When the advisers of the late Queen Elizabeth I sorted through her belongings, they found a letter buried deep among her possessions. As they looked closer, they saw a note written in the queen’s own hand on the outside of it: “His last letter. ” It was from Robert Dudley, the man she had loved for decades and who had died in 1588, shortly after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The discovery revealed something the queen had kept hidden her entire life.
Elizabeth was born in 1533 into the greatest scandal of her age. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, had seduced her way into King Henry VIII’s bed and triggered his monumental divorce from Katherine of Aragon, the scandal that helped spark the English Reformation. That was only the beginning of Elizabeth’s troubles. Few people could say their own father executed their mother, but that is exactly what happened to her.
Anne Boleyn fell out of the king’s favor and was beheaded on May 19, 1536, when Elizabeth was just over two years old. A new stepmother arrived almost immediately. Jane Seymour, Henry’s third queen, moved into the palace just eleven days after the execution. Within a year, she gave Henry the thing he had risked everything for: a male heir.
Elizabeth now had a baby brother, Edward. By the age of twelve, Elizabeth had translated her stepmother Katherine Parr’s English work Prayers or Meditations into three languages, Italian, Latin, and French, and presented it to her father as a gift. By the end of her schooling, she was likely one of the best-educated women of her time. While Elizabeth was still a teenager, Henry VIII died, leaving her an orphan in the care of Katherine Parr.
Parr almost immediately married Thomas Seymour, the uncle of the new young king, Edward VI. Almost as soon as Elizabeth moved in with them, the forty-year-old Seymour began behaving in disturbing ways toward her. He would creep into her bedroom in his nightgown and tickle the princess. According to records from the time, Katherine Parr did nothing to stop it and even joined in at least twice, once helping her husband tickle Elizabeth and, in a particularly alarming incident, holding the girl down as Seymour ripped her dress to pieces.
Then Katherine Parr made a chilling discovery. She stumbled upon Seymour and the teenage Elizabeth locked in an embrace, a sign that the behavior was becoming romantic. Whether out of jealousy or fear for the girl, Parr sent Elizabeth away soon after. But that was not the last Elizabeth saw of Seymour.
Months later, Katherine Parr died in childbirth. With his wife conveniently out of the way, the widowed Seymour turned his attention back to the teenage princess. The Royal Council had had enough of his scheming and charged him with treason for plotting to marry Elizabeth. He was executed on March 20, 1549.
On July 6, 1553, Elizabeth’s brother Edward, Henry VIII’s only male heir, died, throwing the kingdom into chaos. Shockingly, he named his cousin Jane Grey as his successor rather than his sisters Elizabeth or Mary. Mary and Elizabeth quickly proved too powerful for Jane Grey, who was defeated and became known as the Nine Days’ Queen. In August 1553, Mary rode into London to claim the throne.
It could have been a moment of sisterly unity, but it was not. The two sisters were very different people, not just because they had different mothers. Mary, raised by Katherine of Aragon, was a strict Catholic. Elizabeth, born at the height of the Reformation, was Protestant.
Even as young girls they had never been friends. Mary refused to recognize Anne Boleyn as queen or even Elizabeth as a princess. Mary may have had another reason for jealousy: her husband, King Philip of Spain, reportedly planned to marry Elizabeth should anything happen to Mary, particularly if she died in childbirth. Mary’s reign quickly became unpopular because of her ruthless persecution of Protestants and her gruesome method of burning heretics at the stake, which earned her the nickname Bloody Mary.
When a rebellion broke out in 1554, Mary instantly suspected Elizabeth and threw her sister into the Tower of London for three terrifying months. During that time, Mary’s advisers whispered that while Elizabeth breathed, Mary’s throne would never be safe, and the only solution was to execute her. In the end, Elizabeth’s supporters in Mary’s court convinced the queen to spare her sister’s life. Mary placed Elizabeth under house arrest in the countryside.
Then, in 1558, Queen Mary died without children. Elizabeth was next in line, and she became Queen Elizabeth I. From the moment she took the throne, her advisers assumed she would marry to strengthen England and produce an heir. Though she considered candidates until she was fifty, she never married.
Her refusal to wed and her nickname, the Virgin Queen, elevated her to near-legendary status. Poets compared her to goddesses and the Virgin Mary. But her private life was far from simple. Her most notorious relationship was with her handsome childhood friend Robert Dudley.
There was one problem: he was already married. His wife, Amy Robsart, was battling breast cancer, and everyone assumed she did not have long to live. But her death in September 1560 was far more suspicious. She was found dead after falling down a flight of stairs.
The coroner ruled it an accident, but many in the palace assumed Dudley had arranged it to secure the queen’s affections. Historians agree that Elizabeth was prepared to marry Dudley, but he had no political clout, and with royals from across Europe vying for her hand, her counselors told her plainly that if she married him, they would revolt. Elizabeth backed off reluctantly, but she never forgot him. She was intensely jealous of his time and affections, so when she discovered his ultimate betrayal, she was enraged.
