How Did Elizabeth I An Impeccable Queen?
Elizabeth I became the queen of England in 1558 at the age of twenty-five. It was not a peaceful time for a young woman to burden the responsibility for ruling a kingdom. Religious conflicts, a huge balance deficit, and heavy losses in a war with France degraded England a lot. But by the time of Elizabeth's death forty-five years later, England had experienced one of the greatest periods in its venerable history. People often think this great queen Elizabeth I must have been an impeccable monarch ever. However, she, too, was an ordinary person who just had to cope with numerous obstacles and conspiracies such as marriage issues, assassination threats, and illness. Milton Meltzer, the historian, remembers in Elizabeth I, "Even before Elizabeth
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Once, suffering a raging toothache, the queen feared the pain of having an extraction. When the Bishop Aylmer of London demonstrated that it was not such a terrible process and had one of his own good teeth pulled out in her presence, the queen finally agreed to the extraction. After this, she resolved to keep hers and suffer rather than have them out as they decayed. This decision condemned her to years of intermittent pain from toothache, gum disease and resultant neuralgia in the face and neck. A foreign observer who saw her in old age noticed that her remaining teeth were "very yellow and unequal, and many of them are missing"( Heather, 5). At the end of the 1500s, Elizabeth was beginning to show signs of ageing. She was not riding out in the park so often, and after a mile or two would complain "of the uneasy going of her horse, and when she is taken down, her legs are so benumbed that she is unable to stand," remembers one of the royal observers(Heather, 6) .This did not hamper her from trying to show that she was still hale and hearty, and roared at Lord Hunsdon when he ventured to suggest that it might not be wise for one of her years to ride horseback all the way from Hampton Court to Nonsuch. Although her energy drained from her, and she grew careless and forgetful towards the end of her reign, Elizabeth did not want people to notice her health problem and tried to conceal it even if it afflicted her a
Once, suffering a raging toothache, the queen feared the pain of having an extraction. When the Bishop Aylmer of London demonstrated that it was not such a terrible process and had one of his own good teeth pulled out in her presence, the queen finally agreed to the extraction. After this, she resolved to keep hers and suffer rather than have them out as they decayed. This decision condemned her to years of intermittent pain from toothache, gum disease and resultant neuralgia in the face and neck. A foreign observer who saw her in old age noticed that her remaining teeth were "very yellow and unequal, and many of them are missing"( Heather, 5). At the end of the 1500s, Elizabeth was beginning to show signs of ageing. She was not riding out in the park so often, and after a mile or two would complain "of the uneasy going of her horse, and when she is taken down, her legs are so benumbed that she is unable to stand," remembers one of the royal observers(Heather, 6) .This did not hamper her from trying to show that she was still hale and hearty, and roared at Lord Hunsdon when he ventured to suggest that it might not be wise for one of her years to ride horseback all the way from Hampton Court to Nonsuch. Although her energy drained from her, and she grew careless and forgetful towards the end of her reign, Elizabeth did not want people to notice her health problem and tried to conceal it even if it afflicted her a