Ladies with Scepters

"Famous have been the reigns of our queens," said Winston Churchill last week. Britain's two golden ages--the Elizabethan and the Victorian--bore the names of queens. Five queens have reigned before Elizabeth II.

Mary I (1553-1558) tried to restore Catholicism in England, but the fires of her persecutions only hardened Protestantism, increasing its popularity and making its triumph inevitable. She had a personal reason for being anti-Protestant: when her father, lusty Henry VIII, defied Rome and nullified his marriage to her mother, Catherine of Aragon, for a time Mary had to renounce her royal claims and style herself a bastard. She was an honest, well-intentioned woman who withered everything she loved and unintentionally fostered what she hated. To please her husband, Philip II of Spain, she enlisted England in a disastrous and unpopular war on France. After five years on the throne, she died alone, deserted by her husband, detested by her people, and nicknamed "Bloody Mary."

Elizabeth I (1558-1603), Mary's half-sister, found England on its knees and left it exuberantly reaching for empire. She made England unmistakably Protestant again, as it has been to this day. Her policy was to be "mere English"; she determinedly kept her people out of continental entanglements and gave them 30 years of peace in which to develop their resources--industrial, commercial, maritime and artistic. Then began a surge to empire: Elizabeth's privateers, Drake and Frobisher, singed the beard of the Spaniard, Sir Walter Raleigh planted the royal standard in the forests of Virginia, and England's gallant little fleet repulsed the Spanish Armada. Elizabeth queened it over an age crowded with greatness, which nourished such figures as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. She was the strongest queen and the most vital woman ever to rule England.

Mary II (1689-1694), daughter of James II, three-quarters of a century later acknowledged Parliament as the real ruler of England, thereby dissolving a long quarrel which had drained England's strength and postponed its power. Already first lady of The Netherlands when called to England's throne, Mary agreed to cross the Channel only if her husband, Stadholder William III of The Netherlands, could be coruler. Together, the two assumed kingship, making Mary the only feminine King in English history. Actually, Mary, a dutiful, intelligent woman who added a touch of respectability to a loose age, did little except serve and adore her stern, taciturn, unfaithful but capable husband. Like Mary I and Elizabeth, she died childless.

Anne (1702-1714), the younger sister of Mary, had the good fortune to rule in the era of one of Winston Churchill's ancestors, the Duke of Marlborough, whose victories made England the strongest power in the world. A skilled diplomat as well as a great soldier, Marlborough led a Europe-wide coalition that broke the power of France. At the Peace of Utrecht, he won for Britain such imperial gems as Gibraltar, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Hudson Bay territory.

Anne also gave her name to an elegant era marked by Christopher Wren's architecture, the Queen Anne chair, the thinking of Bishop Berkeley and Isaac Newton and the writings of Swift, Addison, Pope, Steele and Defoe. Personally she was a dull, respectable woman who spent most of her reign swathed in bandages to ease the pain of her gout and dropsy. She produced 15 children but all died, leaving her the last of the royal Stuarts.

Victoria (1837-1901) had the longest reign in British history. After a lonely, overprotected childhood, she was awakened one night to be told that her uncle, William IV, was dead, and that she, at 18, was Queen. Three years later she married her shy, studious cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburg, and bore him nine children, whose marriages allied England with the ruling houses of Germany, Russia, Greece and Rumania. In the first part of her reign, in the turbulent debates over the Reform Bill and during the unsettling changes of the Industrial Revolution, she quarreled frequently with her ministers. As she grew older, and her Empire prospered and expanded, she came to exemplify Britain's solid, enduring middle-class virtue, summed up in the word Victorian. When it came time to celebrate her diamond jubilee in 1897, Britain was at the summit of its imperial power and glory, and recognized in her the symbol of its majesty.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.