"Gloriana! The Golden Legend of Elizabeth I"

In Elizabeth's forty-four-year reign (1558-1603), England grew from a small weak nation on the north-west edge of Europe, reeling from three decades of political and religious strife, to a stable world power, challenging Spain's monopoly in the New World and founding a maritime empire of her own. Elizabeth ended the religious persecutions of her Catholic sister Mary, established the Anglican Church of England, defeated the "invincible" Spanish Armada, kept her nation at peace in a belligerent age, presided over a glittering court, and inspired a Golden Age of Renaissance culture.

Or so at least runs the legend. At its heart lies considerable substance, for Elizabeth was indeed an extraordinary woman, coming to power at a time when England's past experience of ruling queens was uniformly poor and most believed that any female was simply incapable of governing. She was educated by England's top humanist scholars, read seven languages, translated Boethius for fun, delivered impromptu speeches in Latin, played the lute and virginals like a professional, and gave her name to the first English colony of "Virginia." She sent daring English privateers out to raid Spanish possessions around the world, supported scientists and explorers, and patronized artists, musicians, and poets.

In addition to such royal accomplishments, however, Elizabeth also possessed skills more familiar to our modern world: she was a genius at public relations, and understood instinctively how best to use all the available media of her day. In speeches and writing, public appearances and official ceremonies, dress and comportment and paintings and prints, the Queen displayed a hard-headed approach to controlling her own image. With her ministers' help and the half-knowing connivance of her subjects, she created a monarch who was part real woman and part legendary goddess. Together they crafted and largely sustained a royal image of power, justice, benevolence, Protestant piety, unattainable beauty, and firm Tudor resolve.

This attention to appearance was evident from the earliest days of her reign, when the turbulent and dangerous childhood of Henry VIII's younger daughter gave way to the popular triumphant accession of a Protestant Princess
(Case 1): Elizabeth's words and actions during these tense transitions served notice that the new young Queen was already well aware of the importance of her image, and creating a pattern for the rest of her reign. As an eleven-year old princess she had translated pious French religious poems as a holiday gift for her royal stepmother, and her tutor Roger Ascham had praised her academic accomplishments. The Londoners who flocked to her Coronation procession saw a serious, pious, benevolent young Queen who hushed the crowd that a child might speak, carried a poor woman's gift of flowers, stopped frequently to enjoy allegorical tableaux constructed by the citizens, and (for those too far away to hear her approving words) held high the newly restored English Bible before clasping it to her heart.

In the providential belief that God had saved her from danger so that she could restore the true and reformed Protestant faith, Elizabeth stood at the center of the religious settlement establishing the Anglican Church of England: looking serenely back at her subjects from the title page of an English Bible, issuing a volume of sermons "for the better understanding of the simple people," starring as the heroine of John Foxe's "Book of Martyrs", and remembered each Sunday through the Book of Common Prayer used in every parish church in the land.

In politics too the Queen's carefully worded speeches to Parliament (printed after the fact for public consumption), the language of her proclamations, the popular pamphlets of pro-government propaganda, the widely reported quasi-public pronouncements of Elizabeth and her ministers, all reinforced the strongly personal elements of Her Majesty's Government: that she was the font of justice and mercy, that her Court was the primary source of all honor and preferment, that her person was the target of enemies foreign and domestic, and that upon her life and safety rested the well-being of the realm. Beyond the formal institutions of the Queen's government, however, Elizabeth's reign also saw a great expansion in the uses of indirect political performance: in her public appearances and many summer "progresses" around the realm, in elaborate formal visits to stay with favored courtiers, and in ceremonial civic "entrances", the Queen was regularly on display to her people and the focus of a skillfully produced media campaign to promote her own royal image and the many benefits of her reign. Elizabeth's particular genius was knowing how to blend a sacred aura of majesty with the common touch, and a stream of inexpensive books, pamphlets, and engravings from the popular press described and spread her legend to a wider audience through the effective use of the new technology of print.

Such skills were nowhere more evident than in the early years of a long and worldwide conflict with Spain which occupied the second half of her reign. "The use of the sea and air is common to all," the Queen told the Spanish ambassador; "neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons." She invested in the voyages of exploration (with a little privateering on the side) which Richard Hakluyt described in print for an eager public; supported Drake's daring circumnavigation of the world; encouraged Ralegh's colonial schemes and listened to John Dee's programme for empire; and challenged the claims of Catholic Spain to a monopoly in the Americas.

When this cold war turned hot and Phillip II sent an "Invincible Armada" to invade England in the summer of 1588, Elizabeth rode down to review her waiting army at Tilbury Camp and delivered the most famous speech of her life: "I am come," she told them, "…to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people mine honor and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too." The defeat and ruin of this first and strongest of several Spanish fleets, harried up the Channel by a smaller English navy, only confirmed England's providential belief that God had saved His favored nation, and its Queen.

Yet the last decade of Elizabeth's reign was not altogether happy. Although foreign troops never set foot on English soil, the war with Spain and a new rebellion in Ireland dragged on inconclusively, and their continuing costs in human misery, economic hardship, and social unrest, combined with growing religious division, finally began to chip away at the Queen's popularity. Old advisers died off, and new young favorites conspired behind her back. Fewer now remembered the brave young Protestant Princess of 1558; most saw only an aging, lonely, tired old woman behind the red wig, heavy make-up, and elaborate gowns."

If the Queen's personal magic began to falter a little towards the end of her life, then other champions had already taken over the mission of preserving a legend. Nicholas Hilliard's idealized miniature portraits of an ever young and beautiful Queen, music composed in her honor by Byrd and Tallis and Morley, Holinshed's and Camden's histories of her world, Spenser's "Gloriana," the polestar of The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's plays, performed in her presence: all contributed to the glittering cultural Renaissance of Elizabeth's England. At its center, ageless and enduring, was - and is - Elizabeth Tudor.