After she had made her rounds through the troops, Elizabeth delivered her speech to them. Leonel Sharp's version is accepted as the speech that she gave, and it best captures her rhetorical strategies as opposed to the versions of William Leigh and James Aske. In the past, Elizabeth had defied gender expectations by refusing to marry or produce heirs, instead opting to rule alone, with God and England as her soul mates. Elizabeth practically claims that she is both King and Queen of England in the most famous line of the address, "I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a King of England too." At the same time that she claims the power, she acknowledges her physical weakness and condescends to the level of soldiers and subjects to whom she lovingly refers in the speech. Elizabeth calls upon God in the speech and asserts confidence in her own faith and the salvation of herself and her people, thereby placing Spain and the Pope as the ones in the wrong, calling them "tyrants" and "enemies" of both Elizabeth and England.
If the speech is accepted as the true speech given at Tilbury, it is worth noting that Elizabeth wrote it herself. As a writer, she wrote many of her own speeches[23] as well as poems.[24]
