Elizabeth I (England) (1533–1603; Ruled 1558–1603)

ELIZABETH I (ENGLAND) (1533–1603; ruled 1558–1603)

ELIZABETH I (ENGLAND) (1533–1603; ruled 1558–1603), queen of England and Ireland. The daughter of Henry VIII by his second wife, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth was rendered a bastard by Henry's repudiation and execution of Anne in 1536. She was, however, reared as a princess and received the same education in the classical curriculum as her half-brother, Edward VI. In her father's will Elizabeth was placed third in succession to the throne after her two siblings, Mary and Edward. In her Catholic half-sister Mary's reign, Elizabeth fell under suspicion for her supposed Protestant sympathies and, in the wake of the 1554 revolt led by Sir Thomas Wyatt (in which she had refused to participate), she was imprisoned in the Tower of London. However, Philip II of Spain, Mary's husband, protected her. Freed from the tower and then confined at Woodstock House in Oxfordshire, she was finally released.

ELIZABETH'S RELIGIOUS POLICY

Elizabeth acceded to the throne on 17 November 1558. In her first Parliament she restored the Edwardian religious settlement reestablishing Protestant worship and doctrine, which the nation at large accepted, although many looked nostalgically to the past. Elizabeth, unwilling to force consciences, demanded only outward obedience, counting on the operation of time to dissolve old loyalties. This easygoing attitude continued until the Papal Bull of deposition (1570), the subsequent Jesuit missionary campaign, and plots against the queen's life led to harsh legislation, crushing fines on the Catholic laity, and prison or the scaffold for clerics. By 1603 all but a small percentage of the populace had accepted Protestantism, some with enthusiasm but many out of obedience to the regime.

For zealous Protestant reformers the queen's ecclesiastical policy was disappointing. For them the Edwardian program had been only half complete at the king's death. They looked in vain for further measures of change under his sister, but Elizabeth's prime concern was not for purity of doctrine or practice but public order, a goal that demanded religious uniformity. Continuing change in the religious establishment would unsettle the political order. The queen's opposition to further change led to (unavailing) Parliamentary agitation and ultimately to the formed opposition of the Puritan movement.

ELIZABETH THE POLITICIAN

Elizabeth's greatest problem was, of course, male disbelief in the very possibility of a female sovereign. It was assumed she must find a husband to relieve her of an impossible burden by taking on the active exercise of rulership. For a while it looked as though she would respond to this call by marrying her favorite courtier, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester (by her creation). This was unpopular in many circles. (Repeated Parliamentary appeals that she marry were skillfully evaded by the queen, and the match did not transpire.)

In the conduct of government Elizabeth showed her talent both in her choice of ministers and in their performance and the trust she reposed in them. Virtually all were to die in office, witness of her confidence and their ability. Although all of them felt the rough side of her tongue at times and wrung their hands at what they thought were wrong decisions (or lack of them), the underlying respect on both sides was not shaken.

The lively court world—with its endless succession of masques, balls, plays, and jousting, all centered on a highly accessible royal presence—focused the social and political life of the English aristocracy, noble and gentle; but Elizabeth cultivated a wider public still. She reached out to the country at large in "progresses," her annual visits to a succession of aristocratic country houses, displaying herself en route to the country and townsfolk of much of southern England. By 1570 there had grown up spontaneously local celebrations on 17 November, her accession day, with bonfires, fireworks, and general jollity—celebrations that would continue long after 1603.

This was the regime that shaped itself in the first ten years of the reign. It was at the end of the decade that a testing time came. Various causes contributed to a crisis—jealousy within the court of the dominant role of Sir William Cecil, the secretary of state, the alienation of the great northern earls, the Percies of Northumberland and the Nevilles of Westmoreland with their Catholic sympathies, but above all by the presence of the refugee queen of Scots, Mary Stuart, from May 1568.

At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, Mary, then queen of France as the wife of Francis II, had asserted a claim to the English succession (if not to the throne itself), backed by a substantial French force in Scotland. Mary was the granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Margaret Tudor, her descent untainted by the bastardy that her adherents claimed disqualified Elizabeth. That bid had been crushed by English arms. The widowed Mary's return to her homeland in 1562 had inaugurated a phase of uneasy but civil intercourse between the queens in which Elizabeth offered her favorite, Leicester, as a husband for Mary. When Mary's match to Henry, Lord Darnley, ended in bloody melodrama, she fled to England, hopefully seeking support for her restoration, but Elizabeth, faced with the dilemma of backing either Mary or the rebel regime in Edinburgh, chose the latter, retaining her unwanted guest in genteel confinement. Mary would spend the remaining nineteen years of her life in England. In 1572, she unwisely linked herself with the English malcontents, lending herself to a scheme for marrying the premier noble, Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk. Elizabeth scotched this plot, but Norfolk foolishly engaged himself in a replay of the same plan, thereby losing his head while Mary became the target of an enraged Parliament that was clamoring for hers. Previous to these events the two northern earls organized a rising in 1569 that appealed to Catholic sentiment. They got no response to their appeal and fled without striking a blow; their followers were duly punished. The event had proved the strength of the Elizabethan regime and the acceptance of the new religious order. There followed a long epoch of domestic peace.

