Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I (7 September 1533 – 24 March 1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death, whose reign saw the establishment of the Church of England under the Elizabeth Religious Settlement and the framing of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. The last monarch of the Tudor dynasty, she reigned for 44 years, a period that profoundly shaped the doctrine, worship, and identity of the Church of England.

Early life and succession

Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533 at Greenwich, the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Her birth was a disappointment to the king, who had broken with the papacy and dissolved his first marriage in expectation of a male heir. When Anne Boleyn was executed in 1536, the young Elizabeth was declared illegitimate and removed from the line of succession, a status that overshadowed the remainder of her childhood.

Her position was later partly restored. By the Third Succession Act of 1544, Elizabeth was returned to the succession after her half-brother Edward and her half-sister Mary, though without any formal reversal of the declaration of illegitimacy. She received a careful humanist education and proved an able linguist and scholar. During the reign of Mary I, a Catholic restoration during which the Church of England's reformed settlement was dismantled, Elizabeth's Protestant sympathies made her position precarious, and she was at one point imprisoned in the Tower of London. She survived, however, and on Mary's death on 17 November 1558 she succeeded to the throne without opposition.

Accession and the Religious Settlement

Elizabeth was crowned on 15 January 1559 in Westminster Abbey by Owen Oglethorpe, Bishop of Carlisle, the senior bishop willing to perform the ceremony. Within months her government carried through Parliament the legislation known as the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. The Act of Supremacy (1559) restored the Crown's authority over the Church, though in a modified form: Elizabeth took the title Supreme Governor of the Church of England rather than the "Supreme Head" claimed by her father. The Act of Uniformity (1559) restored Protestant worship and imposed the Book of Common Prayer in its 1559 revision as the authorised liturgy of the Church.

In December 1559 Matthew Parker, the queen's former chaplain, was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, the appointment that anchored the new settlement in the historic structures of the English Church. Under Parker's leadership the hierarchy imposed the settlement across the dioceses, requiring clergy to subscribe to the royal supremacy and to use the prescribed services.

Doctrine and the Thirty-nine Articles

The doctrinal formularies of the Church of England were also framed under Elizabeth's reign. The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, agreed by the Convocations of 1563 and authorised in their final form in 1571, set out the Church's position on Scripture, justification, the sacraments, and church order. The settlement they embodied is often characterised as a middle way: episcopal in government and catholic in creedal confession, yet reformed in doctrine, rejecting papal jurisdiction and medieval practices such as purgatory, indulgences, and the invocation of saints. Writers of the period, including John Jewel in his Apology of the Church of England and later Richard Hooker in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, defended the settlement as continuous with the faith of the early Church.

Later reign

The religious settlement was challenged from both directions. In 1570 Pope Pius V issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating Elizabeth and absolving her subjects of their allegiance — a measure that hardened English suspicion of Catholic loyalty and brought sterner penal laws against recusants. At the same time, more ardent Protestants pressed for further reformation of the Church along presbyterian lines, a campaign the queen resisted, determined to preserve the settlement of 1559 intact.

The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 — after her implication in plots against Elizabeth's life — deepened the conflict with Catholic Spain. In 1588 Philip II sent the Spanish Armada to invade England; the fleet was defeated, and Elizabeth's speech to her troops assembled at Tilbury became the most celebrated utterance of her reign. Foreign war, religious division, and plots against her person marked her later years, yet the Church's settlement survived them unchanged in substance.

Death and succession

Elizabeth died on 24 March 1603 at Richmond Palace. Having named no heir publicly during her lifetime, she was succeeded peacefully by James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England. She left behind a church whose formularies — the Prayer Book, the Articles, and the Ordinal — remained the standards of Anglican doctrine and worship for centuries, and whose polity under the Crown as Supreme Governor endured as a defining feature of the Anglican Communion's mother church. Her reign is central to the History of Anglicanism and to the course of the wider English Reformation.

See also

• Thomas Cranmer
• Matthew Parker
• Books of Homilies
• Elizabeth Religious Settlement
• The 1559 Book of Common Prayer

References

• Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603, 2nd ed. (2001).
• Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I, 2nd ed. (1998).