Master the art of procrastination, with the help of the Virgin Queen

I’ve been putting off writing this piece for quite a while. Not because I’m plain lazy, but because I’m channelling my inner Tudor queen. My Life Lesson from History this week, as proposed by Professor Tracy Borman, is that we should master the art of procrastination. Helping us in this endeavour will be Elizabeth I, the procrastinator par excellence.

I know what you’re thinking. Procrastination is a bad thing. It’s what you do when you can’t make a decision, or you’re unwilling to knuckle down to a task. This is the territory of urgently needing to tidy up your bedroom when you should be revising for your exams.

We’re not talking avoidance procrastination here though – we are looking at deliberate, strategic procrastination. For Elizabeth, it was a case of good things coming to those who wait.

“Elizabeth was the absolute master of procrastination, or at least that’s how it appeared. So really her strategy was to resist the pressure that she was constantly under from her male advisors, her parliaments, her people even, to do things like marry, have an heir and go to war,” says Borman. “She played the procrastination card brilliantly because instead of being pressured into making a decision, she would say, ‘Hang on, I just need a bit of time. I’m only a woman: what do I know?’”

Avoiding the altar

Let’s have a quick recap of who Elizabeth I was. She was queen of England from 1558 to 1603, and daughter of King Henry VIII. She was Good Queen Bess and Gloriana, the virgin queen who never married, and who navigated a half century of rule as a woman in a man’s world.

Part of her success and longevity as a monarch was because she was slow to play her hand. The way she managed the pressure to marry is a case in point.

“When she comes to the throne, she’s single, she’s 25 years old. Of course, the first thing everybody expects her to do is to take a husband and thus secure the dynasty, the succession. It’s the right thing to do, not just for a queen, but for any woman,” explains Borman.

“But she famously declares to her first parliament that she will live and die a virgin and that she wasn’t going to marry. So you might say she didn’t procrastinate: she made a decision.”

Elizabeth famously declares to her first parliament that she will live and die a virgin. So you might say she didn’t procrastinate: she made a decision

That’s true, but it was the delivery of that decision over several decades that required a long-running masterclass in misdirection, time-wasting and delay.

“She showed herself willing to entertain foreign suitors and indeed homegrown ones as well. She lent them a willing ear. She entered into negotiations. She delayed, she put off. There was this wonderful phrase that her counsellors used about Elizabeth that she ‘gave answers answerless’,” says Borman.

“She plays this game for a good 20 or 30 years. Her last serious suitor is the Duke of Anjou in the early 1580s, by which time Elizabeth can no longer have children. Nobody really believes she’s ever going to marry, but she still makes a good go at it and strings it out a bit and flirts with him and calls him her little frog. And then eventually he goes back to France and the whole thing is forgotten. But she’s brilliant at just playing for time.”

Smallpox, strategy and succession

The fact that Elizabeth didn’t marry meant that she didn’t have an obvious heir, so the next matter on which she procrastinated at length was the vexed question of who would succeed her. Everybody in her court and realm wanted to know who was next in line to the throne, particularly when it looked like she was going to die.

“In 1562 she’s staying at Hampton Court and she falls ill with smallpox. This is one of the most deadly diseases of the age. Everybody thinks she’s about to die. Indeed Elizabeth herself thinks she’s about to die, and it brings this question of the succession right to the fore. From that moment on, even though Elizabeth survives, it never goes away.”

As Borman explains, after the smallpox incident, she is under constant pressure to name her heir – to make a choice from Mary, Queen of Scots, or Lady Katherine Grey, or even Philip II of Spain.

“This really is Elizabeth procrastinating par excellence because she manages it for 40 years,” says Borman. “She just keeps putting them off”.

The queen either just doesn’t answer or offers gnomic utterances like “when I am dead, he shall succeed that has the most right”. That sort of response left a wide open goal for interpretation, but importantly made sure that Elizabeth did not have to stay on the defensive throughout her reign.

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“ It was a master stroke because she knew from direct experience that the minute she named her heir, she was in trouble. The same had happened during her sister Mary’s reign, where it was very obvious that Elizabeth was the only viable successor and everybody started to gather around her and turn against Mary, and Elizabeth became the focus of rebellions against her sister,” notes Borman.

