Monarchs From England

"To report her death, like a thunder-clap, was able to kill thousands. It took away hearts from millions. For having brought up even under her wing a nation that was almost begotten and born under her, that never shouted any other ave than for her name, never saw the face of any prince but herself, never understood what that strange outlandish word 'change' signified—how was it possible but that her sickness should throw abroad universal fear, and her death an astonishment?"

"Queen Elizabeth of famous memory,—we need not be ashamed to call her so! ... that Lady, that great Queen."

"Not surprisingly, the cult of Elizabeth grew directly in proportion to the perceived Catholic menace. In the autumn of 1626, while ladies at court were dallying with the Mass, and while Spanish forces appeared ascendant in Europe, the anniversary of Elizabeth's accession produced a resounding clamour of bells. "Today these bells rang merrily in remembrance of famous Queen Elizabeth" wrote one London correspondent on 17 November. Similarly in 1630 there was "universal ringing of bells for Queen Elizabeth's coronation" on 17 November... This anniversary ringing, quite innocent of official prompting, combined elements of reassurance and defiance, as if the commemoration of Elizabeth could somehow restore the virtues of her reign. "Our Elizabeth" had become the unofficial patron saint of England."

"Lest I offend, I hasten to explain that I have no motive to reduce Elizabeth in stature, or to diminish her vitality, if such a thing were possible. I know that her power to overawe, having first won the devotion of those personally and politically closest to her, has rarely been equalled."

"Victory over Spain was the most shining achievement of Elizabeth's reign, but by no means the only one. The repulse of the Armada had subdued religious dissension at home. Events which had swung England toward Puritanism while the Catholic danger was impending swung her back to the Anglican settlement when the peril vanished in the smoke of the burning Armada at Gravelines."

"With 1588 the crisis of the reign was past. England had emerged from the Armada year as a first-class Power. She had resisted the weight of the mightiest empire that had been seen since Roman times. Her people awoke to a consciousness of their greatness, and the last years of Elizabeth's reign saw a welling up of national energy and enthusiasm focused upon the person of the Queen. In the year following the Armada, the first three books were published of Spenser's Faerie Queene, in which Elizabeth is hymned as Gloriana. Poets and courtiers alike paid their homage to the sovereign who symbolized the great achievement. Elizabeth had schooled a generation of Englishmen."

"The greatest prince that perhaps this country ever saw."

"On Wednesday the twenty-third of March [1603] she grew speechless. That afternoone, by signes, she called for her Councill, and by putting her hand to her head, when the King of Scottes was named to succeed her, they all knew hee was the man she desired should reign after her."

"[In 1588] the Queen with a masculine Spirit came and took a View of her Army and Camp at Tilbury, and riding about through the Ranks of Armed men drawn up on both sides her, with a Leader's Truncheon in her Hand, sometimes with a martial Pace, another while gently like a Woman, incredible it is how much she encouraged the Hearts of her Captains and Soldiers by her Presence and Speech to them."

"[T]he Memory of that Princess (which amongst English-men ought ever to be gratefull and sacred)."

"The wisest woman that ever was; for she understood the interests and dispositions of all the princes in her time, and was so perfect in the knowledge of her own realm, that no counsellor could tell her anything she did not know before."

"[Elizabeth is] descended by father and mother of mere English blood, and not of Spain, as her sister was."

"Remember and consider that this very day...eighty-two years sithence began a new resurrection of this kingdom from the dead, our second happy reformation of religion by the auspicious entrance of our late royal Deborah (worthy of eternal remembrance and honour) into her blessed and glorious reign."

"Elizabeth, unlike Mary, born of both an English mother and an English father, seems to have felt real affection for her people. Certainly, she had the common touch, frequently going out amongst them on summer-long cross-country progresses, or being carried in an open chair through the streets of London. At such moments Elizabeth played to the crowd, ordered "her carriage... to be taken where the crowd seemed thickest, and stood up and thanked the people.""

"Elizabeth, again like her father, learned to use the possibility of matrimony as a diplomatic trump card or, more crudely, as bait: after all, marriage to the queen of England would be a peaceful and inexpensive way for Spain or France to win that country into an alliance and, perhaps, even back to Catholicism. Throughout the first half of the reign, especially during foreign policy crisis, she entertained a steady stream of French princes and German dukes, all of whom offered undying love- and diplomatic alliance. Unlike her father, however, she knew that marriage was a card that she could only play once. Once played, her freedom of maneuver and, with it, that of her country, would be virtually eliminated. Instead, she preferred to play potential suitors against each other in a brilliant game of amorous, albeit duplicitous, diplomacy."

