"I will never marry," the future Elizabeth I declared at the age of eight, and, to the terror of her people, the Great Queen kept her word. For four centuries, historians have guessed why Elizabeth never married.In her own day, her decision to remain single was considered absurd and dangerous.A queen needed a husband to make political decisions for her and to organise and lead her military campaigns.More important, she needed male heirs to avoid a civil war after her death. There was no shortage of suitors for the Queen, both English courtiers   and foreign princes, and it was confidently expected for the best part of 30 years that Elizabeth would eventually marry one of them.Indeed, although she insisted that she preferred the single state, she kept these suitors in a state of permanent expectation.This was a deliberate policy on the Queen's part, since by keeping foreign princes in hope, sometimes for a decade, she kept them friendly when they might otherwise have made war on her kingdom. There were, indeed, good political reasons for her avoiding marriage.The disastrous union of her sister Mary I to Philip II of Spain had had an unwelcome foreign influence upon English politics.The English were generally prejudiced against the Queen taking a foreign husband, particularly a Catholic one.Yet if she married an English, jealousy might lead to the separation of the court. There were other, deeper reasons for Elizabeth's unwillingness to marry, chief of which, I believe, was her fear of losing her autonomy as Queen. In the 16th century, a queen was regarded as holding supreme dominion over the state, while a husband was thought to hold supreme dominion over his wife.Elizabeth knew that marriage and motherhood would bring some harm to her power. She once pointed out that marriage seemed too uncertain a state for her. She had seen several unions in her immediate family break down, including that of her own parents. Some writers, based on very fragile evidence, have argued that Elizabeth was frightened or incapable of the sex act, but it is more likely that she feared childbirth. Two of her stepmothers, her grandmother and several acquaintances had died in childbed. Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, had had her mother, Anne Boleyn, killed; her stepmother Catherine Howard later suffered the same fate. When Elizabeth was 14 she was all but attracted by Admiral Thomas Seymour, who also went to the prison within a year. Witnessing these terrible events at an early age, it has been argued, may have put Elizabeth off marriage. Elizabeth had to decide her priorities. Marriage or being single? Elizabeth was far too intelligent.The choice she made was courageous and revolutionary, and, in the long run, the right one for England. If Elizabeth had married a foreign prince, there might have been   _  .
prejudice against her separation of the court jealousy among English courtiers a negative impact on English politics