Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I (1533–1603), queen of England (1558–1603). ‘A very strange sort of woman,’ wrote the imperial ambassador three weeks after Elizabeth's accession. Much of the pattern of Elizabeth's life and reign was shaped by the circumstances of her birth. Her mother was Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife. Elizabeth was born at Greenwich in September 1533 five months after her parents' marriage had been announced. Her father was momentarily disappointed by the birth of a daughter but comforted himself that a son would no doubt follow. Cranmer's declaration in May 1533 that Henry's previous marriage to Catherine of Aragon had been invalid meant that Elizabeth took precedence over her half-sister Mary, seventeen years her senior.

Elizabeth's early years were even more turbulent than those of Mary, but with different results. While Mary retreated into her religion, Elizabeth grew up wary and dexterous. Her position as heir was confirmed by the Act of Succession of 1534 but her favoured situation lasted less than three years. In May 1536 her mother was executed and a new Act of Succession declared Anne's marriage void, Elizabeth illegitimate, and recognized Henry's third marriage to Jane Seymour as ‘without spot, doubt or impediment’. The birth of her half-brother Edward in October 1537 made her chances of succeeding to the throne appear remote. After Henry's three last marriages had failed to produce more children, a third Act of Succession in 1543 reinstated his daughters, declaring that if Edward died without heirs, the throne would pass to Mary and then Elizabeth. The king's will in 1546 confirmed that arrangement and accordingly Edward succeeded in 1547. Elizabeth was then 13.

She had spent most of her girlhood at Hatfield. She received a high-powered classical education which left her in command of Latin and Greek and speaking French, Spanish, and Italian ‘most perfectly’. ‘My illustrious mistress shines like a star,’ wrote Roger Ascham, one of her tutors. She was on good terms with Catherine Parr, Henry's last wife, and when, after his death, Catherine married Lord Seymour, Somerset's younger brother, Elizabeth moved into the household. The arrangement ended when Seymour made playful advances to Elizabeth which were not totally unwelcome. After Catherine died in childbirth, Seymour suggested marriage to Elizabeth, who replied prudently that such a matter should be laid before the council. Seymour was arrested in 1549 on a charge of treason and Elizabeth closely questioned by Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, who confessed himself baffled that she would not ‘cough out’ anything: ‘she hath a very good wit and nothing is to be got from her but by great policy.’

During the rest of Edward's reign she was in good standing at court and sympathetic towards the religious changes. But there are few mentions of Elizabeth in Edward's journal and they do not seem to have been very close. Consequently, when he was dying in the spring of 1553 and could not bear the thought of a catholic succession, Edward bypassed Elizabeth and named Lady Jane Grey, Northumberland's daughter-in-law, as his successor. During the ensuing crisis which placed Mary on the throne, Elizabeth stayed at Hatfield on the plea of illness. She was not well rewarded for her acquiescence in Mary's triumph. Within a month Mary was urging her to attend mass and Elizabeth, in floods of tears, real or simulated, begged for time to study the question. The following month, Mary's first Parliament acknowledged the validity of Catherine of Aragon's marriage, by implication bastardizing Elizabeth once more. Yet Mary did not take the next step of removing her formally from the succession, presumably because, until six months before her death, she hoped for children of her own.

In February 1554 Wyatt's rising against Mary's Spanish marriage brought Elizabeth to the brink of disaster. Summoned urgently to court as the Kentish rebels advanced upon London, she pleaded more illness, then reluctantly obeyed. In March she was sent to the Tower while the conspirators were racked to provide evidence against her. ‘She will have to be executed,’ wrote the emperor's envoy Mendoza briskly, ‘as while she lives it will be very difficult to make the Prince's [Philip] entry here safe.’ But no evidence could be found and after two months she was sent off to Woodstock under house arrest. It was not an experience Elizabeth forgot: twelve years later she told her Parliament, ‘I stood in danger of my life, my sister was so incensed against me.’ While she was at Woodstock, Soranzo the Venetian ambassador sent a long description of her: ‘her figure and face are very handsome, and such an air of dignified majesty pervades all her actions that no one can fail to suppose she is a queen … her manners are very modest and affable.’ Ultimately she returned to Hatfield, kept her head down, attended mass regularly, and refused all offers of marriage. ‘She is too clever to get herself caught,’ Renard, the imperial ambassador, told the emperor. Elizabeth received some protection from an unexpected quarter— Philip, who, increasingly aware that his marriage to Mary would be neither fruitful nor lengthy, was thinking of long-term investments. Mary, queen of Scots, the next heir, though a catholic, was betrothed to the dauphin and would certainly carry England, Scotland, and Ireland into the camp of his French enemies.

