Queen Elizabeth I's Latin reply to the Polish ambassador

On 25 July 1597, a Polish ambassador, Paul Dzialynski, chastised Queen Eliz abeth I publicly for interfering with his country's shipping trade in Spain . The furious Queen replied at once in extemporaneous Latin, a stunning rhe torical feat which delighted her countrymen and renewed the popularity of t he aging queen. With great rhetorical skill, Elizabeth used a characteristi c arrangement, the balancing of antitheses, together with sentence variety, irony, wordplay, and even some Latin rhyme. This brilliant epideictic orat ion, though short, demonstrates her acute historical and political memory, her definitions of "the law of nature" and "books of princes" and her perce ption of her royal power, and it demonstrates that at age sixty-three the q ueen's intellectual faculties were far from impaired. As a tour de force, t his Latin oration can be ranked with Elizabeth's better-known English orati on at Tilbury Camp in 1588.