Elizabeth I
Elizabetha I
Queen of England · Queen of Ireland · Supreme Governor of the Church of England
1533 – 1603
Biography
Last of the Tudors and the monarch who fixed England's identity as a Protestant, parliamentary, and maritime power. Her religious settlement of 1559 established the moderate Anglican via media; her navy and weather scattered the Spanish Armada in 1588; her court patronized Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Spenser. She refused all marriage proposals, declared herself wedded to her kingdom, and died at sixty-nine — naming with her last breath the Stuart king of Scotland as her successor.
Events
On 8 February 1587, after nineteen years of English captivity and three botched plots against Elizabeth I in her name, Mary Stuart was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle. Elizabeth signed the warrant under enormous Privy Council pressure and later professed bitter regret. Mary's son James VI of Scotland — destined to inherit the English throne sixteen years later — protested the execution but did not break with England over it.
Also there: Mary, Queen of Scots
Philip II of Spain assembled the Grande y Felicísima Armada — 130 ships, 30,000 men — to invade Elizabethan England, depose its Protestant queen, and reclaim the English throne for Catholicism. English long-range gunnery, fireships at Calais, and the great Atlantic gales drove the fleet north around Scotland and Ireland; perhaps half the ships and most of the men never returned to Spain. The defeat ended Spain's century-long dominance of European warfare.
Also there: Philip II of Spain
Elizabeth I died childless on 24 March 1603 with the words "my cousin of Scotland" reportedly her last designation of an heir. Her great-grandnephew James VI of Scotland — descended from Henry VII through his daughter Margaret Tudor — inherited the English and Irish crowns the same day, uniting the three British kingdoms under a single monarch for the first time. Each kept its own parliament, courts, and church.
Also there: James VI and I, Margaret Tudor
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