Queen Elizabeth I

I remember reading many years ago about how Elizabeth the First didn’t like women. She had no time for women. She only enjoyed the company of men. It is true Elizabeth relished interacting with men, flirting with handsome men, bossing them—and proving she was far more intelligent than them. She was a woman well able to navigate and dominate her world — a world designed by men for them to dominate. She surmounted her world so well legends started: Elizabeth was not a woman at all. That the real Elizabeth had died young, and her fearful household had swapped the dead girl with a lookalike male youth. My first forays into Tudor research soon brought home to me the importance of Elizabeth Tudor’s relationships with so many women in her life. Anne Boleyn may have died before Elizabeth was three, but she left the raising and shaping of her young daughter in strong and nurturing hands. Most of these strong hands belonged to women. Many of the women who formed a protective knot around Elizabeth after her mother’s death also knew Anne Boleyn. Some of them were her kin. They knew the injustice of her death, and what had been important to her. That she would want her daughter educated well and prepared for her ‘royal’ future. Another queen also deserves thanks for Elizabeth’s education—another queen who desired to have her daughter educated well and prepared to rule too. By the time Anne Boleyn became queen, Katherine of Aragon’s efforts to improve the educational opportunities for women for the sake of Mary, her daughter, had borne fruit. The next generations of the Tudors shone with women writers, translators, and book lovers. A lover of learning from her earliest years, Anne Boleyn benefited from Katherine of Aragon’s female leadership too. Anne also encouraged her women to read and think. The women who cared for the infant Elizabeth ensured she knew this too. Elizabeth never acted ashamed of who her mother was.