by Paul Wallis

Created on: January 18, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Question; what leader of a nation spent nearly her entire life under threat of assassination, rebellion, and in direct confrontation with the only superpower of her time, and laid the foundations of her country to become a global power?

Answer; Elizabeth The First of England.

Here we have the story of a successful leader who achieved miracles despite her society. Elizabeth was born the daughter of Anne Boleyn, which was a political error of great magnitude. After the death of her father, Henry VIII, and the brief reign of her brother, Edward, she was subjected to the tender care of her embittered and brutalized stepsister, the aptly named Bloody Mary. Mary's relationship with Elizabeth was such that as a disowned "bastard" daughter she was required to attend as a servant to the baby Elizabeth, and was treated like an object of abuse by her relatives, in-laws, and the court. The result was a very hard time for Elizabeth when Mary came to power.

Things had already become grim by any measure. From the age of fourteen she was subjected to physical and mental abuse. There is some reason to believe that one of her "guardians" may have added attempted sexual abuse to the list after Henry's death. She, too, had suddenly become a "bastard" and took her turn in the vicious process. From a successor to the throne to a possible encore at the chopping block doesn't seem to have been much of a step. Mary's accession culminated in her imprisonment in the Tower Of London, a great way to spend adolescence, if at this point not necessarily much worse than life outside the Tower had been. Thomas Wyatt's rebellion had been the spark for this move, and Wyatt, although offered a pardon if he would implicate Elizabeth, refused to do so. That was all that had stood between her and certain death, and was a pretty good indication of her parlous grip on life.

These were especially brutal times, and a miscellany of powerbrokers, would-be revolutionaries, and other delightful parasitic manifestations of humanity were running England like a dying greyhound. The nation fractured disastrously. Very little was left of Henry's kingdom. Mary's response to this dissolution was to burn Protestants. During this period Elizabeth was incessantly at risk of immediate death. As a Protestant her position was parlous, to say the least. She was also a direct threat to Mary as a possible successor. Many of her friends had been implicated in "plots", real or imaginary, to provide an excuse for removing Elizabeth.

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