"Indeed, Queen Elizabeth was capable of making her Privy Council and parliaments wait an agonizingly long time while she made up her mind. In some crucial cases (marriage, what to do about Mary Queen of Scots), it could be argued that she never did so. But it could also be argued that she had been taught by hard experience the dangers of committing herself too early or too definitely. After all, Elizabeth had grown up in a perilous environment in which overt commitment to one side or the other- in politics or religion- could lead to disgrace, even death. As queen, she ruled a country which was seemingly at the mercy of bigger, more powerful neighbors. What often struck her subjects (and later male historians) as indecisiveness now looks like prudence, even a mastery of herself and of the situation at hand. In particular she was a virtuoso at playing two sides off each other, so that they would not turn against her- or England."

"If even Mary's good qualities proved to be counter-productive, Elizabeth's bad ones sometimes worked in her favor. For example, her imperious nature, quick temper, and sharp tongue did much to counter any assumptions that she was weak because she was a woman. The most common charge leveled against her, also linked to contemporary assumptions about her gender, is that she was indecisive. Thus, Robert Devereaux, earl of Essex (1565-1601), complained to the French ambassador in 1597 that "they labored under two things at this Court, delay and inconsistency, which proceeded from the sex of the queen.""

"Like her father, Henry VIII, with whom she identified publicly, she was a larger-than-life personality. As with King Hal, this makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction. This much is inarguable. Elizabeth was young when she took the throne: 25 years old. She was also good-looking- an advantage that she was not reluctant to exploit. In addition, the new queen was highly intelligent, witty, hardworking, and well educated. She was fluent in Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and, of course, English. She wrote poetry and could speak effectively when she chose to do so. Elizabeth was also, like her father, something of a scholar: she once translated Boethius' On the Consolations of Philosophy into English for her own amusement. She also took after her father in being both musical and athletic. She played the virginals (a primitive keyboard instrument), danced, and hunted with enthusiasm. A final, crucial similarity to Henry VIII was that Elizabeth I was vain and imperious. Men could flirt with her- indeed, she encouraged them- but they had to be careful not to go too far, for she never forgot that she was queen."

"Perhaps no figure in English history has inspired more myth than Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603). She had many personas: the Virgin Queen, Gloriana, Good Queen Bess to her supporters; the bastard and heretic daughter of the whore, Anne Boleyn, to her detractors. In her day, scores of poets and artists promoted these various images. Since then, legions of writers, some scholarly, some popular, as well as playwrights and film-makers, have sought to relate the achievements of her reign and explain the mystique she exercised over her people. She herself was well aware of that mystique, cultivating it so effectively that it is almost impossible to pin down the "real" Elizabeth. Still, it is necessary to try, if only because so many of the age's triumphs and failures were intimately bound up with her words and actions."

"Greatest of all the Queen's services to England was the peace she gave her. When a divided Christendom was wracked by cruel ideological passions, within their watery bounds the English were at peace and unity. It was of this Elizabeth was most proud, and deservedly, for it was she who had saved them from the maelstrom by her diplomacy, her womanly dissimulation and cunning and, after her brief initial intervention in the religious wars of Scotland and France, her determination to spare both her people and purse from the waste, folly and destruction of war."

"With characteristic pragmatism as well as a keen eye for symbolic revenge, Elizabeth stripped lead and tin from deconsecrated Catholic churches to export to the Ottomans as munitions in their wars with the Shia Persian empire—“which the Turk buys of them,” wrote an outraged Spanish ambassador to England, “almost for its weight in gold, the tin being vitally necessary for the casting of guns and the lead for purposes of war.” The trade was so successful that it was replicated in the Barbary states of North Africa, where again English armaments were traded for gold and sugar (hence Elizabeth’s infamously bad teeth). English merchants also traveled as far as Persia, playing the Shah off against his Ottoman adversaries in a dangerous geopolitical game, aimed at neutralizing the Catholic threat of imminent Spanish invasion and keeping the ailing English economy afloat."

"Official papal policy was to excommunicate Christians trading with Muslims, but Elizabeth was now beyond such edicts. By the 1580s Elizabeth had a resident ambassador in Istanbul (then Constantinople) and consuls throughout North Africa and the Middle East, including in places like Aleppo and Raqqa. As reformed Protestants, many of them would have felt safer traveling in Muslim lands under Ottoman protection than in Catholic Europe, where arrest and the Inquisition invariably awaited them."

