The Princess Who Lost Everything Overnight

Elizabeth Tudor was two years old when her father had her mother beheaded on Tower Green, and three years old when she was stripped of her title and declared illegitimate, and her governess wrote to Henry VIII that year begging for money because the child had no gowns, no kirtles, no petticoats, and Elizabeth herself asked her governess “how haps it, yesterday my Lady Princess, and today but my Lady Elizabeth?”, and at fifteen she was interrogated about a traitor’s plot, and at sixteen a man who had made sexual advances toward her as a child was beheaded, and at twenty she walked through Traitors’ Gate into the Tower of London where her mother had been executed and spent eight weeks in the Bell Tower not knowing if her sister intended to kill her, and years later she told a French nobleman that while imprisoned she had decided that if it came to it she would ask for a French swordsman, so that like her mother she might at least die in one stroke, and in 1558 she became the greatest monarch England ever produced, and she never married, and she never explained why.

Interesting Fact: When Elizabeth arrived at the Tower in 1554 she stood at the top of the Traitors’ Gate stairs in the rain and refused to move, saying she was no traitor. The Yeoman Warders fell to their knees and swore “God preserve Your Grace.” She wept. She spent eight weeks in the Bell Tower — the same complex where her mother had spent her last days. When she was finally released, the experience had marked her so deeply that even as Queen she referred back to her time as a prisoner. At eight years old, Robert Dudley — her childhood companion and lifelong favourite — later recalled her declaring “I will never marry.” She kept that promise for forty-five years of reign. Her coronation procession passed through the same Tower she had entered as a prisoner. She was twenty-five years old.

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