FOREIGN RELATIONS

At the opening of the reign it was France that gave concern to the new government. In the 1540s Henry VIII had sought to match his son Edward with the infant queen of Scots. His "rough wooing"—successive invasions of Scotland—threw the Scots into the arms of the French; the young queen, spirited off to France, was married to the Dauphin, who succeeded his father as Francis II in 1559. As we saw above, the French then asserted Mary's rights in the English succession, backed by a French army; it was imperative it be expelled. The opportunity arose when a consortium of Protestant Scottish lords took up arms and sought English aid. Elizabeth, reluctant to support rebels against a fellow sovereign, grudgingly agreed to send an army in 1560. The action was successful; the traditional Scottish alliance with France was broken, and a Protestant regime dependent on English support was established at Edinburgh.

The next encounter with France came in 1562 in response to a French Huguenot plea for aid. Elizabeth sent money and an army that occupied Le Havre, the latter to be held as a security, for the return of Calais, lost by England in Mary Tudor's reign. The expedition was a failure. The Huguenots pocketed the English cash, reconciled themselves to the French crown and joined in expelling the English from Le Havre. This disaster confirmed the queen's distaste for aid to Protestant rebels in her neighbors' kingdoms. Henceforth she repelled emphatically all pleas to act as continental Protestantism's protector.

From the 1560s France, embroiled in religious civil war, ceased to be a threat. Attention gradually shifted to Spain. Here the religious difference counted since Philip II, wholly committed to the Catholic faith, regarded the English regime with intolerance and looked for opportunities to overthrow it. In addition there were clashes of interest in two theaters—the Low Countries and the Spanish West Indies. The former area, already stirring with religious discontent, was the main center of English trade. The latter was the scene of unwelcome English expeditions, half slave trade, half piracy. When in 1572 Dutch rebels under William of Orange organized large-scale, sustained revolt, Elizabeth resolutely opposed open assistance to them but turned a blind eye to English volunteers and encouraged Sir Francis Drake and Sir William Hawkins in their exploits in the Spanish New World.

Matters came to a head when French intervention in the Low Countries, headed by François, duke of Alençon/Anjou, the French king's brother, threatened. Elizabeth responded by encouraging the duke's courtship, hoping to tie him to her leading strings. The proposal aroused opposition; Elizabeth yielded to popular opinion, abandoning the match. Then in 1585 the plight of the Dutch rebels became so desperate that she reluctantly agreed to a military alliance with them. Philip in turn began to prepare an invasion fleet, the Great Armada.

The invasion threat and conspiracies against the queen's life brought patriotism to a pitch. Mary Stuart unwisely allowed herself to become involved in a plot against the queen. Its discovery led to a clamor for her death that Elizabeth found hard to resist. She sought to avoid signing Mary's death warrant by vainly encouraging private assassination. Her desperate ministers seized a momentary yielding to their pleas and beheaded Mary before Elizabeth's inevitable change of mind. All she could do was wither them with her impotent wrath.

In July 1588 the armada approached English shores; Elizabeth characteristically pushed herself to the fore, visiting her army stationed at Tilbury in Essex. Riding among her troops she addressed them, declaring herself to have the stomach of a king, "aye, and of a king of England."

The English victory of 1588 was in many ways the climax of the reign. A burdensome war continued to be fought to its end, in the Low Countries, in France (assisting the beleaguered Henry IV) and in Ireland, where a major rebellion was crushed with difficulty. Taxes were at record heights; Parliament had to be coaxed into new levies while the Commons complained vigorously about fiscal practices, and the queen, in an adroit speech, politely acceded to some of their demands. Her own generation of familiars, the trusted councillors on whom she had relied for decades, was dying off. Finally there was the Essex affair. Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, the favorite of her declining years, betrayed her doting indulgence and ended on the headsman's block in 1601, an event that darkened the last phase of her life. It was also, however, in these last decades of her life that the flowering of English literature, dramatic and poetic, began, thanks in part to the patronage of the queen and her court.

Elizabeth, against the odds posed by her gender and by the formidable problems facing her kingdom in 1558, had reigned for almost half a century, triumphantly surmounting one challenge after another. Well aware of the liabilities posed by her gender, she fashioned a complex personality that at once awed and charmed her subjects and impressed on the English historical memory an image that is still vital after four centuries.

See also Cecil Family ; Church of England ; England ; English Literature and Language ; Henry VIII (England) ; Mary I (England) ; Puritanism ; Stuart Dynasty (England and Scotland) ; Tudor Dynasty (England) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Camden, William. History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England. London, 1630, 1635, 1675, 1688. Selections from the work are edited by W. T. MacCaffrey. Chicago, 1970.

Elizabeth I. Collected Works. Edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago, 2000. Contains poems, letters, and speeches.

The Letters of Queen Elizabeth. Edited by G. B. Harrison. London, 1968.

Strong, Roy C. The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth. Oxford, 1963.

Secondary Sources

Brigden, Susan. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603. London, 2000. Best recent study of sixteenth-century England.

Doran, Susan. Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I. London and New York, 1996.

Dunlop, Ian. Palaces and Progresses of Elizabeth I. London, 1962.

Guy, John, ed. The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Phase. Cambridge, U.K., 1995. A study of Elizabeth's declining years.

MacCaffrey, W. T. The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime, 1558–1572. Princeton, 1968. An account of the first phase of the reign.

Neale, J. E. Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments. 2 vols. London, 1957.

——. Queen Elizabeth. London, 1934; reprinted 1967, 1971. Best modern biography.

Read, Conyers. Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth. London, 1960.

——. Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth. London, 1955.

——. Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth. 3 vols. Oxford, 1925. Detailed accounts of politics and foreign relations.

Starkey, David. Elizabeth: Apprenticeship. London, 2000. Elizabeth's career up to her accession.

Wernham, R. B. The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1558–1603. Berkeley, 1980.

Wallace MacCaffrey