Elizabeth I

A Marriage Never Spent

Elizabeth Tudor was two years old when her father, King Henry VIII, had her mother, Anne Boleyn, beheaded, and was declared illegitimate before she was three. At twenty she was in the Tower on suspicion of plotting against her half-sister, Queen Mary I — a different Mary from her cousin, the Queen of Scots — and talked her way out of it. She became queen in 1558 of a country that had swung between Catholic and Protestant rule four times in twenty-five years, and resolved the question by design, keeping it deliberately vague: outward conformity required, private belief not investigated. She was reported to have said she had no desire to make windows into men's souls. She used the possibility of her own marriage as a diplomatic instrument for twenty-five years and never once spent it. She reigned forty-four years and died the last of her line — having never married, that too was a decision.

Refused Her Bed, Refused Her Physicians

She died at Richmond on 24 March 1603, aged sixty-nine. In her last days she refused her bed and sat propped on floor cushions for hours, refused her physicians, and would not name a successor while silence still protected her — naming one would only give rivals something to rally around. Tradition holds that her secretary of state, Robert Cecil, got some kind of answer close to the end — accounts disagree on whether she spoke, gestured, or did nothing at all. She had spent forty-four years keeping options open and closed the final one as late as it could be closed.