Speech to the Troops of Tilbury

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This text is the Speech to the Troops at Tilbury delivered on August 9th of 1588 by Queen Elizabeth I of England to the land forces earlier assembled at Tilbury, Essex, in preparation of repelling the expected invasion by the Spanish Armada sent by Philip II of Spain. This speech can be classified as a political and motivational oratory text because the diction, imagery and sentence structure succeed in rallying her troops to confront an imposing enemy. This particular transcription of the speech was found in a letter from Leonel Sharp (1559-1631) to the Duke of Buckingham around 1623. Leonel Sharp was a royal chaplain and Archdeacon of Berkshire. Sharp studied at Eton and King’s College, and he received a doctorate from Oxford University in 1618. He was present on the site of the speech in the capacity of chaplain to Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. He was assigned to repeat the speech to the troops that might have been unable to hear it from the Queen. That is the reason why he wrote it down and was able to recall it in a letter to the Duke of Buckingham 35 years later. There is no certain evidence that this accurate transcription was the actual speech delivered by Elizabeth I and there is a possibility that Leonel Sharp might have embellished it. However, it is mostly accepted that these words mainly reflect the personality and the oration of the Queen. Elizabeth I was the last of the Tudor Monarchs, after Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward IV, Jane Grey and Mary I. She was born on September 7th 1553 in Greenwich Palace, downstream from London. Elizabeth I was the child of a broken couple. Her father, Henry VIII, had not only divorced her mother, Anne Boleyn; he had her executed and declared Elizabeth illegitimate. From then on, her fate varied with each change in her father’s politics and with each of his marriages. Her childhood was

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