Elizabeth I - The Virgin Queen Documentary

The woman known to history as Queen Elizabeth I of England and Ireland was born on the 7th of September 1533 at Greenwich Palace near London. Her father was King Henry VIII, the second son of King Henry VII, who had ruled England between 1485 and 1509, having emerged victorious from the series of civil wars which wracked England in the fifteenth century known as the Wars of the Roses. Elizabeth’s mother was Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII and briefly the Queen Consort of England between 1533 and 1536. The circumstances of Elizabeth’s birth would dictate the

first quarter of a century of her life. Her parents had hoped for a son to provide Henry VIII with a long-desired legitimate male heir to continue the Tudor line and prevent any fall back into the civil wars which had characterized English politics in the fifteenth century. Thus, while Elizabeth’s birth was celebrated, and she was promptly proclaimed Henry’s heir presumptive, jumping past her half-sister Mary, born of Henry’s first marriage to Catherine of Aragon, there was no denying that Henry and Anne were disappointed not to have had a boy. This desire for a male heir had characterized

Henry VIII’s reign since the mid-1520s and had resulted in his long-running quest for a legal divorce from his first wife between 1527 and 1533. Nevertheless, when a daughter arrived in 1533 the king and queen made the best of it and claimed that a boy would soon follow. Meanwhile, in December 1533, the three-month-old Princess Elizabeth was established in her own royal household at Hatfield, staffed by numerous servants and a group of guardians handpicked by her mother. Most of Elizabeth’s closest attendants were extended Boleyn relatives. Though she was only a baby, Elizabeth was a chess piece in

the English politics of the 1530s. Before long her father’s patience with her mother began to wear thin, as Anne suffered multiple miscarriages in the mid-1530s and the son she had promised the king never arrived. In May 1536, after a series of outlandish claims, including the suggestion that Anne had been in an incestuous relationship with her own brother, emerged, Anne was executed for charges of adultery, incest, and treason. The charges were probably fabricated as a means for Henry to dispense of his second wife. Not long thereafter the Boleyn marriage was annulled on the basis that Henry

had been seduced into it by some form of withcraft. This rendered Elizabeth illegitimate and within two weeks of Anne’s death Henry was married to his third wife, Jane Seymour. He soon ceased supporting Elizabeth’s household in the fashion that he previously had. Then, in July of 1536, the English parliament passed the Succession Act, which stated that Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn had been invalid, officially rendering Elizabeth illegitimate. Henry had always demonstrated an attachment to his eldest daughter, Mary, born in 1516 from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and he had been quick to welcome her back

into the fold in the 1530s once she agreed to end her obstinate refusal to acknowledge Henry’s divorce of her mother. The king did not immediately make such an effort for his younger daughter and continued to keep her at arm’s length in the years following her mother’s execution. Indeed, Elizabeth’s governess, Lady Margaret Bryan, was soon writing to Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, begging him to intercede with the King on the child’s behalf. In her letter, Lady Bryan wrote that Elizabeth was growing out of her clothes quickly and there were insufficient resources to keep her in a

manner befitting a daughter of the king, legitimate or illegitimate. Such were the financial straits at Hatfield that two members of Elizabeth’s household were even charged for poaching deer in the parklands surrounding the house. The birth in October 1537 of Prince Edward, Henry’s first legitimate male heir, changed matters, though it resulted in the death two weeks later of Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife, owing to post-natal complications. With a male heir now in place, Elizabeth and Mary were re-integrated back into the Henrician court more fully, their positions as either legitimate or illegitimate being somewhat nullified when there

was now a male successor to the throne. Moreover, before her death and while she was pregnant, Jane had encouraged the king to restore Elizabeth to a better position. The belated manner in which Henry accepted Elizabeth into the royal household contrasted sharply with her character. Of all his children, Elizabeth would prove to be the most like her father. She resembled Henry, with the same light, reddish hair, pale skin, and ruddy cheeks, though with her mother Anne’s brown eyes. She would also prove herself in years to come to have the same hard-headedness of her father. Elizabeth received

a very good education in the late 1530s and throughout the 1540s and soon proved to be one of the most brilliantly learned women in sixteenth-century Europe. She spoke five languages, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Latin, and could read Greek and Dutch to some extent. When an Irish aristocrat visiting court many years later wanted to gain her attention, he presented her with a small dictionary of key phrases in the Irish language. Her scholarly work involved translating ancient Latin text such as Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy and Tacitus’ Annals. As she was being educated in the 1540s

she grew closer to her younger brother, Prince Edward, who was much closer in age to her than was Mary. Elizabeth carried the chrisom at Edward’s baptism, they shared some of the same tutors in the years that followed, and they were both influenced by the same ardently Protestant reformers at the Henrician court. During her early years, Elizabeth found surrogate mothers in her governesses and in a succession of stepmothers. The Protestant German princess, Anne of Cleves, whom Henry married when Elizabeth was six years old, took an interest in Henry’s youngest daughter. Her marriage to Henry lasted only

