In Elizabeth's reign, and in no small measure because of the influential reading of her accession as providential, an understanding of queenship and English history developed which promoted the characteristic conguration of Elizabethan politics that I described in chapter 1: counsel insistently proposed to, and at points imposed upon, the female ruler by her godly male subjects. In a society that defined women as spiritually decient and lacking the capacity for political virtue – a view given weight and immediacy by the failures of Mary I's reign – recourse to providentialism constituted a powerful means of legitimating a female holder of the imperial crown. However, reading Elizabeth as ‘Deborah’ and her ‘government’ as providentially ordained to secure Protestantism, at home and abroad, inevitably gave rise to political tensions during the reign. It did so because of the ambiguity of the concept of ‘prophecy’ and the linkage between prophecy and God's expressed will on the one hand, and ongoing fears about the destabilising social consequences of religious reformation on the other.