Introduction: Elizabeth's Life and Reign Henry VIII, the second Tudor king, lacked a male heir as he approached age forty in 1531. His twenty-odd years of wedlock with Catherine of Aragon had produced only one child who survived into adolescence, his daughter Mary. When Pope Clement VII refused to dissolve Henry's marriage with Catherine, the King renounced papal authority, arranged for the annulment of his marriage by authority of the newly autonomous English Church, and married Anne Boleyn in 1533. By the Act of Supremacy (1534), Parliament proclaimed Henry the Supreme Head of the Church of England; thus, the Protestant Reformation came to England as a by-product of the King's efforts to perpetuate the Tudor dynasty. Henry was unable to hide his disappointment when Anne gave birth to their daughter Elizabeth on September 7, 1533. He could not foresee that this baby girl was destined to rule England for nearly forty-five years as a successful, indeed illustrious, queen.
Elizabeth learned early in life that her status as a potential successor to the crown could be dangerous. After her father's death in 1547, when her brother Edward came to the throne, she spent a year in the household of her stepmother, the dowager Queen Catherine Parr. Catherine's new husband, the Lord Admiral, Thomas Seymour, was handsome, dashing, and influential. His nephew, King Edward VI, was titular ruler of England under the protectorship of Seymour's brother, Edward, duke of Somerset. The teenage Princess found Thomas attractive, and his initial flirtation with her turned to open courtship when Catherine died just after childbirth in September 1548. Given Elizabeth's claim to the throne, this or any other match would have been treasonous without consent of the King and Privy Council. While Elizabeth escaped punishment, the Lord Admiral was in 1549 beheaded at his brother's command for, among other offenses, his designs on the Princess.
Elizabeth avoided any appearance of rivalry for the throne when Edward VI died in July 1553 and their half-sister, Mary, acceded as queen. But Mary reinstated Catholicism as the state religion and on July 25, 1554, married Philip II of Spain. During the preceding winter, English Protestants had launched a rebellion against the new regime. Sir Thomas Wyatt actually led troops into London in February, but his uprising was crushed. The government implicated Elizabeth in the failed coup and sent her to the Tower of London. Although once again her life was spared, she was held prisoner for more than a year, at first in the Tower and then at Woodstock Manor, Oxfordshire.
Elizabeth became Queen of England when Mary died on November 17, 1558. The country was deeply divided along religious lines as well as being economically and militarily weak; it was thus a tempting prey for the two great Catholic powers, Spain and France. Moreover, the new Queen was the last direct heir of the Tudor dynasty (though her legitimacy was not entirely certain even by English law). For the sake of England's future it was vital that either she marry and produce an heir or designate a successor who could then be legally ratified by Parliament. The alternative was an unregulated succession; at Elizabeth's death, civil war on behalf of rival contenders for the crown would be the most likely outcome.
The members of Elizabeth's first Parliament probably felt that the succession dilemma would be resolved soon enough by an appropriate marriage. Their foremost legislation in 1559, the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, restored the Protestant state church founded by Henry VIII and maintained under Edward VI. Their religious "settlement," confirmed in 1563 by adoption of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Church doctrine, termed Elizabeth the Supreme Governor of the realm in both ecclesiastical and temporal affairs. However, her status as a Protestant queen failed to discourage Catholic suitors; indeed, the formally recognized candidate who came closest to marrying her was Francis, duke of Alençon (later, duke of Anjou) and brother to the King of France. His off-and-on courtship of the Queen, begun in 1570, concluded without success in 1582 when Elizabeth was nearly fifty.
At the beginning of her reign, however, Elizabeth had engaged in open warfare with France, both in Scotland and over the French seaport of Calais, England's last Continental holding from the Hundred Years' War. The crisis intensified when Mary Stuart, Henry VII's great-granddaughter and widow of Francis II of France, returned to her native Scotland as queen in 1561. Mary was a staunch Catholic who held a viable claim to the English throne. During the 1560s and 1570s, Elizabeth's Privy Council and Parliament exhorted her with increasing fervor to marry or name an heir, but in the first decade of her reign she rejected perhaps a dozen suitors. She undoubtedly would have married her longtime favorite, Robert Dudley, were personal preference the only criterion. But the death of Lord Robert's wife under mysterious circumstances in 1560 made any match with Elizabeth politically impossible on grounds of the scandal it would cause. She instead created Dudley earl of Leicester in 1564 and offered him as a husband of suitable rank for the Queen of Scots in an effort to secure England's northern border. But in July 1565, this rival queen married another of Elizabeth's own subjects, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and in the following June gave birth to a male heir, the future King James VI of Scotland.