"By the late 1570s, Elizabeth had developed an amicable correspondence with the Ottoman sultan Murad III, advising him that they both hated those idolatrous Catholics, and that she would be happy to act as his subject in return for a political and commercial alliance. Murad was rather perplexed—as we know from his advisers’ writings—to hear from a female ruler of a tiny country on the edge of Europe that he’d never heard of."

"A warm concern for the interest and honour of the nation, a tenderness for her people, and a confidence in their affections, were appearances that ran through her whole public conduct, and gave life and colour to it. She did great things, and she knew how to set them off according to their full value, by her manner of doing them."

"[S]he united the great body of the people in her and their common interest, she inflamed them with one national spirit, and, thus armed, she maintained tranquillity at home, and carried succour to her friends and terror to her enemies abroad."

"She considered herself as queen of a country cut off from the Continent, and separated by the sea from all other countries, except Scotland... The situation of an island affords great advantages, when they are wisely improved; and when they are neglected, as great disadvantages may result from this very situation. The reign, now before us, is a glorious and unanswerable proof, that the halcyon days, so much boasted of, and so seldom found, days of prosperity, as well as peace, may be enjoyed in an island, while all the neighbouring continent is filled with alarms, and even laid waste by war."

"She disappointed, divided, and weakened her enemies. She prepared the opportunities, which she afterward improved. She united, animated, and enriched her people; and, as difficult as that may seem to be for a prince in such a situation, she maintained her own dignity, and supported the honour of the nation."

"She considered the interest of no kingdom, no state, nor people, no not even the general interest of the reformation, as zealous a protestant as she was, nor the preservation of a balance of power in Europe, as great a heroine as she was, in any other light than relatively to the interest of England. She assisted, or opposed, she defended or attacked, just as this interest directed."

"Unallied and alone, queen Elizabeth maintained a glorious and successful war against the greatest power and the richest potentate in Europe. She distressed him in the West Indies. She insulted him in Spain. She took from him the empire of the sea. She fixed it in herself. She rendered all the projects of universal monarchy vain; and shook to the foundations the most exorbitant power, which ever disturbed the peace, or threatened the liberties of Europe... She, who seemed to have every thing to fear in the beginning of her reign, became in the progress of it terrible to her enemies... [S]he preserved her subjects in peace and plenty. While the glory of the nation was carried high by achievements in war: the riches and the strength of it were raised by the arts of peace to such a degree, as former ages had never seen, and as we of this age feel in the consequences."

"Now you, the whole world's ornament, the Queen On whose behalf both winds and oceans fight, Rule on with God, far from ambition seen, And succour still the pious with your might, That England you, you England long hold dear, Whom good men love as much as wicked fear."

"With the Turkish fleet destroyed, Spain for the time was without a rival in the Mediterranean large enough to challenge her or check her. The response of the nominally Catholic King of France to the great victory was secretly to offer Sokolli a firm alliance against Spain... In besieged Leyden, Dutch Calvinists there who followed the Prince of Orange wore little brass crescents in their caps. But though excommunicated by the old Pope as a heretic and treated by him as a usurper, Elizabeth of England showed greater political penetration. For her, Lepanto was not so much a victory for Spain or the Pope as a triumph for all Christendom – a guarantee that the values upon which Western Europe had been established would survive. To show exactly what she thought, the Church of England which she had established by law was ordered to hold services of thanksgiving."

"At the height of the siege [of Malta], and sensitive as ever to the realities of European politics, Elizabeth herself had warned that "if the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what peril might follow to the rest of Christendom". Elizabeth, the daughter of the schismatic Henry VIII, was kept on her throne with the help of extreme Protestants – followers of John Calvin. But in her private opinions she herself kept her distance from them. Elizabeth had deeper discernment, and was aware that if the Turks came in victorious, so that the Crescent prevailed against the Cross, then Europe as a recognizable society with its inherited moral values must change for the worse; the world Englishmen had always known would disappear."

"This lady was endued with learning in her sex singular, and great even amongst masculine princes; whether we speak of learning, of language, or of science, modern or ancient, Divinity or Humanity: and unto the very last year of her life she was accustomed to appoint set hours for reading, scarcely any young student in a university more daily, or more duly. As for her government, I assure myself I shall not exceed, if I do affirm that this part of the island never had forty-five years of better times; and yet not through the calmness of the season, but through the wisdom of her regiment."

