On September 7, 1533, a baby princess was born at Greenwich Palace in England. Her father was the famously moody King Henry VIII, and he was hugely disappointed because he had been promised a son. The little girl was named Elizabeth, and for years she was treated like a problem rather than a future queen. Few people in that palace had any idea that this baby would grow up to lead England into one of the most dazzling chapters in its history.
Elizabeth's childhood was rough. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, was beheaded when Elizabeth was only two. She was shuffled between houses, declared illegitimate, then declared royal again, and at one point locked in the Tower of London by her own half-sister. But she was also a brilliant student who could speak Latin, French, Italian, and Greek by her teens. When she finally became queen in 1558 at age 25, England was poor, divided, and small. Elizabeth ruled for 44 years and turned it into a sea power. Her navy defeated the mighty Spanish Armada in 1588, English explorers like Francis Drake sailed around the world, and a young writer named William Shakespeare put on plays for her court.
Historians call her time the Elizabethan Age, and so much of what we think of as classic English culture comes from it: Shakespeare's plays, sword-fighting pirates, those huge ruffled collars in old paintings. Elizabeth never married, which was unheard of for a queen, and she ruled alone with such success that she became the standard every later English monarch was measured against.
