Elizabeth I of England

Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603) was Queen of England in the late sixteenth century. She was a member of England's House of Tudor, the second daughter of Henry VIII. She ascended to the throne in 1558 upon the death of her sister, Mary. A Protestant, she made that religion the official state religion of England, as it had been under her father and younger brother, Edward VI; Catholicism had been the state religion under Mary. Elizabeth also persecuted Catholics in much the same way her sister persecuted Prostetants. For these reasons, she was excommunicated by Pope Pius V in 1570.

In 1585, she involved England in a proxy war against Spain by supporting The Netherlands in their rebellion against Spanish colonialism. The war with Spain would drag on for the rest of her reign and beyond, and would include Spanish support for Irish resistance to English colonialism; but the moment of maximum danger passed when the Royal Navy defeated the Armada in the English Channel in the summer of 1588.

Elizabeth died in 1603 without having produced an heir. The Tudor dynasty, which had produced produced six monarchs over 118 years, died with her, and the Stuart dynasty began when James VI of Scotland, the great-grandson of Elizabeth's aunt (and son of Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had ordered beheaded in 1587) inherited the throne.

Elizabeth ruled England for forty-five years, during which period she secured the kingdom against foreign invasion, turned regular budgetary deficits into surpluses, largely settled religious strife in England (though internal religious violence would crop up occasioally for centuries to come), and in the end paved the ways for England to become a power-broker in European as well as North American affairs. She developed England's first international espionage network, which quickly became the best in Europe and started the tradition of Britain maintaining top-notch intelligence services, a tradition which has continued into the twenty-first century. She also provided one of modern Western history's first examples of a strong and capable female ruler.

Famous for her extravagant tastes and patronage of the arts, she is often credited with presiding over a cultural renaissance, though arguably so-called Elizabethan literature flourished in spite of rather than because of her: she imposed upon the publishing industry the strictest censorship laws in English history. She was notorious for her mercurial moods and tempers, for the favoritism she showed her courtiers (and the occasional lapses in judgment when she came under the influence of a malfeasant courtier) and the casual coldness with which she ordered the deaths of her enemies. She obtained religious consensus by persecuting religious dissenters, even though Catholics continued to make up the majority of both northern England and Ireland for most if not all of her reign. Her tightening of the hitherto lax English suzerainty over Ireland paved the way for a pattern of human rights violations perpetrated by the English and British in Ireland through the twentieth century. Despite these grounds for criticism, history tends to remember Elizabeth very favorably.

Elizabeth I in Ruled Britannia
Elizabeth's entire reign was marked by tense diplomatic relations with Spain. Knowing her nation would most likely lose in a war against its much stronger enemy, Elizabeth, with the assistance of her counselor, William Cecil, avoided a war as she could, but her support for Protestant rebels in the Spanish colony of the Netherlands forced the issue. In 1588, King Philip II of Spain launched the Spanish Armada, a massive fleet of 138 warships, against England. The Armada defeated the English fleet and landed its armies on England's shores. The Spaniards easily defeated the amateur English army, and Elizabeth was soon overthrown. Philip's daughter Isabella was made Queen of England. Philip ordered that Elizabeth be imprisoned in the Tower of London, saying "Though she herself murdered a Queen* I will not do the same."

Elizabeth remained in the Tower for ten years before a plot set in motion by Cecil and executed by his son, Robert, expelled the Spanish and restored Elizabeth to the throne. She became exceedingly grateful to English playwright William Shakespeare for glorifying her in his play Boudicca. She granted him knighthood; patronage for his acting troupe formerly Lord Westmorland's Men and afterward known as The Queen's Men; a divorce from his wife, Anne Hathaway; the parole of Lope de Vega; permission to perform King Philip; and a substantial monetary reward despite the depleted state of her treasury.

*She had executed her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, a year before being overthrown.

Elizabeth I in Atlantis
In the eighteenth century, schoolboys were forced to learn the details of Elizabeth I's greatness on pain of corporal punishment. When Victor Radcliff became the first Consul of Atlantis, Meg Radcliff was excited to think that some day that would be true of her husband as well. Victor found the idea vaguely horrifying.