a few months before he acquired an annulment, but Anne and Elizabeth continued to visit and write to each other following the divorce. She did not develop a close relationship with her father’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk who wed Henry when she was 17 years old in 1540. She was dead not much over a year and a half later after committing adultery with a courtier by the name of Thomas Culpeper. When this latest stepmother was executed, Elizabeth drew an important lesson from it. The princess, no doubt remembering what had happened

to her mother as well, remarked to her childhood friend, Robert Dudley, “I shall never marry.” This lesson would be reinforced over and over again as Elizabeth grew up and she observed that married women were invariably at the mercy of their husbands, surrendering power and self-determination to them. Henry’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, whom Henry married when Elizabeth was nine years old, was also kind and motherly towards her. Catherine, who authored several books herself, recognized the young princess’ intellectual potential and encouraged her in her academic pursuits. Catherine is also usually credited with persuading Henry to restore both

Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession to the throne, after their younger brother Edward. Beyond these stepmothers, it was the serving members of Elizabeth’s household, most of whom were extended relations of her mother, Anne Boleyn, with whom Elizabeth developed the closest relationships, particularly her beloved governess, Catherine “Cat” Ashley, who would remain with Elizabeth as lady-in-waiting when she became queen many years later, while William Cecil, a rising official esteemed for his intelligence and abilities, served in his younger years as the surveyor of Elizabeth’s household. Elizabeth was thirteen years old when her father died in January

1547. It must have been a difficult event full of conflicting emotions for a girl who by then was old enough to know that her father had sanctioned the execution of her mother. Henry was generous to his daughters in his will, allowing each of them an annual income of £3,000. With Henry’s death, nine-year-old Edward became King Edward VI. A regency council was appointed to govern for him during his childhood years. This was first headed by his uncle Edward Seymour, who became Lord Protector of England and the Duke of Somerset. The Dowager Queen, Catherine Parr, invited Elizabeth

to live with her and her new husband, Thomas Seymour, Somerset’s brother, whom Catherine had married within months of the king’s death, something which many people disapproved of. Elizabeth’s experiences here were less than ideal. Thomas Seymour was an unscrupulous man, constantly in pursuit of greater power. Clearly his marriage to Catherine had not fully satisfied his ambitions and he began to engage in highly inappropriate behaviour towards Elizabeth once she was ensconced in their household. He frequently visited her bedchamber in the early mornings, still in his nightgown, sitting on her bed uninvited and tickling her. Elizabeth began to

get up earlier in the mornings, ensuring that her maids attended her as early as possible to avoid Seymour’s visits. It must have been enormously confusing to her when her stepmother, rather than confront her husband about his behavior, began to participate in the peculiar horseplay. This leaves us with many questions and, if true, it is a damning indictment of both Seymour and Parr. Did Catherine believe that her husband’s behavior towards her stepdaughter was in fact innocent and all in fun? Was she jealous or insecure and seeking to keep herself involved in her husband’s activities? Whatever Catherine’s

beliefs and motives were, she promptly sent Elizabeth away in May 1548, when she unexpectedly discovered her husband and fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, quote: “in an embrace.” To give Catherine the benefit of the doubt, she may very well have sent Elizabeth away to protect her, while she was seemingly unable to control her husband’s behaviour. After being sent away, Elizabeth never saw her stepmother again. The two exchanged a few letters after Elizabeth’s departure, but Catherine Parr died as a result of complications from childbirth less than four months later. Unfortunately, Elizabeth had not heard the last of Thomas Seymour. With

Catherine dead, he began actively pursuing Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. It is difficult to determine how Elizabeth felt about this. Seymour was around 40 years old at the time, whereas she was fifteen, but such age differences were not entirely unusual in early modern times when it came to organising political marriages. And a marriage between one of the king’s uncles and his half-sister would most certainly be a political match were it to occur. What foiled Seymour’s plan was that he acted in secret and when details of what he was conspiring towards became public it had the look

of a political conspiracy by him. When it was revealed, the Privy Council had him detained and questioned. Elizabeth was interrogated closely about the Seymour plot, but she adamantly denied any involvement on her part in any plans or schemes of which King Edward or the Privy Council did not approve, including any question of marriage. The Seymour episode eventually blew over. Elizabeth likely learned a great deal from it. For the next two years she passed most of her time at Hatfield, immersed in her studies, and wrote regularly and dutifully to her brother, King Edward. She began to

visit court more regularly, beginning in or around 1551. There she became the very model of the virtuous princess, dressing with modesty and little ostentation. Elizabeth was Protestant in her religious leanings, though she was much more moderate than her brother the king. Edward was emerging as a Calvinist monarch and had overseen the adoption of a radical form of Protestantism in the late 1540s and early 1550s. Elizabeth, conversely, favoured some doctrinal elements of Protestantism but still admired the pomp and ceremony of Roman Catholicism. As with so much else, she was much like her father in that regard.

