Delirious shouts of joy were heard throughout the land: "God save Queen Elizabeth!" "No more burnings at Smithfield, nor beheadings on Tower green! No more of Spanish Philip and his pernicious bigots! Toleration, freedom, light!" The people of England were ready for a golden age, and the golden age had come.
ELIZABETH .-- And who was Elizabeth?
The daughter of the dishonored Anne Boleyn, who had been declared illegitimate, and set out of the succession; who had been kept in ward; often and long in peril of her life; destined, in all human foresight, to a life of sorrow, humiliation, and obscurity; her head had been long lying "'twixt axe and crown," with more probability of the former than the latter.
Wonderful was the change.

With her began a reign the like of which the world had never seen; a great and brilliant crisis in English history, in which the old order passed away and the new was inaugurated.

It was like a new historic fulfilment of the prophecy of Virgil: Magnus ...

saeclorum nascitur ordo; Jam redit et _Virgo_, redeunt Saturnia regna.
Her accession and its consequences were like the scenes in some fairy tale.

She was indeed a Faerie Queene, as she was designated in Spenser's magnificent allegory.