G. M. Trevelyan on Elizabeth I of England

“To her own people she boasted on her accession that she was ‘mere English.’ Her mother had been no foreign princess but an English flirt, and her father, the founder of England's Navy and of England's religious independence, had possessed a sixth sense whereby he understood the English people, even in the highest rages of his tyranny. She inherited from both, but most from her father in whose steps it was her ambition to walk. If she was heir to her mother's vanity and coquetry, she heeded the warning of her fate; and her own bitter experiences as a girl,—disgrace, imprisonment and danger of death,—had taught her, as Frederic the Great was taught by similar experiences in boyhood, that private affections and passions are not for Princes. She had learnt every lesson that adversity had to teach, and she would leave it to her rival to lose the world for love.”

“There was in her a certain hardness and coarseness of fibre, necessary perhaps for her terrible task in life. As a private person she would scarcely have been lovable, perhaps not even very admirable. But lonely on the throne she knew all the arts to make herself adored by her Court and her people. Without ceasing to be a woman, and while loving life in its fullness, she made everything subservient to purposes of State. Her learning endeared her to the Universities, her courage to the soldiers and sailors. Her coquetry became a means of keeping her nobles and courtiers each in his place, and exacting from each one the last ounce of personal devotion in the public service. Leicester's neck might be tickled by the royal hand, but his rival Cecil would be trusted in matters of high policy... Her love of hunting and dancing, masque, pageantry and display, was used to strengthen the wider popularity which was her ultimate strength; her public appearances and progresses through the country, which she thoroughly enjoyed, were no dull and formal functions, but works of art by a great player whose heart was in the piece, interchanges of soul between a Princess and her loving people.”