In the century long tug-of-war between Catholics and Protestants for
control of England, Queen Elizabeth I was a win for the Protestants,
undoing all the
work her sister Mary
had put into making England Catholic.
Elizabeth was not exactly predestined to
rule England. Many others were ahead of
her in line. It was only an unlikely string of specific events that elevated her to Number One. She was
the only surviving child of Anne
Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII.
Elizabeth
became the third of Henry VIII's children to rule England, but after
all that, she managed to stabilize the throne by
holding onto it for 45 years, from 1558 until her death in 1603.
Under Elizabeth, England started on its path to world domination on
the high seas by defeating
the Spanish Armada and establishing England's first tentative colonies
in America. Privateers sailing under her license raided Spanish America
and circumnavigated the globe. The English language started to come
together as a national tongue under writers like Shakespeare.
Elizabeth was the last monarch of the House of
Tudor, and when
she died unmarried and childless, the throne passed to King James of
Scotland of the House of Stuart, son of Mary Queen of Scots. This
brought
about a defacto unification of the island of Great Britain.
Queen Elizabeth I of England