“Elizabeth was absolutely determined that wasn’t going to happen to her. The only way of holding onto her power was not to give somebody else the power of knowing they were going to succeed her and certainly not the likes of Mary, Queen of Scots – her deadliest rival.

“So it was politically expedient not to name an heir, although admittedly you’ve got to take your hat off to her for still refusing to do so on her deathbed when you kind of think she’s got nothing to lose. She just continues to her last breath to keep the focus entirely on herself.”

You’ll want to have a read of Borman’s new book The Stolen Crown (Hodder & Stoughton, out September 2025) to find out the latest thinking on how James VI and I did eventually succeed, and why Elizabeth never did actually name him as her heir.

A war of wits

Elizabeth had really good reasons to prevaricate on these decisions then, and a lot of her problems boiled down to the fact that she was a woman. “She played her quite chauvinistic male courtiers at their own game because of course she was a weak and feeble woman. ‘What am I going do? I can’t make decisions. I don’t understand weighty matters. I need time to think about it’.

“She does this again and again, and she employs that language to make sure that people are aware that it is just her womanly weakness. All the time it’s a very clever ploy of buying herself that precious time, particularly when it came to war.

“This was one realm that was very male-dominated, and Elizabeth made no secret of the fact she hated wars. They had uncertain outcomes. They were expensive. She was much more like her grandfather, Henry VII, than her warmongering father Henry VIII. She tried to buy time with diplomacy by using her hand in marriage as a bait to keep the great superpowers of Europe on side. It was only when forced that she really had to rally and take action, notably in 1588 when Philip II launched his Armada against England, and then she did finally agree to go to war.”

Even though her procrastination was probably intensely annoying for those around her, it did provide a certain predictability. Her courtiers probably knew that they didn’t need to worry about snap decisions or being caught off guard by sudden changes of plan (though she could be very mercurial about her favourites).

Should any of our modern global leaders take heed of this? I wouldn’t like to say, but it’s food for thought, certainly when you consider that Elizabeth did navigate a huge international crisis in the form of the religious settlement over the bloody rift between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Some would argue that her religious compromise simply laid the foundations for future strife, but as Borman notes, “ It did at least bring much needed security and peace after 30 years of religious turmoil”.

You shouldn’t take from this that Elizabeth didn’t make decisions or get stuff done – quite the opposite. According to Borman, she was one of the hardest-working monarchs ever to sit on the throne of England. She procrastinated because that was the best tool in her armoury to stay in power.

Elizabeth was one of the hardest-working monarchs ever to sit on the throne of England. She procrastinated because that was the best tool in her armoury to stay in power

The power of procrastination

If you’re interested in becoming a productive procrastinator like Elizabeth, might I suggest an amusing and informative little book by the philosopher Professor John Perry. It’s called The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing (Workman Publishing, 2012). Perry argues for a policy of structured procrastination, whereby you get lots of things done by not doing other things. You accomplish stuff and deliver projects by actively avoiding other things that you think you should be working on. It’s a mind-trick of self-deception, via clever manipulation of your internal to-do list, according to Perry.

Queen Elizabeth was actively not doing things too, but perhaps without that slice of self-deception. If I’m hearing Borman correctly, the Tudor queen knew exactly what she was doing with her delaying techniques, because she was operating in a very fraught power-play at home and abroad.

Given that you’re probably not a global leader struggling with geo-political challenges, what’s the lesson that we can take from Elizabeth’s reign?

I guess it’s that procrastination has its place in life, if you’re using it strategically rather than as an excuse. Personally, I have found once or twice that problems that seemed somewhat insurmountable one day just resolved themselves quite nicely the next, because some external circumstance had shifted. Sometimes, it’s best to just do nothing, deliberately, to see where the pieces land.

As Borman says, “ I often channel my inner Elizabeth when faced with a dilemma and I think, you know what? I'm going to do absolutely nothing and just see what happens”.

Procrastination doesn’t necessarily mean an absence of decision either – it could be that you just need a bit of thinking time. Elizabeth I was a great one for going for walks in her palaces and gardens early in the morning, presumably to free up her mind for whatever the day held. So again, we can take a prompt from her that you don’t have to rush into decisions. Take your time, go for a walk, think before you leap in. That’s what Good Queen Bess would have done, and, as Borman concludes, “if it was good enough for Queen Bess, I think it’s good enough for us”.