Elizabeth I

(1533–1603)

   Monarch.

   Elizabeth was the daughter of King Henry VIII of England by his second wife, Anne Boleyn. During the reign of her elder half-sister, Mary i, she conformed to the prevailing Catholicism, although for a period she was imprisoned in the Tower of London. She succeeded to the throne in 1559. The Roman Catholic Bishops refused to take the Oath of Allegiance and she was eventually crowned by the Bishop of Carlisle. In religion she tried to steer a middle course between the old Catholicism and the new Protestantism and she insisted that she disliked making ‘windows into men’s souls’. Rejecting her father’s title of Supreme Head of the Church, she chose to be described as Supreme Governor. She reissued the 1552 Prayer Book with some conciliatory amendments and she appointed the moderate Matthew parker to be her Archbishop of Canterbury. Gradually, uniformity was established and the first text of the Thirty-Nine Articles defining the Anglican faith was issued in 1563. In 1570 she was excommunicated by Pope Pius v. This effectively led to the greater harassment of Catholics, but, after the execution of her cousin Mary Queen of Scots and the defeat of King Philip II of Spain’s Armada, the Catholic threat subsided. By the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603, England was largely united and was the leading Protestant power in Europe.

   G.B. Harrison (ed.), The Letters of Queen Elizabeth (1935);

   C. Cross, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (1969);

   W.P. Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation (1968);

   J.E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (1934).