Skip to main content

Focus on Tudor Life: Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I is the second daughter of King Henry VIII.

As a princess, she doesn't think woman is a weaker sex, she said: "I know that I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, bu I have the heart and stomach of a king..."

After she succeeded Queen Marry, who is her elder sister, the successor of King Edward VI, the son of King Henry VIII, Elizabeth always maintained high standards at her court. She even refused to employ anybody who was ugly - a young man was once denied employment because he had a front tooth missing. Elizabeth hated being disobeyed. Her ladies-in-waiting were expected to ask her permission before they married. Nobody was allowed to sit while she stood, and anyone addressing the Queen had to do so on bend knee.

Even though England was not a rich country, Elizabeth insisted that her coronation appear grand and extravagant. She wanted to show people that she was the rightful heir to the throne.

Elizabeth never married. When Elizabeth was a teenager, she said: "I will never marry!" As reigning Queen, she was under enormous pressure to find a husband and have children. but she said: "I am already bound unto a husband, which is the kingdom of England."

Elizabeth loved poem and court drama, the court became famous for promoting the theatre. Plays by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were performed before the Queen. Shakespeare believed to  have written The Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night especially for her.

Most summers Elizabeth went on a grand tour of her royal palaces and the homes of her courtiers.  Elizabeth visited her favourite Robert Dudely, she stayed for ten days and was treated to torch-lit dinners, music and fireworks. It is said that when Elizabeth told Dudley that she couldn't see the new gardens from her bedroom, he had a garden built overnight under the Queen's window.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Does pearls reproduce by itself through time

At the request of several families he and Mrs Legge gave a home for some months to a young Dutch girl, a granddaughter of the first Dutch governor of the Straits Settlements. She had several pearls of which the Dutch residents were great collectors, got from oysters found in a river of the Malay Peninsula, when she left them she gave Mrs Legge a small box containing a large pearl the size of a pea, with a blue spot on it, and two others not so large. This box was then put away and locked up. Several weeks later he took it out and on opening it discovered more than a dozen pearls, most of them very small. Astonished at the phenomenon he called his chief servant, a Portuguese, who happened to enter the room and who expressed no surprise but declared it to be a common occurrence. On enquiry he found that many of the Dutch people had jars of pearls, large and small, which had accumulated in this way. Some years later he related the incident at dinner on board ship. The captain was a cautio

Bidmas, Bedmas, Bodmas, Pedmas And Christmas

This BBC GCSE Bitesize post says, BODMAS stands for 'brackets', 'other', 'division', 'multiplication', 'addition' and 'subtraction'. It's the order in which we carry out a calculation. But another article says, the order of operations in Maths called BIDMAS. BIDMAS stands for Brackets, Indices, Division and Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction. The difference is that the second substitute 'o' with 'i', and we can understand that teacher normally chooses easy way to explain whose pupils can understand, exponent or power or indices are out of reach of foundation students, so teachers uses 'other' instead. And in this article , 'o' actually stands for 'order', as far as my memory can go, my English teacher never teach me 'order' actually means 'Powers and Square Roots, etc.' In United States, the mnemonic fo Order of Operation is PEMDAS, because brackets are called pa

Panic or panick

There is only one spelling for panic ; the verb is inflected 'panic, panics, panicked, and panicking’. The form panick is used for progressive tense, past tense and past participle. We don't write panick today, though English speakers from a few hundred years ago might have (in the same way they might have written musick). When the alternate spelling “panick” is used for the past participle: "I panicked last night at the disco." When it’s use for progressive tense: “Invariably, when markets are panicking, they sell the stocks quickly.” It's the rule for root words ending in "c" is that you have to add “k”, so the spelling is related with the pronunciation. If we don't add the <k>, it looks as if the <c> has to be pronounced /s/. If the "k" was not there, “panicing” would look like the word which is supposed to be pronounced as if it is ended in "sing," while “paniced” would be pronounced like “panised”. The same