Abstract
When Queen Elizabeth I appeared before her troops at during the Spanish Armada, she helped to create an image of her relation to England. That image has been made to serve different points of view in the intervening centuries, during which it has attained the complexity of myth. The establishment of a connection between Elizabeth's chaste, imperial person and the Spanish defeat was the task of Elizabeth's iconography from 1588 on. A shift becomes visible in drama, the visual arts, and in historical text during the 1620s and 1630s, when Elizabeth's armor and speech first gained importance as the queen's supposed militant Protestantism became an icon of national unity. The Tilbury speech, appearing in Leonel Sharp's 1623 letter arguing against the Spanish marriage of Prince Charles, surfaced in this context, which casts doubt on its authenticity. Whether or not Elizabeth actually gave this speech, Elizabeth at has become a myth of nationalist sentiment as useful to seventeenth-century nationalists as to those historians who experienced World War II.
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