarch ruled by popular consent.

Priding herself on being "mere English", Queen Elizabeth I trusted in God, honest advice, and the love of her subjects for the success of her rule.