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Back home, Louis redoubled his penance and his efforts to create a holy nation. He systematized customary law, recorded cases as precedents, and replaced trial by combat with the examination of witnesses under oath. Though he no doubt seemed to some of his cynical subjects to be making a show of charity and good works, as did many other feudal lords, Louis showed an exceptional humility and perseverance not shared by those hypocrites. Every year, he went to the abbey of Saint Denis barefoot and bareheaded. Louis not only served the poor at his table, but he and his sons washed the feet of the beggars. He was especially generous to the widows of crusaders. Louis had a special passion for sermons, then just coming into vogue, and he encouraged the preaching friars, repeating his favorite homilies to those at his table. Queen Margaret recorded having gotten up at night, on many occasions, to cover the king with a cloak while he was at his lengthy prayers, because he did not notice the cold.

It was while on a second crusade that Louis fell ill and died while lying penitently on a bed of ashes, whispering the name of the city he never won: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem." He soon became the only king of France named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

The royal career of England's Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was less manifestly pious than that of Louis IX, but it radiates with a combination of strong, active faith and prudent, sensitive rulership. In the May/June 2003 issue of Books & Culture, author Jill Peláez Baumgaertner reviews the literary output of this queen (Elizabeth I: Collected Works, University of Chicago Press, 2000). In the process, she gives us a glimpse into Elizabeth's faith and life.

A precocious, multilingual student, by age 12 Elizabeth had translated for her stepmother Queen Catherine such pious works as Navarre's The Mirror of the Sinful Soul and the first chapter of Calvin's Institutes. But these were not mere exercises. She claimed in later years that until her accession to the throne, she had studied only theology. In a later recorded prayer, Elizabeth asked God to help her always use her intellectual gifts to his glory.

After a precarious youth, lived for a time under the famously bloody rule and watchful eye of her Catholic sister Mary I, she spent most of her 45-year reign dealing with theological pressures raised by the Catholics from without and the Puritans within the English Church. Her solutions to these religious controversies, though easily seen as arrangements of political expediency, maintained a delicate religious balance in England, preventing her beloved nation from plunging once again into the bloody religious bigotry that had so marred its past.

Above all, says Baumgartner, Elizabeth was "a woman of strong faith who recognized her own vulnerabilities and who embraced utterly the basic tenets of Reformation theology." When certain bishops complained of a lack of learned preachers in England, Elizabeth (unlike Charlemagne) replied that she sought not so much learned ministers as "honest, sober, and wise men, and such as can read the Scriptures and Homilies well unto the people."

As for her own piety, we get a glimpse of it in a prayer she composed and delivered 15 years into her reign, in 1574. In part, it read:

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