In the early summer of 1553, with Edward profoundly ill, Elizabeth was warned by William Cecil that the king was dying and that there was a plot afoot to imprison both herself and her half-sister Mary and place Lady Jane Grey, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, on the throne as a Protestant stooge controlled by the Duke of Northumberland, who had emerged as the foremost figure in Edward’s government in the early 1550s. When Edward VI died on the 6th of July 1553, possibly from tuberculosis, Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen. Athough Elizabeth mourned her brother’s passing, Edward’s attempt

to defy their father’s will and remove both Mary and Elizabeth from the line of succession rankled her. Thus, when the Privy Council proclaimed Mary as queen, in defiance of Northumberland’s efforts to make Lady Jane Grey queen, Elizabeth promptly wrote to Mary to signal her support for her cause, despite Mary’s well-known zealous Roman Catholicism. Elizabeth accompanied the new queen as she progressed triumphantly into London in August of 1553, the Grey cause having collapsed almost immediately. Mary’s reign would prove tumultuous for Elizabeth. As a Protestant and Mary’s heir, she was a figurehead for those English people who

would rather see a Protestant on the throne. Accordingly, even in instances where she did not encourage it, she was made a figurehead of opposition to the Marian regime, most dangerously in the case of the rebellion in early 1554 of Thomas Wyatt, an insurrection which Elizabeth had nothing to do with but nevertheless led to her being detained in the Tower of London for some time. Throughout these unsettling years Elizabeth could never be certain that her life was secure and she cleaved ever closer to the serving members of her household, whom she considered her family. These included

the Ashleys, the Sheltons and William Cecil. She also grew closer during these years to her friend, Robert Dudley, whom she referred to affectionately as “sweet Robin.” Robert was a son of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, whom Queen Mary had executed for his part in the plot to raise Lady Jane Grey to the throne. The apparent closeness between the princess and Dudley was controversial. He had been married since 1550 to Amy Robsart. In April of 1555, Elizabeth’s house arrest abruptly ended, when Queen Mary summoned her to court. The queen was labouring under the belief that she

was expecting a child and requested that Elizabeth join her in her confinement. Elizabeth dutifully attended her sister in the birthing chamber throughout the summer, but Mary’s due date came and went and no baby was born. It had been a phantom pregnancy and Elizabeth remained the heir to the throne. In the aftermath of this incident, Mary invited Elizabeth to remain at court, giving her chambers befitting her position, and allowing her more and more freedom as time went on. It is possible that Mary’s conduct in this matter indicated some renewal of sisterly feeling between the two women.

However, Mary may also have invited Elizabeth to remain at court simply to keep a closer eye on her. Elizabeth remained at Hatfield for the next two years. During this time, she and Robert Dudley became closer than ever. He visited her often and they enjoyed many of the same pursuits, including riding, hunting, dancing, playing at cards, and witty conversation. Elizabeth and Robert seemed not to care about the implications of their relationship when in each other’s company, and there was little Elizabeth’s advisors such as William Cecil could say to dissuade her. Elizabeth endured two years of tension

and uncertainty after her return to Hatfield. Then matters changed very dramatically. On the 17th of November 1558, her sister Mary died, most likely of ovarian or uterine cancer, a likely explanation for some of the symptoms accompanying her phantom pregnancies. Lacking any other heir, Elizabeth, the last of the children of Henry VIII, was promptly proclaimed as Queen Elizabeth I of England. It was not immediately apparent whether Elizabeth intended to rule as a Protestant or a Catholic monarch. For her part, Elizabeth was content that this ambiguity should last as long as possible, until she could consolidate her

power and establish a government. She well understood that England was still heavily Catholic, as were many of the nobles and clergy around her. Nearly two decades of separation from Rome had rendered many English ambivalent about Papal supremacy, even those who considered themselves to be loyal Catholics. The English parliament thus proved willing to grant Elizabeth the title of “Supreme Governor of the Church of England” without really knowing what the queen’s wider religious stance was. The Elizabethan religious settlement would only unfold in the course of 1559 and 1560. Elizabeth understood that she had to proceed carefully while

her reign was still new and uncertain. Queen Mary’s body lay in state at St. James’ Palace until mid-December, with regular Catholic vigils performed until her interrment at Westminster. Elizabeth continued to have the Latin mass celebrated in her private chapel, but demonstrated her discomfort with Catholicism in other small ways, such as requesting removal of specifically Catholic rituals such as the raising of the host during mass. Elizabeth ensured that her sister’s funeral was both magnificent and in keeping with Catholic tradition, although she did imprison a eulogizing priest following it for vaguely referring to her supposed illegitimacy. On

the day of her coronation, the 15th of January 1559, Elizabeth processed through the city of London as the people cheered her joyfully. She was anointed and crowned Queen of England and Ireland in Westminster Abbey, entering the church dressed in magnificent royal robes of gold, trimmed with ermine and jewels, her long red hair loose and flowing. As Elizabeth passed by, attendees promptly cut off pieces of the blue carpet upon which she walked as souvenirs. Ever conscious of how controversial her Protestant faith still was to many of her subjects, Elizabeth’s coronation was a largely Catholic service. Even

