Queen Elizabeth I Quotes

“It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past ... entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the "problem" of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. Only recently has it occrurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

“I will never accept life for what it is. I don't need an easy life. My road was meant to be hard because anything worth having in this world will take me to the very edge of myself. I will overcome everything I have ever gone through and will make my future the one God intended me to have. I will pick up the pieces of this pain and sculpt it into art. I am not ordinary and never was. I walk into my birthright as a queen with her head held high. I was born to do this!”
― Shannon L. Alder

“There is only one Christ, Jesus, one faith. All else is a dispute over trifles.”
― Queen Elizabeth I

“I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.”
― Sigmund Freud

“But what use was the semblance of power without the substance?”
― Alison Weir, The Lady Elizabeth

“I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I know Jane is dear to you," Bess said. "I also know that she's in danger. But Jane is one person, Edward. There are thousands of lives at stake. There's a kingdom on the edge of a knife. We must tread carefully.”
― Cynthia Hand, My Lady Jane

“The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something turn up.”
― Charles Dickens

“She had been born knowing that boldness erased fear, while cowardice invited it and earned her only more ill treatment. No matter how she shook with dread in private, she would never show fear before her questioners or her guards. In men's minds fear was a certain mark of guilt.”
― Jeane Westin, His Last Letter: Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester

“I have never thought that the man of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.”
― Lewis F. Powell Jr.

“Why do old men grow huge beards as if to proclaim a manhood that has long since fled?”
― Jeane Westin, His Last Letter: Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester

“Sir Walter Raleigh is more safely enshrined in the memory of mankind because he set his cloak for the Virgin Queen to walk on than because he carried the english name to undiscovered countries.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Robert bowed to the inevitable. The queen's motto, 'I see all and speak nothing." was as well chosen as any motto could be. He had almost made his old mistake of confusing what Elizabeth said with what she would do.”
― Jeane Westin, His Last Letter: Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester

“Like her father, Bess never forgot a hurt of a service.”
― Jeane Westin, His Last Letter: Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester

“The English language [during the Elizabethan era] wasn't standardized. There were no official dictionaries. There was no cultural belief that words should always be spelled the same way. So people spelled things however they heard them or however made sense. I mean the name Shakespeare had something like 16 different spellings, and the way he spelled it isn't the way we spell it.- School of Night - pg 44”
― Bayard Louis

“Sometimes letting go is not about a lack of faith in God, but a lack in faith that you have it in yourself to pull off the greatest plan he has in store for you.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Vale la pena luchar por la libertad; vale la pena pagar un alto precio por ella, porque morir por la libertad es dejar esta vida en un derroche de gloria que destruye nuestras debilidades del pasado y nos vuelve uno con los héroes”
― Jean Plaidy, Queen of This Realm

“It’s not his friendship I miss,’ Elizabeth said bluntly. ‘It’s him. The very person of him. His presence. I want his shadow on my wall, I want the smell of him. I can’t eat without him, I can’t do the business of the realm. I can’t read a book without wanting his opinion, I can’t hear a tune without wanting to sing it to him.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Virgin's Lover

“Fear not, we are of the nature of the lion, and cannot descend to the destruction of mice and such small beasts.”
― Queen Elizabeth I

“He imagined this was the sort of shadow battle Queen Elizabeth had fought her entire reign—starting as a young woman alone, besieged by foreign kings and English nobles who would marry her crown, always steps behind grizzled courtiers like Lord Burghley. No! Rarely steps behind. She was steps ahead or she would never have survived so long.”
― Justin Scott, The Sister Queens