How Is Queen Elizabeth A Tyrant

Daughter to a tyrant and sister to a Protestant persecutor, Queen Elizabeth I strayed from her predecessors’ oppressive authorities, commanding her people rather with the weight of her words than the force of her fists. Yearning for a male heir to succeed him on the throne, her father King Henry VIII was crestfallen with Elizabeth’s birth, so when Elizabeth was only three years old, Henry sentenced Elizabeth’s mother Anne Boleyn to death on false accusations of treason, witchcraft, incest, and adultery. As a consequence, Henry’s marriage to Anne was annulled, and Elizabeth was deemed an illegitimate successor to the throne. Although her early life was gravely marked with such great obstacles already, Elizabeth was fortunately born in the heart

Accepting this first challenge, Elizabeth articulated and confirmed her claim to the throne. Upon her ascension, she remarked that she is “God’s creature, ordained to obey His appointment” (“Elizabeth’s First Speech”). At the time, kings exercised the use of the divine-right theory of kingship. Referring to this divine right, she applied the same accepted belief to her own authority, establishing her reign as God’s desire. Elizabeth effectively shifted her role as an illegitimate successor to the throne to the divinely chosen queen of England. Fortuitously, England was returning to a primarily Protestant country, and the citizens soon accepted her as

Following the authoritarian rule of Mary I, Elizabeth received harsh criticism from some political and religious reformers. Although it was expected that Elizabeth receive an obvious opposition from Catholics over her reign, a historian of the sixteenth-century Amanda Shephard refutes that Elizabeth actually received some of the severest disapproval from Protestant polemicists and reformers (Shephard). Whereas John Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger were able to accept female rulers on occasion, drawing parallels between Elizabeth and the Biblical judge Deborah to permit her rule, other Protestants entirely contested the idea. In particular, John Knox, a Scottish theologian and writer, composed the infamous piece The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in a response to female rulers such as Mary I of England. During the Medieval Period, man recognized the hierarchy of life, beginning with God and descending all the way down to minerals. Within the pyramid, various social distinctions emerged, including the conviction that men surpassed and held governance over women. Knox called upon this principle, when he declared “it is a thing most repugnant to nature that women rule and govern over men.” In this assertion, Knox implied that it was unnatural and conflicting with