"To her own people she boasted on her accession that she was ‘mere English.’ Her mother had been no foreign princess but an English flirt, and her father, the founder of England's Navy and of England's religious independence, had possessed a sixth sense whereby he understood the English people, even in the highest rages of his tyranny. She inherited from both, but most from her father in whose steps it was her ambition to walk. If she was heir to her mother's vanity and coquetry, she heeded the warning of her fate; and her own bitter experiences as a girl,—disgrace, imprisonment and danger of death,—had taught her, as Frederic the Great was taught by similar experiences in boyhood, that private affections and passions are not for Princes. She had learnt every lesson that adversity had to teach, and she would leave it to her rival to lose the world for love."
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Poets from EnglandTranslators from EnglandAnglicans from the United KingdomWomen from EnglandMonarchs from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
G. M. Trevelyan, Illustrated History of England (1926; 1956), p. 326
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England
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Elizabeth I of England
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