ABSTRACT
Few historians today would agree with A. F. Pollard, in his history of England published in 1919, that Elizabeth ‘was sceptical or indifferent in religion’; on the contrary most now accept that throughout her adult life she was a committed and conventionally pious Protestant. As an impressionable adolescent, she had been educated by the humanists, William Grindal and Roger Ascham, and immersed in the atmosphere of the evangelical households of Sir Anthony Denny and Queen Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife. During the latter years of her father’s reign, she had spent months in translating three pious works of an Erasmian or mildly Protestant nature into different languages: a French version of Erasmus’s Dialogus Fidei, an English copy of Marguerite de Valois’s Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul, and a version in French, Italian and Latin of her stepmother’s composition, Prayers or Meditations. In the reign of her half-brother, she was noted for her ‘godly zeal’, an image that she was keen to cultivate. Throughout Mary’s reign, she was a suspected heretic and continued to use the English Bible, even though she obeyed the law and attended the Catholic mass. Once queen, she not only regularly attended morning service in the royal chapel but in addition used private prayers, probably composed by herself, for daily worship (Haugaard 1981).