within a largely Catholic ceremony, Elizabeth did not prostrate herself for the anointing. Instead she simply knelt in a dignified fashion. Moreover, as soon as the Latin mass began, the Queen promptly withdrew to a private chamber to change her costume for the upcoming feast and celebration. This was clearly designed as a public statement of her rejection of some of the Catholic rites, carefully choreographed to indicate to the political nation that further religious changes would come in the months ahead. Emerging in an exquisite costume of purple and ermine, she headed the procession out of the church, smiling

and graciously greeting members of the cheering crowds. Elizabeth had cleverly managed to have herself crowned in a way which seemed to placate both Catholics and Protestants to varying extents. One of Elizabeth’s first acts as Queen was what is known as the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. At her first official parliament, she had her government pass an Act of Uniformity, which reinstated the 1549 Book of Common Prayer that had been a bedrock of her half-brother’s Protestant settlement, although a few alterations were introduced into it in line with Elizabeth’s much more moderate Protestantism. One sticking point concerned the real

presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, known as transubstantiation, which Catholics believed in and Protestants did not. Some historians argue that the liturgical alterations of the Elizabethan era made it possible for both Protestants and Catholics to interpret communion as they pleased. In addition, because Elizabeth was fond of the ceremony and pageantry of the Roman Catholic Church, the traditional Catholic vestments worn by priests and clerics were preserved under the new Elizabethan Religious Settlement, as were the images and crucifixes in churches and monasteries across England. This would become a major point of contention for more

hardline Protestant reformers in England, who believed ostentation of this kind was idolatrous. Elizabeth also filled as many bishoprics and archbishoprics as possible with Protestant clerics, removing Catholic bishops appointed by Mary in the process. All in all, Elizabeth imposed a very moderate form of Lutheran Protestantism in the late 1550s and early 1560s, but it would never please a large cohort of radical Calvinists in England who became known as the Puritans and who wanted a form of Protestantism based largely on the theocracy Jean Calvin had created in the city of Geneva in the Swiss Confederacy back in

the 1530s and 1540s. Clashes between the government and the Puritans would remain a constant feature of Elizabeth’s long reign. This disagreement illustrates the level of religious discord which was prevalent, not just in England, but across Europe during the sixteenth century, Elizabeth’s religious settlement decreed punishment for refusal to attend Sunday services or for other examples of Catholic failure to conform, but the penalties were small fines, which frequently went unenforced, depending on religious sympathies in a given region. Many Catholic clergy and the laity found it convenient to conform outwardly, while inwardly retaining their own beliefs. Indeed, as

Elizabeth once wisely declared, quote: “There is only one Christ, one faith, all else is a dispute over trifles.” The English certainly had their religious struggles, but under Elizabeth these struggles were considerably less violent than they proved to be elsewhere in Europe, such as in France where the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 would see Parisian Catholics massacre over 3,000 Protestant Huguenots in a single day. This was in the midst of forty years of religious wars in France between the 1560s and the 1590s. Compared to this level of religious strife, England remained calm under Elizabeth, and

more than a decade would pass after her accession to the throne before the religious question erupted into any form of major violence in England. England’s administrative, economic and military infrastructure all needed urgent attention. Henry VIII had spent ruinously during his reign and neither Edward nor Mary had ruled for long enough to fully correct the problems he bequeathed to them. Conversely, wars during both Elizabeth’s half-sibling’s reigns and harvest failures had compounded the problem. English trade had declined as well, following the decreasing value of the English currency. Elizabeth worked closely with her newly appointed Secretary of State,

William Cecil, the de-facto head of her government for the next forty years, and Thomas Gresham, financier, merchant and longtime economic advisor to the Tudors, to formulate a strategy to rescue the economy. By 1561 all of the debased currency had been withdrawn from circulation, dissolved and replaced with freshly minted coins of gold and silver that re-established confidence in the face value of the English coinage. The recovery of England’s currency helped the economy rebound nicely. Prices stabilized and trade boomed once more. In addition, Gresham founded London’s Royal Exchange early in the reign, after being inspired by his

direct experiences of the Antwerp Bourse where English cloth merchants had been carrying out much of their trade in the Low Countries for decades. An island nation requires ships, for both economic and military purposes. Elizabeth understood that a good deal of investment was needed in this area, yet, she was still constrained by budgets. Therefore the process of naval expansion was a careful and practical one during her reign. The ships built during Elizabeth’s reign tended to be multi-purpose in design, meant for trade, exploration, fishing and warfare. They were smaller, faster and more maneuverable than the standard warship,

and yet not so diminutive that they could not be equipped with multiple gun carriages. Several dozen were built for the royal fleet and they were so in a semi-private manner whereby nobles and mariners offset some of the cost by having semi-control over the ships when they were built. Ships, of course, require experienced and competent men to man them and Elizabeth and Cecil patronised a number of highly skilled mariners from the English West Country, men like Humphrey Gilbert, Martin Frobisher and Walter Raleigh, as well as sailors from ports like Bristol who had decades of experience leading