In the event, Elizabeth's accession, on 17 November 1558, passed off without incident. Even Mary, in her last weeks, had conceded its inevitability. Elizabeth was faced at once with the same problems that had confronted Mary on her accession five years before—the religious question and her own marriage.

The outlines of her religious policy were signalled at an early stage when she pointedly absented herself from the elevation of the host, placed two of Mary's bishops under arrest for intemperate sermons, and in her first Parliament took back the governorship of the church. It would have been surprising had she done anything else. Her mother had sympathized with the reformers, and Elizabeth herself, educated with her brother Edward by protestant tutors, shared his views, though not his zeal. To adopt a catholic posture would have meant accepting her own bastardy and admitting that she had no right to the throne. It might, of course, have been possible in the intricate ecclesiastical politics of 1558 to come to some arrangement with the papacy, but since the pope was at that time a staunch ally of the French, whose new queen, Mary, was a genuine catholic and had just claimed the English throne, it might seem a thin chance. The famous via media was to a great extent forced upon her. Catholicism certainly would have meant giving up the headship and possibly the throne as well: calvinism, as James VI of Scotland was to discover, meant being hectored by godly presbyters. By the end of 1559 the whole bench of catholic bishops had been replaced.

The second problem, marriage, had already caused trouble. There has been considerable speculation about the nature of Elizabeth's sexuality. But the romping with Seymour, the long attachment to Leicester, her sad coquetry with Anjou in the late 1570s, and her appreciation of ‘proper men’ like Raleigh and Essex suggest normal heterosexuality. Nor is there any reason to believe that she could not have borne children. The political objections to marriage were overwhelming and her council and Parliament urged in vain. Any husband would certainly interfere and possibly dominate, and opinion would support him. A foreign husband would drag the country into continental disputes and reawaken religious animosities: marriage to a subject would be an act of condescension and a formula for faction. Though her reasons for virginity were largely negative, she turned it to her own advantage, declaring that she was married to her people. Elizabeth's decision may have been wrong. But her sister's marriage had scarcely been a success and though Mary, queen of Scots, can hardly be accused of being against matrimony, the results were not encouraging. Elizabeth's cautious attitude extended to naming a successor. No doubt she postponed doing so for the reason that many people postpone making their wills, but essentially it was political—a named successor would create a rival centre of power and an invitation to intrigue. ‘I know the inconstancy of the people of England,’ she observed privately in 1561, ‘how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed upon that person who is next to succeed.’

Two other decisions could not be delayed—her choice of advisers and her attitude towards the war with France which she had inherited from her sister. On the very first day of her reign she appointed as secretary William Cecil (Burghley), whom she had employed as her estates surveyor. He was yoked with Knollys as vice-chamberlain, Nicholas Bacon as lord keeper, Clinton as lord high admiral, and Howard as lord chamberlain. Despite internal rivalries and some very rough treatment from the queen, they stayed in service until they died and, joined in 1559 by Dudley (Leicester) and from 1573 by Walsingham, formed a remarkable team.

Elizabeth was anxious to wind up the war against France, but dared not risk alienating her ally Philip, lest the nightmare possibility of a grand catholic coalition of Spain, France, and Scotland should come into existence. Nor could she easily reconcile herself to losing Calais and in the end a face-saving formula had to be devised. No sooner had she escaped from one conflict than another emerged—in Scotland where she was persuaded to intervene in 1560 on behalf of the protestant lords against the French. Though the assault on the French-held Leith castle was a dismal failure, the death of Mary of Guise took the heart out of the French resistance and by the treaty of Edinburgh they agreed to withdraw. Elizabeth's initial reluctance was due in part to natural caution, concern for the cost of the enterprise, but also to the thought that helping subjects to resist their lawful monarch was a bad example. She showed less reluctance in her next adventure, which was an unmitigated fiasco. Religious wars in France in 1562 held out the hope of strengthening the protestant cause there and of regaining Calais. An expedition to assist the Huguenots took possession of Le Havre, to be exchanged for Calais. The French factions then made peace to unite against the English, the English force was decimated by disease, and obliged to surrender.

