Questions to ask Queen Elizabeth I

Elizabeth's life in key dates

What survives in her own words, and what does not

Elizabeth is one of the best-documented rulers of her century. The scholarly edition Elizabeth I: Collected Works (edited by Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, 2000) gathers her speeches, letters, prayers and poems. She wrote Latin, French and Italian, read Greek, and translated Boethius in 1593. But some famous texts are other people's reports. The Tilbury speech, for instance, survives in a version from a letter by the chaplain Leonel Sharp, printed in 1654. Speeches to Parliament were often noted down by members and then revised by the queen herself.

So in your interview script, say which version you are quoting and when it was written down. For a wax museum, the Elizabeth of 1588 is the strongest choice: 55, at the height of her reign, just back from Tilbury as the Armada is driven north.

Questions about a dangerous childhood

What the record says: she was two when her mother was beheaded. Her education under tutors including Roger Ascham was among the best any English girl received. In 1549, at 15, she was questioned over the ambitions of Thomas Seymour, who was executed. In 1554 Mary I sent her to the Tower on suspicion of involvement in Wyatt's rebellion; nothing was proved.

1. What do you remember of your mother, Anne Boleyn?
2. How did you answer the investigators in 1549 without incriminating yourself?
3. What did you think when you were taken to the Tower in 1554?
4. Which subject did you most enjoy studying with Roger Ascham?

Hear her parents' side too: Yuga also has Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII.

Questions about marriage

What the record says: Parliament petitioned her to marry in 1559 and again in 1563 and 1566. Her reply in 1559, as recorded, said she would be content for her tombstone to say that a queen had lived and died a virgin. Suitors included Philip II of Spain, the Archduke Charles of Austria and the French Duke of Anjou, whom she courted seriously in 1579 to 1581. Her favourite for thirty years was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; his wife Amy Robsart's death in a fall in 1560 caused a scandal that made marrying him impossible.

1. Why did you never marry?
2. Did you love Robert Dudley?
3. Was the courtship of the Duke of Anjou serious, or a diplomatic game?
4. Why did Parliament's requests to marry make you so angry in 1566?
5. Did you ever regret having no child to succeed you?

Questions about Mary, Queen of Scots

What the record says: Mary, her Catholic cousin and heir by blood, fled to England in 1568 and was held for nineteen years while plots (Ridolfi 1571, Throckmorton 1583, Babington 1586) aimed to put her on the throne. Sir Francis Walsingham's agents read Mary's coded letters in the Babington plot. Elizabeth signed the death warrant on 1 February 1587; after the execution she said it had been sent without her consent, wrote to Mary's son James VI to express her grief, and punished her secretary William Davison.

1. Why keep Mary alive for nineteen years?
2. Why did you sign the warrant, and then claim it was sent against your wishes?
3. Was punishing William Davison fair?
4. What did you write to Mary's son, James?

Questions about the Armada and the Golden Speech

What the record says: in August 1588, as the Armada was being driven north, she visited the army at Tilbury. In Sharp's later version she told the troops that she had the body of a weak woman but the heart and stomach of a king. The defeat of the Armada owed much to English fireships at Gravelines and to storms on the way home. In her Golden Speech of 30 November 1601 she told members of the Commons that she counted it the glory of her crown to have reigned with her people's love.

1. Why go to Tilbury in person, when Spanish troops might land?
2. Who deserves most credit for the Armada's defeat: your captains, such as Francis Drake, or the weather?
3. How did you want your people to see you, and why did your portraits matter so much?
4. What did you mean when you said you reigned with your people's love?

Drake has his own page on Yuga: Sir Francis Drake.

Hard questions about her reign

What the record says: after her excommunication in 1570, Catholic priests trained abroad were treated as traitors, and around 180 Catholics, most of them priests, were executed in her reign. In Ireland, English forces massacred surrendered Spanish and Italian soldiers at Smerwick in 1580, and the Nine Years' War (1594 to 1603) brought famine. She invested in John Hawkins's slaving voyage of 1564, lending him the royal ship Jesus of Lübeck. In 1596 her council issued letters about deporting Black people from England; historians such as Miranda Kaufmann note these seem to have had little effect.

1. Your government said it did not want to make windows into men's souls. Why, then, were Catholic priests executed?
2. What do you say about Smerwick and the war in Ireland?
3. Why did you invest in John Hawkins's voyage, knowing he traded in enslaved Africans?

The phrase about windows into men's souls is often credited to Elizabeth herself, but it comes from Francis Bacon's description of her policy, not from her own words. If you use it, say so.

Sample answers in her own words

Question: Parliament thinks a woman needs a husband to rule. What do you say?

Question: How did you reward the gaoler who guarded Mary, Queen of Scots?

Question: In your last illness, Robert Cecil said you must go to bed. How did you answer? A contemporary account reports her reply:

Questions she could not answer

• The union of England and Scotland under James, beyond what she might have expected.
• Elizabeth II, or a monarch who reigns but does not govern.
• The British Empire, or the American state of Virginia (named in her honour in the 1580s) as part of a new nation.
• Films about her romance with Dudley.
• Whether she wore lead face paint. Contemporaries describe white make-up and smallpox scars after 1562, but she would not have discussed her cosmetics in public.

Where to read Elizabeth's own words

Wikisource collects many of her speeches, letters and poems, including On Monsieur's Departure. The Collected Works (2000) and its companion volumes in libraries give accurate texts with the dates and versions. William Camden's Annales (1615 onward), written by a man who knew her court, is the first full history of the reign. The National Portrait Gallery and Royal Museums Greenwich hold her portraits, including versions of the Armada Portrait.

To practise questions aloud before a presentation, try Yuga's Elizabeth I, an AI recreation built from her writings and the historical record. It is not the queen and it can be wrong, so quote her speeches and letters in your work. For her court, see Tudor England's key figures, women rulers in history and our questions to ask William Shakespeare, whose company played before her.