CORONATION | Elizabeth I, November 17, 1558

Elizabeth I (regnat 1558-1603)

 November 17, 2020—This day in 1558, 25-year-old Queen Elizabeth I,  the Virgin Queen, ascended to the English throne after the death of her half-sister, Mary I (Mary Tudor or "Bloody" Mary although she wasn't as bloody as her father Henry VIII). 

Elizabeth 2 was a year older than Elizabeth I when she became Queen in 1952. (I was in England then and vividly remember watching the coronation on a tiny television.) Elizabeth II has stayed in the throne for 68 years, the only British monarch to have lived this long and to have held the crown for this long.

The Crown went to Elizabeth I at a time when England was debt-ridden because of Henry VIII’s spending, despite his having seized and sold so many monastic lands. 

The country was deeply divided because of Henry VIII’s break with Rome, and then Mary I's attempt to restore Catholicism. A new problem was emerging with a dissenters disagreeing with the doctrines and example of both the Catholic Church and the Church of England. It would be 62 years from Elizabeth I’s ascension to the throne, and in the reign of James I of England (also titled James VI of Scotland), that the Pilgrims gave up on both England and Holland and set off to create the Plymouth colony in the New World. (Spoiler: The new regime in Massachusetts got to look a lot like the theocracy they left behind.)

Elizabeth I coat of arms

She inspired her subjects with walking tours and encouraged portraits of herself in gorgeous regal attire and flattering songs about her. She started England's empire by chartering companies like the East India Company to colonize areas around the world.  She was the first monarch to allow theaters to operate legally, opening up careers for dramatic writers of whom we are most grateful for William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. 

Compared with James I and the ill-fated Charles I, who provoked Parliament with the doctrine of the Monarch’s Divine Right to Rule (until dissenters in Parliament raised an army, chased Charles down in Oxford University, and made clear how much they disagreed with this idea...), Elizabeth I was wise and tolerant. She was the head of the Church of England, but she gave Catholics freedom to worship. She was not a war hawk, but when she learned that Spain had sent an Armada of warships to England, she rode out to rally the troops and England prevailed.