* Writing to the Earl of Essex in July, 1597, Robert Cecil told him that the Queen had barely concealed her wrath at the Polish ambassador’s discourteous manner of speaking, and called the Queen’s reply “one of the best answers extempore, in Latin, that ever I heard”. “God’s death! my Lords” the Queen exclaimed afterwards, using a favourite expression of hers when angry; “I have been enforced this day to scour up my Latin that hath lain long in rusting.”

* On August 7th, 1564. The address was said to have left the attending academics ‘mervelouslye astonied’. At its close, her speech was greeted with eager shouts of ‘Vivat Regina!’ (Long live the Queen!) to which the queen smilingly replied ‘Taceat Regina’ (The Queen is going to shut up now).

* The phrase was ‘feminilis pudor’, which her audience took to mean ‘ladylike modesty’; the Queen was seemingly dissatisfied with more usual Latin words for ‘womanly’ such as femininus and muliebris. Elizabeth offered to speak in English, but was told the regulations did not permit it. Then she tried to persuade the University’s senior officers to deputise, but again to no avail. Resigned to her fate, the queen made a good deal of this ladylike modesty and her own shortcomings as a speaker before going on to remind her subjects — by means of quotations from classical literature off the top of her head — of their solemn duty to do whatever she told them to do.

* Elizabeth is credited with overhauling England’s coinage after widespread abuse in the reign of Henry VIII. On her tomb is written: Religio reformata, pax fundata, moneta ad suum valorem reducta: ‘Religion reformed, peace established, money restored to its proper value’.

* Fuller recorded a lighthearted example of Elizabeth’s spontaneous riddling, from the time when Walter Raleigh was first rising at court. See A Step Up for Captain Raleigh.

* “Under the reign of her father,” wrote Thomas Fuller, “and brother king Edward VI, (who commonly called her his ‘sister Temperance,’) she lived in a princely fashion. But the case was altered with her, when her sister Mary came to the crown [in 1553], who ever looked upon her with a jealous eye and frowning face; chiefly, because of the difference between them in religion. For though queen Mary is said of herself not so much as to have barked, yet she had under her those who did more than bite.” See also see The Little Flower Boy.

* Elizabeth’s ‘above my pay grade’ response was as respectable as it was diplomatic. “And now you ask,” wrote St John Damascene back in the eighth century, “how the bread became Christ’s body and the wine and water Christ’s blood. And I say unto you, ‘The Holy Spirit is present and does those things which surpass reason and thought’.”

* For well over a thousand years, the churches of East and West had believed that Christ really is present in the communion bread and wine without feeling the need to explain how: ‘a mystery of the Holy Ghost’ sufficed for Abbot Elfric (?955-?1022). Then Continental academics began to quarrel about it, and in 1539 Henry VIII’s Six Articles rubber-stamped the theory of ‘transubstantiation’ preferred in Rome, imposing the death sentence for anyone who disagreed. ‘Transubstantiation’ became Roman Catholic dogma in 1551. The Articles were repealed in 1547, brought back under Mary, and repealed again by Elizabeth, but the mischief was done and the bloody controversy raged on for more than a century. See also Christmas Under Cromwell.