expeditions to the valuable fisheries off the “Grand Banks” of Newfoundland in North America. Their exploration of the North American seaboard was an important, though often under-appreciated, precursor to the English colonisation of North America in the seventeenth century. England’s economic recovery was impressive, and much credit is due to Elizabeth and her advisors for overseeing it, especially since regular taxation was not a strategy England could resort to, as taxes had to be approved by parliament. Instead a large source of funding for England’s recovery came from crown land revenues and customs duties. Due to this, Elizabeth’s court was

markedly less extravagant than her father’s. She kept her staff and that of the Privy Council, the main governing body of the realm, small, installing most of the members of her traditional household in positions at court. Entertainments and banquets in the early years were elegant, but not overly extravagant. Indeed, such was the manner in which Elizabeth was determined to put the state’s finances on a better footing than had been seen since the days of her grandfather, King Henry VII, that she became notorious for her parsimony and unwillingness to spend excessive amounts of money on grand projects.

In the long run this was a judicious policy for the most part and despite its limited resources the English government accomplished quite a lot during the Elizabethan era. However, it frequently infuriated her councillors, who viewed the Queen as a ruler who constantly changed her mind on policy matters, often based on her concerns about expenditure. There was one particular area where Elizabeth could not avoid spending money. This was in Ireland. When she came to the throne in 1558, Elizabeth also became Queen of Ireland, yet the island remained only partially under English control. Dozens of largely independent

Irish lords ruled different parts of the country, whereas English rule was largely confined to Dublin and the Pale which surrounded it in Leinster. A programme of regional conquest and colonisation had been entered into towards the end of her father’s reign and would play out for decades during Elizabeth’s reign. Initially, the weaknesses of Elizabeth’s government were plain for all to see, as Shane O’Neill, the head of the foremost Irish lordship in the country, the O’Neills of Ulster, raided the Pale on numerous occasions in the early 1560s. He was only finally defeated in 1567 because he overextended

himself in the north of the country and was killed by his erstwhile allies, the MacDonnells of western Scotland. Further wars and plantations occurred consistently through the 1570s and 1580s, gradually reducing the Irish lords, though at a large cost to Elizabeth’s exchequer, much to her dismay. Because Elizabeth was young, unmarried and childless, the question of her marriage was intensely debated all throughout the 1560s and 1570s. England needed an heir. Unlike Edward and Mary before her, there was no sibling waiting to step into the breach and succeed her if Elizabeth died. Furthermore, the closest remaining heir to

the English throne was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, a granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister. Mary was a Catholic and so Elizabeth and her advisors understood that the preservation of the new Protestant religious settlement in England depended on Mary Queen of Scots never securing the English throne, even though she had the best claim in law to it if Elizabeth died childless. Therefore, as soon as the reign commenced, the issue of Elizabeth’s marriage arose and suitors began to appear. However, much to the great consternation of her advisors and the political realm at large, Elizabeth seemed

to only appear to be interested in Robert Dudley, who she appointed as Master of the Horse and made the Earl of Leicester several years into the reign. Tongues wagged throughout the late 1550s and early 1560s about Dudley’s excessive influence and the nature of his relationship with the queen. This was compounded in September 1560 when Robert’s wife, Amy Robsart, died suddenly under suspicious circumstances. Amy was found at the bottom of a staircase with her neck broken, following which theories of foul play abounded, with many presuming Dudley had thrown his wife down the stairs, breaking her neck

in the process, in order to free himself up to marry the Queen. The theory is generally discounted by most historians today and Amy’s death was most likely an accident. The reality is that it was always unlikely that Elizabeth would marry Dudley. He was an English lord and by the second half of the sixteenth century it was an accepted norm that a monarch like Elizabeth would marry a member of another European royal family, the better to cement an alliance of some kind. Yet Elizabeth did none of these things. Already in the 1560s she was cultivating the

public image of herself as The Virgin Queen, pledged in marriage to the realm, rather than a husband, and mother to all of her people. This campaign manifested itself in Elizabeth’s speeches, in the portraiture she commissioned, and it even appeared in the poems and plays of the time. Elizabeth would continue to entertain suitors for her hand, most notably King Eric XIV of Sweden and Francis, Duke of Alencon and Anjou, brother of King Henry III of France, but she ultimately refused them all. She would remain unmarried her entire life. It is hard to escape the fact that

there was a complicated psychology at work here, Elizabeth having grown up at the Henrician court where her father married and then dispensed with one wife after another, Elizabeth’s own mother included. She eventually determined not to subjugate herself to a husband in this way, though her court became a peculiar place where a succession of favourites including Dudley, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Walter Raleigh and later the second Earl of Essex gained her favour by courting her as one would a prospective bride, all the while knowing that no marriage would ever follow. In 1562, Elizabeth, who was in