The next developments in foreign affairs were on a totally different scale—no limited interventions, but the great crisis of her reign. Three problems ran together in the 1570s and 1580s—the international religious question, the problem of Mary, queen of Scots, and the developing rift with Philip over the revolt of the Low Countries. For some time, even after the readoption of the governorship of the church, the reaction of the papacy was restrained, since it was not clear that the breach would be permanent and there were suggestions that Elizabeth was sympathetic to catholicism. But immediately after the failure of the rising of the northern earls, Pius V, far less moderate than his predecessor Pius IV who had extended an invitation to Elizabeth to send representatives to the Council of Trent, issued in 1570 a bull deposing her and absolving her catholic subjects from allegiance. The result was a series of plots against Elizabeth's life—Ridolfi 1572, Throckmorton 1584, Parry 1585, and Babington 1586. The second element of the worsening storm was the decision of Mary, queen of Scots, after her disastrous marriages to Darnley and Bothwell, to flee her country in 1568 and place herself under Elizabeth's protection. She was soon under close arrest. Despair at ever being released led Mary to dabble in plots and each plot produced fresh demands from ardent protestants for her execution. For many years Elizabeth resisted but the Babington plot sealed Mary's fate and she was executed in 1587. Elizabeth, characteristically, blamed her secretary Davidson for a misunderstanding but the confusion was largely diplomatic. The third factor was that relations with her erstwhile ally Philip broke down and from 1585 Elizabeth sent help to the Dutch rebels. Philip's retort was to begin planning the invasion of England and in July 1588 the great Armada left Corunna. At Tilbury, Elizabeth delivered the most famous of all her speeches, ‘not doubting that by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my Kingdom and of my People.’

The defeat of the Armada turned her into a living legend and the most famous of all English monarchs. It was a fame she nurtured carefully, devoting great attention to the presentation of her image. Inevitably the later years were something of an anticlimax. Philip launched more attacks, the plots against her life continued, and the centre of anxiety moved to Ireland, where Tyrone's rebellion had Spanish support. Many of her counter-measures were unsuccessful and Essex's foolish behaviour in Ireland, followed by his abortive insurrection, darkened her last days. But she died still in charge, capable of putting on performances and, at the end, naming ‘our cousin of Scotland’, James VI, as her successor.

Though her character was that of her father—a tempestuous personality with sunshine and heavy showers—her policies were more akin to those of her grandfather Henry VII—an attention to money bordering on meanness, reluctance to summon Parliament, and a disinclination to foreign adventure which would not only be expensive but place her at the mercy of the military. After the usual dip immediately after her death, her reputation soared and as the Stuarts floundered, the great days of Good Queen Bess seemed more and more golden. Lord Cobham at Stowe in the 18th cent. placed her in his temple of British worthies, along with Alfred the Great, Shakespeare, and Newton. The late 20th cent. saw criticism from historians, to whom admiration does not come easily. ‘The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 solved nothing’, we are told—a very odd verdict. The love she claimed to have for her people was shallow and insincere; she outstayed her welcome until the gap between image and reality became grotesque; the young men at her court in the 1590s were impatient and ribald; many of her policies were muddled and she made procrastination an art-form; she took little interest in the mechanics of government; her religious policy pleased nobody. In most of these criticisms there is a grain of truth, but collectively they suggest a determination not to be pleased. It is easier to attack her religious policy than to suggest how ardent catholic and zealous calvinist could be reconciled, nor were many of her contemporary rulers conspicuously successful. Images are always inflated—that is their purpose—but it is to her credit that she understood the importance of imagery. Like all sensible rulers she was, of course, interested primarily in her own survival: dead monarchs have no policy. But though her treatment of men was often bad, her judgement of them was usually good. Essex captivated her but Cecil and his son ran the country. Her religious settlement may have been a patchwork of compromises but the Church of England took root and earned respect and affection. It is, of course, perfectly permissible to prefer the wisdom of her predecessor Mary, or the political skills of her successors James and Charles, but it would be a little strange.

J. A. Cannon

Bibliography

Haigh, C. , Elizabeth I (1988);
Johnson, P. , Elizabeth: A Study in Power and Intellect (1974);
Ridley, J. , Elizabeth I (1987);
Strong, R. , The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (1977);
Somerset, A. , Elizabeth I (1997).