Word: queen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...West b) Groucho Marx c) Queen Elizabeth II d) Ronald Reagan...
First feminist. First spinmeister. Megawatt celeb. So might our age judge her. To 16th century England, Elizabeth I was the original feminine mystique: goddess Gloriana; Virgin Queen; finally and enduringly, Good Queen Bess. The most remarkable woman ruler in history can claim few traditional princely achievements, yet she gave her name to an age. Hers was a prodigious political success story built on the power of personality: the Queen as star. A woman so strong, a politician so skillful, a monarch so magnetic that she impressed herself indelibly on the minds of her people to reshape the fate of England...
With her political and personal security threatened from beginning to end, Elizabeth needed all her courage, cunning and caution to reign. She took the throne of a poor, isolated and deeply humiliated country. As a Queen, she faced special problems of marriage and succession, religious division, domestic discontent and foreign threats. Her Church of England restored the country firmly to Protestantism, yet she allowed Catholics freedom of worship, easing the bitter religious strife of Mary's reign...
Elizabeth spent a lifetime contending with the issue of marriage and royal heirs and the challenges raised by men who would steal her scepter. Marriage is what 16th century women were for, and Queens needed heirs. She engaged in the most manipulative, interminable courtships, driven not by love but by politics--though she was tirelessly fond of suitors. Leading a weak country in need of foreign alliances, she brilliantly played the diplomatic marriage game: at one time she kept a French royal dangling farcically for nearly 10 years. Always she concluded that the perils of matrimony exceeded the benefits...
Playing consciously on the cult of the Virgin Mary, she drew devotion to herself, virgin mother of the nation. "This shall be for me sufficient," she told Parliament, "that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin." She was, in the end, married to England...