her late twenties by then, contracted smallpox. She recovered without significant long-term damage to her overall health, but the disease left her face badly scarred, a common occurrence amongst those who contracted smallpox in early modern times. In order to disguise the scars she began to wear elaborate makeup. Unfortunately, the white make-up she wore to mask her scarred complexion every day was lead-based, and the vermillion she used to redden her cheeks and lips contained significant amounts of mercury. The regular use of these compounds damaged her skin and possibly contributed to her hair loss in later years. As

this compounded the problem caused by the smallpox scars, Elizabeth caked herself in more layers of makeup and took to wearing elaborate wigs in later life. Finally, her teeth began to blacken and decay due to her sweet tooth. Sugar was a novelty in Europe, one introduced from the Americas. All of this would leave her in later life a woman with ravaged skin, extensive hair loss and rotted teeth. Amongst the achievements of the Elizabethan period, one which deserves attention is that this was an early golden age of English literature. Some of the greatest writers, poets, and dramatists

in English history worked at this time and were patronised by the queen and her courtiers. These included the playwrights, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and the poets Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. Walter Raleigh too was a poet, though he is usually more well-known for his explorations in the Americas. The sheer breadth of Raleigh’s experiences encapsulate the excitements and pursuits of the Elizabethan age. He explored North America, founded the first, albeit short-lived, English colonial settlement in North America, at Roanoke Island, captured Spanish gold as a privateer, and is sometimes fantastically credited with introducing tobacco

to England and the potato to Ireland. The exciting new frontiers of exploration and trade broadened English horizons immensely, just as the literary flowering did for English culture. For instance, between 1576 and 1578, Martin Frobisher sailed in search of a Northwest Passage, while Sir Francis Drake became only the second person to ever circumnavigate the globe in 1581. The first permanent colonies were not finally settled by England in North America until the early seventeenth century, but much of the groundwork in terms of exploration and mapping was completed during Elizabeth’s reign. A major drive in all of this

was a desire to strike in an indirect fashion at Spain, the pre-eminent colonial power in the Americas, by attacking Spanish shipping in the Atlantic and trying to present a threat in North America. The first years of Elizabeth’s reign had seen fairly good relations between England and Spain, King Philip II of Spain having only recently been King of England through his marriage to Queen Mary. But relations gradually soured in the course of the 1560s as Elizabeth refused Spanish offers for her to marry Philip, while her religious settlement also put England at loggerheads with Catholic Spain. Finally,

there were a number of diplomatic clashes over shipping in the Atlantic. By the 1570s, England and Spain were involved in a sort of unofficial cold war, but it would take until the second half of the 1580s before open war commenced. All of this was tied up with an ongoing succession crisis, in which the religion of Elizabeth’s most likely heir, Mary Queen of Scots, was the main issue. Elizabeth refused to acknowledge the Catholic Mary as her potential successor in the 1560s and 1570s. The Queen of Scots was a Catholic, and for Elizabeth to encourage her claim

would be to open herself up to the plots and determination of Catholics to place one of their own on the throne of England, and so restore Catholicism, Elizabeth hoped to contain Mary’s ambitions through diplomacy, but this proved to be impossible. Mary had lived out her youth in France with her mother’s family, but she returned to Scotland in 1561 to take up her rightful position as queen. Mary’s presence in Scotland would prove inflammatory. Her Catholicism aroused the animosity of the Scottish Protestant Lords of the Congregation, who in 1560 had established a form of Calvinist Protestantism in

Scotland as the state religion. Mary was soon a major source of contention in Scotland and for years to come in the 1560s conspiracies surrounded her. As with Elizabeth to the south in England, there was a major debate surrounding Mary’s potential marriage. At one time rumours had abounded that Dudley would head north to Scotland and marry Mary, but instead she wed Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in 1565. Darnley and Mary were cousins and were both grandchildren of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister. They were also both Catholics. As such, this marriage posed an enormous threat to Elizabeth and

the Protestant settlement in England, particularly so once Mary have birth to a son, the future King James VI of Scotland, in the summer of 1566. It was assumed that he would be raised as a Catholic in keeping with his mother’s religion. There then followed an extraordinary series of events in which Mary began an affair with James Hepburn, the earl of Bothwell, who was then accused of murdering Darnley in the spring of 1567. Mary married Bothwell within weeks of Darnley’s suspicious death and then was imprisoned not long after by the Scottish lords, who were appalled at

her conduct. She was then forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, James, who succeeded as King James VI of Scotland at just one year of age. He would now be raised by some of the seniormost Scottish lords in the Protestant faith. These developments might by themselves have not been such a bad thing for Elizabeth and the English government had matters remained there. But within months Mary had escaped from her imprisonment at Lochleven Castle and, after an abortive attempt at reclaiming the Scottish throne, absconded over the border into northern England. This placed Elizabeth and

her ministers in London in a very difficult position. Mary could not be sent back to Scotland. To do so would potentially lead to her execution by the Scottish lords and Elizabeth was unwilling to send a fellow queen to that fate. At the same time, her presence as a Catholic contender to the English throne on English soil made her a focus of conspiracies by Roman Catholics in England and abroad. In Rome, English Catholic exiles openly discussed the possibility of launching a revolt in England against Elizabeth’s government and then placing Mary on the English throne as a

means to restore England yet again to the Catholic fold. This was not idle speculation. In 1569 a major revolt was initiated by some of the leading Catholic lords of the north of England. Although she was not directly involved in plotting this, Mary’s position was important in the Northern Rebellion. Though it was quickly crushed and Elizabeth ordered the execution of some 750 Catholic rebels, it highlighted the precarious situation with Mary present on English soil, doubly so when Pope Pius V issued a Papal Bull, Regnans in Excelsis in 1570 in response to the suppression of the Northern

