1533-1603 · Queen of England and Ireland from 1558, daughter of Henry VIII
About Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I (1533-1603), daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, survived the reigns of her half-brother Edward VI and half-sister Mary I, including imprisonment in the Tower, to become Queen of England and Ireland in 1558. She restored a Protestant church settlement, never married, and governed for forty-four years through a period of religious conflict, war with Spain, and literary flowering. She was well educated in Latin, Greek, French, and Italian and composed speeches, prayers, letters, and translations.
In August 1588 Queen Elizabeth I came by river to the army camped at Tilbury, on the north bank of the Thames estuary in Essex, where troops under her lieutenant general, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, waited to resist a Spanish landing. The Armada sent by Philip II had already been driven up the Channel and scattered after the fighting off Gravelines, but no one in England yet knew that it would not return, and the Duke of Parma's army still stood ready in the Spanish Netherlands to cross.