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How did Queen Elizabeth of England manage to maintain power for nearly four decades, and what does this suggest about the changing nature of the kingship?
Elizabeth of England's longevity on the throne is almost unprecedented. One or two monarchs before her and one or two afterwards had comparable reigns. What I would point to as being essential to her success is actually what most people would see as a liability: the fact that she was a woman. What I mean by this is that political thinkers of Elizabeth's time and indeed her own English subjects were beginning to place a premium on the idea of the Kingship as an office, and to separate the idea of the king's personal body, his individual identity, from the identity of the king as the head of state. Thus, you could argue that because Elizabeth is a woman, gender is not relevant to kingship at all.
The other thing is that Elizabeth had plenty of negative examples around her of how not to be a queen regnant. Probably the closest example would have been her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, who in contrast to Elizabeth behaves, even though she is a queen, as an average wealthy and beautiful woman would. When she becomes a young widow after her husband, the King of France, dies, she goes back to Scotland and falls in love with a commoner, one of her own subjects. She marries him for love, not for reasons of state or to make a dynastic alliance. She celebrates her sexuality and her fertility and her femininity, and where does that get her? It gets her deposed by her own subjects, in favor of her son, eventually winds up in prison and is beheaded by her own cousin, Elizabeth. This is a prime negative example.
Elizabeth and her advisors, by contrast, decide that the best way to preserve her power is to turn herself into a living political institution. And so Elizabeth downplays those aspects of her biological sex that could be problematic and instead plays up the fact that she is the representative of kingship in England. She has two bodies: her own body, as she says herself in a famous speech - "Though I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, I have the heart and stomach of a king." - meaning, "I have the guts of a king… I, King of England." She maintains that these "guts of a king" are much more important to her capacity to rule than her actually physical guts of a woman. In fact, this is made into a legal principle by her lawyers and called The Principle of the King's Two Bodies; the King always has two bodies and, in this case, one of them just happens to be female.
Now, there are some drawbacks to this. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, because she doesn't want to fall into the trap her poor cousin, Mary, did, she never does marry, which means she loses out on the possibility of making alliances with other European princes that might have been beneficial to her. Even more importantly, especially if you think about the example of her father, Henry VIII, who was consumed by the necessity to produce an heir, Elizabeth does not produce an heir.
This is probably one of the great ironies of history, that the person who ends up on the throne of England after Elizabeth dies is none other than the son of the cousin that she had murdered: James VI of Scotland, who rules England as James I. Incidentally, he does not understand this concept of The King's Two Bodies to well, because his son, Charles, will be beheaded for not understanding it, but that's another story.