Rebellion, through which Elizabeth was excommunicated and all true Catholics were enjoined to overthrow her. This volatile situation would prevail for nearly twenty years. Though Elizabeth never met Mary in person, the deposed Scottish queen would spend the entirety of the late 1560s, the 1570s and much of the 1580s under house arrest in a series of different palatial houses across northern England. Many of Elizabeth’s senior ministers such as Cecil would doubtlessly have been delighted to have an opportunity to simply have Mary killed and the threat she posed removed, but Elizabeth simply refused to do this to a

fellow female monarch. Again, there was a complex psychology to this and we should remember that Elizabeth’s mother Anne was a queen who had been executed three decades before Mary arrived to northern England. In the complex situation which developed with Mary Queen of Scots over the next decade and a half, Sir Francis Walsingham, the English Secretary of State and chief spymaster from 1573 onwards, was paramount. A committed Protestant, Walsingham viewed himself as a religious warrior whose work was to defend the Protestant settlement in England from the threat Mary and others, such as radical members of the

English Catholic exile community in Rome, posed. He had personally witnessed the mass slaughter of Protestants at the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris while he was serving as England’s ambassador there and he was determined not to see the same thing happen in his own country. Many plots by Catholics in England and abroad were rooted out and crushed by Walsingham and his spies in the 1570s and 1580s. Then, finally, in 1586 he was presented with an opportunity to end the greatest threat of all. That year Walsingham became aware of a plot centred on Anthony Babington, an

English Catholic, to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary before placing her on the throne of England. Walsingham knew what was going on from very early on in affairs, but rather than reveal it quickly he placed double agents within Babington’s circle and allowed him not only to incriminate himself but Mary as well. When he finally revealed the Babington Plot, not even Elizabeth could ignore Mary’s treachery. She was placed on trial, found guilty of treason and executed at Fotheringay Castle on the 8th of February 1587. Elizabeth had finally been coerced into signing Mary’s death warrant after nearly two

decades of keeping her imprisoned in northern England. Yet she had nearly faltered at the last, attempting to rescind the order after she had given it. In the end it was only because Walsingham, Cecil and other members of the Privy Council had acted speedily after she signed Mary’s death warrant that the order was carried out, the councillors being aware that Elizabeth would probably change her mind on reflection. Killing a fellow queen was one of the hardest decisions Elizabeth ever made, regardless of how much of a threat Mary had posed. The drama surrounding Mary’s presence in England

for so many years was connected to the wider international situation in the 1570s and 1580s. When it came to foreign policy, Elizabeth had always sought to avoid an expensive outright war. Her discreet encouragement of privateering and the frequent attacks on Spanish bullion ships by figures like Francis Drake were a cost-effective way of waging an unofficial cold war with Spain, as was providing financial and material support to the Dutch rebels who were engaged in a war of independence against Spain in the Netherlands from 1568 onwards. She would doubtlessly have continued in this vein had it not

been for events in France where the Wars of Religion, a series of civil wars between Catholics, Protestants and a politique faction that steered a middle way between the two, had been underway since the 1560s. In the 1580s, Philip II of Spain was beginning to intervene there on the side of the French Catholic League, while his armies had also made advances in the Netherlands against the Dutch. Faced with the possibility of the Dutch revolt being crushed and France falling into the Spanish camp, Elizabeth and her councillors determined that they had no other option but to risk

an outright war with Spain. In August 1585 they agreed the Treaty of Nonsuch with the Dutch and Elizabeth’s old love, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, headed for the continent with an English expeditionary force to aid the Dutch in the Netherlands. The First Anglo-Spanish War had commenced after years of shadow fighting. Elizabeth expected Leicester to aid the Dutch and to keep their rebellion alive, but without committing too many English resources. However, he immediately scuppered this by accepting the position of Governor-General of the Netherlands from the Dutch States General, something which committed Elizabeth to defending the