"Her Majesty at her coming to the crown, utterly disliking of the tyranny of the Church of Rome, which had used by terror and rigour to seek commandment of men's faiths and consciences, although as a prince of great wisdom and magnanimity she suffered but the exercise of one religion, yet her proceeding towards the Papists was with great lenity, expecting the good effects which time might work in them. And therefore her Majesty revived not the laws made in 28° and 35° of her father's reign, whereby the oath of supremacy might have been offered at the king's pleasure to any subject, though he kept his conscience never so modestly to himself, and the refusal to take the same oath without further circumstance was made treason. But contrariwise her Majesty (not liking to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts, except the abundance of them did overflow into overt and express acts and affirmations,) tempered her law so, as it restraineth only manifest disobedience in impugning and impeaching advisedly and maliciously her Majesty's supreme power, and maintaining and extolling a foreign jurisdiction."

"She is your true and natural Queen, bred, born, and brought up amongst you, and as she has naturally loved you even from the beginning of her reign, so do you most naturally, like English men, defend her, fight for her, and not only guard her with danger of your lives, but also aid her with your lands and livings, and as God has blessed you by her means with gold and silver... open your purses and bestow largely upon her now in time of war, by whom you have filled your coffers richly in time of peace... Pugnate pro patria, fight for you country, your dearest country, wherein you have been bred, born, nourished and brought up, toward which you ought to be as inwardly affected, as you are naturally moved to your mothers. It is your native soil, and therefore most sweet; for what may be dearer or sweeter than your Country?"

"It is difficult to say whether the gifts of nature or of fortune are most to be admired in that illustrious lady. The praise which Aristotle gives wholly centres in her—beauty, stature, prudence, and industry. She has just passed her sixteenth birthday, and shows such dignity and gentleness as are wonderful at her age and in her rank. Her study of true religion and learning is most energetic. Her mind has no womanly weakness, her perseverance is equal to that of a man, and her memory long keeps what it quickly picks up. She talks French and Italian as well as English: she has often talked to me readily and well in Latin, and moderately so in Greek. When she writes Greek and Latin, nothing is more beautiful than her hand-writing. She is as much delighted with music as she is skilful in the art. In adornment she is elegant rather than showy, and by her contempt of gold and head-dresses, she reminds one of Hippolyte rather than of Phsedra."

"God may forgive you, but I never can."

"I would not open windows into men's souls."

"If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all."

"Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor."

"I shall be thy name in Christ as I emerge through these walls in vain."

"There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety than myself. For it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have, any that will be more careful and loving."

"I know the title of a King is a glorious title, but assure yourself that the shining glory of princely authority hath not so dazzled the eyes of our understanding, but that we well know and remember that we also are to yield an account of our actions before the great judge. To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it."

"I do not so much rejoice that God hath made me to be a Queen, as to be a Queen over so thankful a people. Therefore I have cause to wish nothing more than to content the subject and that is a duty which I owe. Neither do I desire to live longer days than I may see your prosperity and that is my only desire."

"Though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my Crown, that I have reigned with your loves."

"Must is not a word to be used to princes! Little man, little man, if your father had lived, ye durst not have said so much: but thou knowest I must die, and that maketh thee so presumptuous."

"Those who touch the sceptres of princes deserve no pity."

"I am Richard II know ye not that? ... He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played 40 times in open streets and houses."

"For even our enemies hold our nation resolute and valiant, which though they will not outwardly show, they invariably know. And whensoever the malice of our enemies should cause them to make any attempt against us, I doubt not but we shall have the greatest glory, God fighting for those that truly serve Him with the justness of their quarrel."

"[L]et me warn you that there is risen both in your realm and mine a sect of perilous consequence—such as would have no kings but a presbytery, and take our place while they enjoy our privilege with a shade of God's Word, which none is judged to follow right without by their censure they be so deemed. Yea, look we well unto them. When they have made in our people's hearts a doubt of our religion and that we err if they say so, what perilous issue this may make I rather think than mind to write. Sapienti pauca. I pray you stop the mouths or make shorter the tongues of such ministers as dare presume to make orison in their pulpits for the persecuted in England for the Gospel. Suppose you, my dear brother, that I can tolerate such scandals of my sincere government? No."