We Americans all know the Founding Fathers. Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Franklin. The usual suspects.
What we talk less about is the Founding Mother.
Founding Mother?
Yes, her name was Elizabeth Tudor. Born 1533, daughter of Henry VIII, who reigned as Queen Elizabeth I of England from 1558-1603. Forty-five years.
It did not begin well.
Her mother, Anne Boleyn, was the second of Henry VIII’s six wives. He had her beheaded for alleged adultery. Elizabeth was declared a bastard. Her two siblings (both with different mothers) fared much more favorably at court. Her sister, Mary, once Queen, had her locked in the Tower of London on suspicion of treason.
It was all very “Game of Thrones.”
She learned early on how to play both sides, walk the tightrope between factions, and at the end of the day, how to survive a room of people who wanted her gone.
That turned out to be her greatest skill. Not winning through force but outlasting everyone who thought they could move against her. She only became Queen because she outlived all the alternatives.
Her second major achievement was keeping England out of a Civil War. Europe in the 1500s was tearing itself apart over religion. France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, all of them in brutal, internal religious conflicts.
England also had big, powerful Protestant and Catholic factions. Elizabeth was Protestant herself, but she had no interest in starting something nasty with her Catholic countrymen. There were tensions for sure, but she figured creating a culture of relative tolerance would cost a whole lot less, especially for herself.
Her third achievement was keeping England off the continental battlefield entirely. Her defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 accomplished that in spades. Spain had the most powerful navy in the world. England won anyway.
The reason why is her fourth greatest achievement, and by far the most interesting. For us at least.
Elizabeth didn’t run the Navy like an extension of the state, she ran it like a startup ecosystem.
She worked primarily with freelance “privateers” like Sir Francis Drake, Jim Hawkins, and Sir Walter Raleigh. Independent operators. Each ship, its own little enterprise. She gave Raleigh a charter to plant a colony in the New World. He lovingly named it “Virginia” (after Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen”). She took a cut of what her privateers brought back, and left them room to take risks she couldn’t officially sanction. Like raiding Spanish ports, colonies, and galleys.
Spain, meanwhile, ran its Armada top-down. Big, coordinated, slow. The kind of thing that looks impressive on paper and crumbles when the conditions change.
Elizabeth’s freelance navy beat the most powerful military force of the 16th century.
It was this startup mentality and culture which birthed what eventually became the British Empire, including the 13 original American colonies.
America’s Founding Fathers had a great vision for a United States. But a lot of what made that vision possible was because they had seen it through eyes Elizabeth helped to open. This American legacy was Elizabeth’s fifth and greatest achievement, we reckon.
She did all of this three hundred years before women could vote.
Perhaps the most interesting question about her reign is, would England have done so well at the time, had it been ruled by a more conventional monarch, like her father? More interested in control than consensus. Would it have built anything worth inheriting?
We sincerely doubt it. Which means the American story starts far earlier than most people think, and with a woman most of us “Ungrateful Colonials” have never thought to thank.
