Which English queen never married, earning the name Virgin Queen?

Elizabeth I, and the refusal was strategy rather than temperament. An unmarried queen kept every foreign prince and domestic faction in play as a suitor; marrying any of them would have handed the country to a foreign power or elevated one faction over the others, and marrying at all would have subordinated her to a husband under the assumptions of the age.

She said in her first speech to parliament that she was already bound to a husband, namely the kingdom of England, and produced a version of that answer for forty years while negotiations with the French and the Habsburgs ran and collapsed. The propaganda of virginity was cultivated deliberately - the Virgin Queen imagery filled a gap left by the suppression of the cult of the Virgin Mary in a newly Protestant country.

It ended the dynasty, which she must have known. The Tudors ran out with her, and the throne passed to the son of the cousin she had executed - James VI of Scotland, whose mother Mary she had kept imprisoned for nineteen years and signed the death warrant for, then claimed not to have meant to send. Her succession to a Scottish king united the crowns, which is arguably the largest political consequence of anyone not getting married.