Queen Elizabeth

ARGUMENT

Queen Elizabeth was a remarkable woman and one of the most remarkable aspects of her royalty was her capacity of breaking almost all the rules. These rules were created by men. The first and the most important rule started from the idea that a Queen is –in the happiest case – a nuisance. This idea was contradicted by the Elizabethan England which was an active society that became aware of its national destiny, destiny which would have transformed England from an insignificant country in the greatest empire of the world.

I consider Queen Elizabeth to be an intelligent woman. The Elizabethan Reform was the one in which she managed to show and prove her efficient way of thinking and doing things.

Queen Elizabeth

The way that the reform took place and the way of introducing a Protestant religion in a former Catholic state was unbelievable. She amazes through her great leading spirit and through her power of imposing her ideas. She could not stand to be contradicted and the ones who did contradict her had to support the consequences.

"I may not be a lion, but I am a lion's cub, and I have a lion's heart”

INTRODUCTION

In the XVI-th century, the religion played an essential part in the usual life of the people. The Church had the right to say its opinion in the judging problems that concerned the most important relations between people. These services were paid and that was why the bishops were rich men. During the Middle Ages, the relations between the monarch and the Church were very tight, but much tensed. It was necessary that these relations to be tight because it was established that the civil power and the religious one worked together. The religion was a factor of control in a violent society and it had no reason to be afraid of the king. Theoretically, the task of the monarch was to protect the Church and the whole religious society. The decisive element was the Pope, whose mission was to supervise the religious culture and the appointment of the important ecclesiastic persons in the whole Europe. The medieval kings were angry because of the independence of the Pope and this was the point where the tensed relation started.

In England, this situation was not the same after the royalty of Henry the VIII-Th. The separation between the England Church and the Roman-Catholic one was the consequence of the impossibility of the Pope of not offering Henry the divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The divorce of Henry was pronounced by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and it was considered a defiance from the traditional authority, the Pope. The separation of Rome was sustained by political factors, which gave the king the possibility of interfering in theological problems whenever he wanted.

This splitting of the Catholic world introduced a new idea of religion: Protestantism, which contradicted the ideas of the Roman-Catholic principles; according to these principles, the priest had the right to possess functions and power. Henry was against this religion and he did not accept its ideas until his death. Still his children – Edward the VI-Th and Elizabeth were brought up in a Protestantism spirit. At the death of Henry, his son was minor and the power was held by the Lord of Somerset. He and the Duce of Northumberland, his heir and enemy at the same time, proclaimed Protestantism as an official religion.

The problem of religion became a minor one in 1553 when Edward the VI-Th, which sustained during his royalty the Protestantism. After his death the problem of succession at the throne was the priority of the citizens of England. The one that came at the throne of England was Mary the I-St. –the eldest of the children of Henric. She was a catholic and that is why she converted the England State at Catholicism. Many Protestants were burnt on the pyre because of their religion and that is why the Protestantism won many supporters. When Mary died in 1558, no one disagreed with the crowning of Elizabeth - which had a Protestant religion. Queen Elizabeth had to deal with a whole Catholic hierarchy, which was very strong inside and outside the Parliament. Beside this problem, the new Queen had to face the confusion created in the country, because many English persons had not heard of the battle between Catholicism and Protestantism.

These problems brought up a new reform: the Elizabethan one, whose consequences were the returning at Protestantism. The new Queen had a real intellectual battle with the Catholic supporters.