Ironically, Mary's apparent successes as queen and mother led to the most glorious triumph of Elizabeth's reign and resulted as well in a Protestant successor to her throne. Mary's indiscreet love life implicated her lover, Bothwell, in Darnley's assassination in 1567. In the wake of this crime, most of Mary's subjects turned against her. She fled to England in May 1568, where she was arrested and where she remained a prisoner until her death. For nearly twenty years Elizabeth dealt with the crisis of a rival queen on English soil whose mere existence served as a constant incitement to Elizabeth's Catholic subjects and the Catholic powers of Europe to place her on the English throne by force. During the winter of 1569-70, Elizabeth's armies quickly suppressed the "Northern Rebellion," the first uprising on Mary's behalf. Yet there followed a series of plots to assassinate Elizabeth, among them the Ridolfi plot of 1571, the Throckmorton plot of 1583, and William Parry's conspiracy in 1585. Not until the Babington plot of 1586, however, was the government able to implicate Mary directly in a scheme to kill Elizabeth. In the fall of that year, the Queen of Scots was tried and found guilty. Parliament demanded the death sentence, but Elizabeth could not bring herself to give final approval for Mary's execution. When Mary was, nevertheless, beheaded on February 8, 1587, it was by authority of a duly signed royal warrant, yet Elizabeth insisted that she never meant to dispatch the warrant, and she made Secretary William Davison the scapegoat for her rival's death.
Mary's execution brought to a head England's conflict with Spain and the papacy. England had sparred for years with its Catholic opponents: in Ireland, in the Netherlands, on the high seas, and in Spain's New World colonies. Spain might have launched an armada against England in 1587 had not Sir Francis Drake burned the shipping in Càdiz harbor that spring. The Great Armada sailed the following summer, its purpose to crush Elizabeth's regime and return England to the Catholic faith. Instead, the English navy routed this flotilla, and nearly half its ships and men never returned to Spain. The defeat of the Armada was Elizabeth's greatest victory on the international front, although hostilities with Spain continued to the end of her reign, draining the royal coffers and distracting the English from both their domestic needs and efforts to establish overseas colonies of their own.
The very fact, however, that Elizabeth could challenge so great a power as Spain raised England's international prestige to its highest level since the days of Henry VIII. The last dozen years of Elizabeth's reign were also a golden age of English literature, created by such writers as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. But the Queen who managed England's problems during these years no doubt found the age substantially less glorious. Virulent outbreaks of plague from 1592 to 1594 were followed by several years of bad weather, poor harvests, and near famine in some parts of the country. The harmonious functioning of the central government was upset by the growing influence of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex. By 1587 he had eclipsed Sir Walter Ralegh as the Queen's chief favorite. Elizabeth delighted in this exuberant nobleman who was less than half her age. But Essex's ambitions soon pitted him against Lord Treasurer Burghley and Burghley's son, Sir Robert Cecil; the result was years of bitter struggle for control of royal favor and national policy. The earl's miscalculated coup attempt and subsequent beheading early in 1601 cast a sombre pall over Elizabeth's final years. Festivities at court were often sparsely attended in the latter years of her reign, while even her most trusted courtiers secretly corresponded with her eagerly expectant successor, King James VI of Scotland. Elizabeth never lost the love of the majority of her subjects, however, just as her love for them was a constant theme of her public oratory from the time of her coronation. Her accession day, November 17, was celebrated spontaneously and publicly decades after her death. The transition to Stuart rule under King James took place smoothly in 1603, yet the new dynasty never produced a ruler as effective and popular as the queen it superseded.
Copyright ©2004 by Steven W. May
Chapter One: Original Poems
Poem 1 Woodstock, 1555.
From Universitätsbibliothek Basel MS L, 7-8,
the diary of Thomas Platter.
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