Elizabeth I 1533-1603
Queen of England and Ireland from 1558

Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. When her father married his third wife, Jane Seymour, in 1536, Elizabeth and her elder half-sister Mary Tudor (the future Mary I) were declared illegitimate by parliament in favour of Jane Seymour's son, the future Edward VI. Her childhood was precarious but well educated, and unlike her sister she was brought up in the Protestant faith. In 1549, during the reign of Edward VI, she rejected the advances of Thomas Seymour, Lord High Admiral of England, who was subsequently executed for treason. On Edward's death she sided with her half-sister Mary against Lady Jane Grey and the Earl of Warwick (Northumberland), but her identification with Protestantism aroused the suspicions of her Catholic sister, and she was imprisoned in the Tower.

Her accession to the throne in 1558 on Mary's death was greeted with general approval as an earnest advocate of religious tolerance after the persecutions of the preceding reigns. Under the able guidance of Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) as Secretary of State, Mary's Catholic legislation was repealed, and the Church of England was fully established (1559-63). Cecil also gave support to the Reformation in Scotland, where Mary, Queen of Scots had returned in 1561 to face conflict with the Calvinist reformers led by John Knox. She was forced to abdicate in 1567, and in 1568 escaped to England, where she was placed in confinement and soon became a focus for Catholic resistance to Elizabeth. The Northern rebellion of 1569 was followed by the Ridolfo plot (1570); and also in 1570 the papal bull, Regnans in Excelsis, pronounced Elizabeth's excommunication and absolved her Catholic subjects from allegiance to her.

Government retribution against English Catholics, at first restrained, became more repressive in the 1580s. Several plots against the queen were exposed, and the connivance of Mary in yet another plot in 1586 (the Babington conspiracy) led to her execution at Fotheringay Castle in 1587. The harsher policy against Roman Catholics, England's support for the Dutch rebellion against Spain, and the licensed piracy of men like Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake against Spanish possessions in the New World, all combined to provoke an attempted Spanish invasion in 1588. The Great Armada launched by Philip II of Spain reached the English Channel, onlyto be dispersed by storms and English harassment, and limped back to Spain after suffering considerable losses.

For the remainder of her reign, Elizabeth continued her policy of strengthening Protestant allies and dividing her enemies. She allowed marriage negotiations with various foreign suitors but with no real intention of getting married, or of settling the line of succession; but with the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, she was content to know that the heir-apparent, James VI of Scotland, was a Protestant. She indulged in romances with court favourites such as Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and later with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, until his rebelliousness led to his execution in 1601.

Her fiscal policies caused growing resentment, with escalating taxation to meet the costs of foreign military expeditions, and famine in the 1590s brought severe economic depression and social unrest, only partly alleviated by the Poor Law of 1597 which charged parishes with providing for the needy. England's vaunted sea-power stimulated voyages of discovery, with Drake circumnavigating the known world in 1577 and Sir Walter Raleigh mounting a number of expeditions to the North American coast in the 1580s, but England's only real Elizabethan colony was Ireland, where opportunities for English settlers to enrich themselves at the expense of the native Irish were now exploited more ruthlessly than ever before and provoked a serious rebellion under Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, in 1597.

At Elizabeth's death in March, 1603, the Tudor dynasty came to an end and the throne passed peacefully to the Stuart James VI of Scotland as James I of England. Her long reign had coincided with the emergence of England as a world power and the flowering of the English Renaissance; and the legend of the 'Virgin Queen', assiduously promoted by the queen herself and her court poets and playwrights, outlived her to play a crucial part in shaping the English national consciousness.

Bibliography: S Bassnett, Elizabeth the First (1988); Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (1977); J B Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, 1558-1603 (2nd edn 1959; J E Neale, Queen Elizabeth (1934, reissued as Queen Elizabeth I, 1971).