15 Amazing Facts About Queen Elizabeth I

Queen Elizabeth I took the crown of England on January 15, 1559 and ruled until her death in 1603. Here are 15 things you might not know about Good Queen Bess.

She very nearly wasn’t queen at all.

Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne required a great deal of good luck … or bad luck, depending on whose perspective you take. Following the death of her father, King Henry VIII, Elizabeth was third in line for the throne after her younger half-brother Edward and her older half-sister Mary. A 10-year-old Edward took the throne in 1547, ruling for only six years before dying of a fever.

Just before his death, Edward named his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, his successor (bumping Elizabeth down yet another spot). However, Jane’s stint on the throne was a brief 13 days—Mary succeeded in having Jane deposed and took over the crown herself for five years, becoming Queen Mary I. Influenza took Mary’s life in 1558, and because she had no heir, Elizabeth at last became the queen of England, Wales, and Ireland.

She was imprisoned for associating with a rebellion against her half-sister.

In 1554, Elizabeth was tried and imprisoned on suspicion of abetting Wyatt’s Rebellion, an uprising against Queen Mary I that many believed to be motivated by the quest for Protestant liberation.

She was a clotheshorse.

Even though she’s remembered for her high fashions, it’s surprising to know just how expansive Elizabeth’s wardrobe was. According to one estimate, she may have owned as many as 2000 pairs of gloves.

Elizabeth firmly believed in astrology.

The queen kept a personal advisor named John Dee—a renowned mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and professed alchemist—in her regular company. Elizabeth relied on Dee’s counsel in the scheduling of important events and, as one rumor suggests, in the removal of a troublesome “death curse.”

A “cult” of admirers surrounded the queen.

Upon Elizabeth’s claim of the throne, her team of advisors encouraged a trend of flattering depictions among her portrait artists. As time went on, depictions of Queen Elizabeth I in both visual and written media began to incorporate likenesses of classic goddesses—she was compared to Venus, Astraea, and the Roman deity Diana, all in an effort to espouse connotations of divinity and purity. This trend of work is known as the Cult of Elizabeth, or the Cult of the Virgin Queen.

Elizabeth pioneered legislation to help feed the poor.

When it wasn’t spreading propaganda, Elizabeth’s administration was actually doing some good. The queen oversaw the nation’s first attempts at poverty relief: a gradual accumulation of rulings, like mandatory taxation, towards this end culminated in the 1601 Elizabethan Poor Law.

She could speak numerous languages.

In addition to her native English, Queen Elizabeth I was known to be fluent in French, Italian, and Latin, going so far as to translate collections of lengthy texts into these languages. The queen is also believed to have spoken Spanish, Welsh, Irish, Flemish, Greek, and the now-endangered Cornish.

A few rumors still tie her romantically to Shakespeare.

Clearly an intellectual, Elizabeth made it her mission while in power to patronize the theatrical arts. Her devotion to the stage led to an assortment of musings regarding her relationship to William Shakespeare. Some scholars surmise that the queen had a personal kinship with the playwright, who alludes to her (quite amorously) in the second act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

That very time I saw, but thou couldst not / Flying between the cold moon and the earth, / Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took / At a fair vestal throned by the west, / And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow, / As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts; / But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft / Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon, / And the imperial votaress passed on, / In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

She was at the center of another romantic scandal.

If the tabloids had existed in the 16th century, they would have had a field day with Queen Elizabeth I. She turned down proposals from the likes of King Philip II of Spain, King Eric XIV of Sweden, Archduke Charles of Austria, and French brothers Henry III and Francis, Dukes of Anjou. Throughout her life, Elizabeth’s one true love remained her childhood friend Robert Dudley, whose marriage to Amy Robsart kept the two from achieving Elizabeth’s long desired union.

Even after the sudden death of Robsart in 1560 Elizabeth resisted marrying her lifelong friend. Eighteen years later, he’d go on to find a second wife, Lettice Knollys, whom Elizabeth was said to have treated with merciless scorn.

Her scandals weren’t limited to marriage proposals.

In addition to these many spotlighted proposals, Queen Elizabeth I found (and continues to find) herself the subject of plentiful rumors about secret love affairs, mainly to high-profile men: explorer and writer Sir Walter Raleigh, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex; and Lord Chancellor Christopher Hatton rank as her most noteworthy would-be loves.

She was the only English queen who never married.

Despite the many men who vied for her hand, Elizabeth never accepted a husband. She is the only English queen to bear this distinction, although eight kings before her also remained lifelong bachelors (Æthelstan, Eadred, Edward the Martyr, Harthacnut, Edgar the Ætheling, William II, Edward V, and Elizabeth’s brother Edward VI).

The House of Tudor ended with Elizabeth I.

In addition to being the last monarch to reign unmarried, she was also the last to rule over England before its union with Scotland. Elizabeth died in 1603, the same year that the Treaty of Union (or the Union of England and Scotland Act) would take effect, under the watch of her successor, James I. Finally, Elizabeth was the fifth and final Tudor monarch.

At the time, Elizabeth was one of the oldest English monarchs.

When she died at age 69, Elizabeth I was the oldest monarch in English history at the time (breaking the nearly 300-year record set by 68-year-old Edward I upon his death in 1307). Elizabeth held this honor until 1754 (151 years), when King George II hit a ripe old 70 while still ruling over what had become Great Britain. He died at age 76 in 1760.

Incidentally, the current record holder is Queen Elizabeth II, who passed away in 2022 at age 96 years and 140 days.

Her looks were somewhat deceiving.

Following a bout with smallpox in the early 1560s, Elizabeth I suffered facial scarring and hair loss, but nobody would have known it. She kept up appearances with an ample supply of gallant wigs and the application of white makeup over her face, which was in keeping with the style of the era.

She cursed like a sailor.

Elizabeth was famous for her proclivity for colorful language, a characteristic she is said to have inherited from her father, Henry VIII.

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A version of this story was published in 2015; it has been updated for 2024.