Elizabeth (before the pox)

On this day in 1559, a 25 year old Elizabeth Tudor was crowned Queen Elizabeth 1 of England and Ireland. Her coronation date had been hand picked by some superstitious old bloke called John Dee. He had done his star gazing Mumbo jumbo and concluded January 15th would be the best day to hold the coronation (he got paid a shit load to give a date… it’s not like if the queen had a short reign she would be around to punish him. Nice work if you can get it eh).
Her coronation came after the death of her fucking mental sister, the Catholic queen (bloody) Mary.
Elizabeth’s ceremony saw her have a short stay in tower as customary, (it is a palace after all), followed by a street procession, then off to Westminster for a ceremony and a slap up feast to finish. Sounds like a mini holiday.
She was dressed head to toe in gold cloth (literally cloth sewn with gold), and her coronation mass was conducted in both English and Latin, (important because previously the Catholics hadn’t wanted the common folk to understand anything they were being told at church other than ‘disobey the church and ye shall be royally fucked’).

Elizabeth, being a Protestant, was thrilled to shit to finally be getting the country back to its ‘proper’ faith after her catholic sister he stormed in and fucking ruined it prior to her death, setting fire to anyone who had an English bible and refused to believe they had been chomping down on Jesus flesh every Sunday at mass.
One bloke though, the Catholic Bishop of Carlisle Owen Oglethorpe, wasn’t having it. He had been appointed by Mary as Bishop in order to restore the country to its Catholic faith and was the only bishop willing to officiate Elizabeth’s coronation. He decided he would totally take the piss and try to ‘elevate the host’, (part of the Eucharist in Catholicism), which Elizabeth had explicitly told him not to do. Imagine.
She went mental and diva stropped out of her own coronation, then had the Bishop relieved of his duties pronto, (but not his head you will be saddened to hear). The whole coronation cost around £17000, (roughly a cool £4m in today’s money and that’s not including the feast which Tudors went completely over the top with).
Happy anniversary Elizabeth