In 1578, Dudley married Elizabeth’s distant relative Lettice Knollys. He tried to keep the marriage a secret, which made it worse when Elizabeth found out. She was so furious she banished Lettice from court, never forgave her, and never acknowledged the marriage. Elizabeth also faced a dangerous enemy in her own family.
Mary, Queen of Scots, her Catholic cousin, posed a constant threat to Elizabeth’s reign and religion. At first, the two queens tried a friendly approach. Elizabeth even offered Dudley as a husband for Mary, but neither Mary nor Dudley was interested. Eventually, Mary’s decisions became so erratic that Elizabeth took drastic action.
She tore Mary away from her baby son, imprisoned her, and forced her to abdicate. Astonishingly, Mary spent the next nineteen years under Elizabeth’s guard. But Elizabeth’s most chilling act was yet to come. When Elizabeth discovered that Mary was helping incite a rebellion from her cell, she responded with brutal force.
On February 8, 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots met the axe. After Mary’s death, Elizabeth grew intensely remorseful and claimed she had signed the warrant without understanding her advisers would carry it out immediately. While it is possible her regret was real, many historians are suspicious of her backtracking; it is hard to sign a death warrant half-heartedly. Elizabeth’s reign is remembered as a golden age of exploration.
One of her favorite explorers was Francis Drake, who circumnavigated the globe between 1577 and 1580 and earned a knighthood from his queen. Elizabeth is perhaps most famous for defeating the Spanish Armada. After Drake raided Spanish ships, King Philip II of Spain decided he had had enough of England. In 1588, he sent his Armada to invade, bent on destroying Elizabeth and her reign.
To everyone’s surprise, the great naval power of Spain succumbed to English fire ships, and Philip’s fleet limped back to Spain in shambles. Elizabeth used the crisis to present herself as a warrior queen. When she inspected her troops on August 8, 1588, she wore a silver breastplate under a white dress. Her speech became famous: “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.
” People now see the Armada as a turning point, and it was, though not exactly as imagined. The triumph was more of a propaganda victory, as English success hinged on Spanish mistakes. The very next year, England sent a fleet of 150 ships to Spain, where they were defeated, and up to fifteen thousand men lost their lives. Spain held on to its naval dominance.
Elizabeth’s reign also saw a flowering of literature. William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe wrote their masterworks during her time, though Elizabeth was not much of a patron of the arts. Edmund Spenser paid homage to her in The Faerie Queene as Belphoebe, a strong virgin huntress, and Elizabeth liked the portrayal enough that Spenser became one of the only writers she patronized. The queen’s early life had been marked by poverty.
After her mother’s execution, Henry VIII ignored and neglected her so completely that her guardian had to beg the king for money to provide clothes that fit. Later, as queen, she collected more than two thousand dresses, and even that was not enough. She allegedly took a dress from one of her maids out of envy. She loved clothes and carefully chose them to project purity and divinity, though her cosmetics had a dark side, made of lead and vinegar that damaged her skin.
She also had a notorious sweet tooth and a fear of dentists. As she aged, her teeth yellowed and decayed so badly that foreign dignitaries often could not understand her. Elizabeth expected total loyalty and had a quick temper, just like her father. During one outburst, she broke a maid’s finger with a hairbrush and told everyone it was an accident involving a candlestick.
As she grew older, her courtiers never let on that her beauty was fading, continuing to compliment her as though she were still the young queen of her coronation. She seemed to believe them and favored whoever could flatter her most. That had dire consequences. One of her later favorites was Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who rose quickly at court with little responsibility.
In 1599, he deserted his military post, and Elizabeth put him under house arrest. In 1601, Essex plotted to kidnap the queen and take power. He had almost no supporters, and Elizabeth caught wind of the plot. She finally accepted her poor judgment and had him beheaded.
She never got over his death. A year later, one courtier remarked that her delight was to sit in the dark, sometimes shedding tears over Essex. Elizabeth’s last years were full of heartache. In the fall of 1602, months before her end, many of her friends and loved ones passed away, leaving her depressed.
She spent her last days lying motionless on cushions in an unremovable melancholy. Just before she died, she finally chose a successor, at least unofficially: James VI of Scotland, the son of her fallen cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. She never publicly declared him, but she made her intentions known to her advisers. On March 24, 1603, Queen Elizabeth I passed away in the early hours at Richmond Palace.
She was sixty-nine years old, and her reign of forty-four years made her the longest-reigning British queen after Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II. Elizabeth left bizarre instructions for her body, breaking royal tradition by insisting she not be embalmed. Many whispered it was to guard her secrets, and her loyal ladies-in-waiting made sure her wishes were honored. The House of Tudor, which began in 1485 with Henry VII, ended with her.
Though she kept it quiet for political reasons, Elizabeth had always loved her mother Anne Boleyn, quietly honoring her family’s positions at court and keeping her mother’s portrait in a locket around her neck. And buried among her belongings, the letter from Robert Dudley remained, marked in her own hand with words that spoke of a love she had carried to the very end.