Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I ruled England and Ireland for forty-four years, and the whole glittering age she presided over, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Drake, the defeated Armada, still carries her name. Look to her chart and you see why she governed the way she did: not with fireworks but with a Virgo Sun, a vitality that shines through hard work, service and a fierce, watchful intellect. Her motto, "I see and keep silent," is Virgo distilled, the analytical mind that observes everything and betrays nothing. That Sun sits in the eighth house, the underworld of death, rebirth and survival, and her early life fitted the archetype exactly: her mother, Anne Boleyn, executed when she was two; declared illegitimate; imprisoned under her half-sister Mary. She was the phoenix who learned young how dark humans can be, and rose anyway.

Her Moon rests exalted in Taurus in the third house, the luminary at its healthiest, steadfast, patient, an unbroken sense of quality and endurance. Elizabeth turned that Taurean will into stability for a whole kingdom, waiting like the patient boss her Capricorn Ascendant made her seem. She never married, and became Gloriana, sovereign of herself.