Dutch against Spanish and Catholic aggression indefinitely. She penned a sharp rebuke and ordered that it be read in Dudley’s presence before the States General, but the damage was done by then. With the signing of the Treaty of Nonsuch, Leicester’s subsequent actions in the Low Countries and the execution of Mary Queen of Scots early in 1587, the Spanish began preparing an armada to try and invade and conquer England, the ultimate goal being to depose Elizabeth and return the country to the Catholic fold. In anticipation of this, Elizabeth authorized Drake to lead an expedition to the Spanish

port of Cadiz and attack the Spanish fleet that was being prepared there before it could ever leave Spain. The raid was a great success, with dozens of ships destroyed, but it only stalled Philip II’s plans for a time. By the spring of 1588 the lost ships had been replaced and on the 12th of July 1588, a Spanish armada of approximately 130 ships set sail for the English Channel. The plan was for the armada to sail through the Channel, pick up the Spanish armies in the Netherlands and then convey an army of tens of thousands of

Spanish troops to southern England. Against this Spanish Armada, the English had hundreds of ships, but most of these were small merchant ships and the vessels of privateers, not the kind of warships that comprised the Spanish fleet. The odds seemed to be against an English victory and on land an army was being prepared for if the Spanish successfully made landfall. The goal, of course, was to try and ever prevent the armada from making contact with the Spanish land forces in the Netherlands or landing in England thereafter. The conclusive sea battle took place over approximately two weeks.

On the 19th of July 1588, the Spanish fleet was first sighted off Plymouth. The next day, the English sailed out to fire on the Spanish. The English ships proved much faster and more maneuverable, but few were willing to get close enough to inflict any significant damage and so only one Spanish ship was taken in these initial clashes. In the days that followed the Spanish continued to advance eastwards through the Channel, eventually anchoring off the north coast of France. This was the sign for the English to move. On the 29th of July, Raleigh, Drake and others

oversaw the launching of numerous fireships at the Spanish Armada in the middle of the night. These were small ships set on fire and effectively used as primitive rockets. The attack was enough to force the Spanish away from the French coast without having rendezvoued with the main land army. The weather took over from there as an unseasonable storm suddenly ripped through the Channel and scattered the Spanish fleet northwards into the North Sea. The English pursued the fleeing Spanish ships north, but in the ensuing severe weather many Spanish ships were wrecked off the coasts of Scotland and

Ireland, with less than a third of the original Armada, eventually limping home to Spain. On land, news of this miraculous storm only arrived gradually. Therefore, on the 8th of August, Elizabeth rode out to review her troops at Tilbury, who were mustering to defend England, under the command of the Earl of Leicester. There, dressed in white and wearing a magnificent silver breastplate, she gave the most famous speech of her reign: “I am come…to live and die amongst you all – to lay down for my God, and for my kingdoms, and for my people, my honour and

my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king – and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that…any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm…I myself will take up arms – I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.” The troops cheered in response to this heartening speech from the Queen and made ready, little knowing that they were already safe and

that the Spanish Armada had been destroyed in the winds of the North Sea. There would be other armadas sent by both Spain and England against one another in a war which would last until 1604, but the armada of 1588 has become infamous, as it could well have resulted in the conquest of England by Spain had it not been for the storm which destroyed it and the calculated actions of Elizabeth’s sea captains in the Channel. Some historians have referred to Elizabeth’s remaining years following 1588, as the “second reign.” England’s economy began to suffer due to the

costs of war with Spain, taxes mounted and prices rose as the country experienced a series of poor harvests. Additionally, by the 1590s, most of Elizabeth’s old guard of advisors, courtiers, and friends were dead and gone, their positions taken over by a younger generation of ambitious courtiers. Leicester died just weeks after the defeat of the Armada in 1588. Walsingham passed two years later. Cecil survived down to 1598, though he had begun to pass his responsibilities to his son, Robert, years before that. By then the queen was an aging woman, surrounded by courtiers who played up to

her ideas of courtly love, but secretly rolled their eyes at her aged ways in private, criticising her seeming unwillingness to allow the party of war hawks led by Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, to take the war to Spain more aggresively. Even in old age, Elizabeth was unwilling to finance such a costly approach. Meanwhile, a factional conflict developed at the English court between Essex and Robert Cecil, each side acquiring their own allies. There was one area where costs spiralled utterly in the 1590s. In 1593 the lords of Ulster, led by Hugh O’Neill, second earl of

Tyrone, and Hugh O’Donnell, lord of Tyrconnell, launched a new massive rebellion against the English crown. They felt they had little option except to do this in the face of an ever-expanding English state in Ireland. The Nine Years’ War would pose the greatest existential threat to English rule yet seen in Ireland, as O’Neill had armed his men with guns and trained them in modern military tactics. The Irish also sought aid from Spain and a Spanish expedition would even arrive to Kinsale in the south of the country in 1601. By then the Irish were in charge of

the vast majority of the island, having inflicted the biggest defeat against an English army there under the Tudors at the Battle of the Yellow Ford on the 14th of August 1598. In the end, Elizabeth would have to finance the provision of an enormous army for Ireland in the late 1590s and early 1600s, over 15,000 men at its height, in order to avoid the English being expelled from the island altogether. Her cost-saving measures here over the years had ultimately cost her money in the long run. The final blow emotionally for Elizabeth was a betrayal by Essex,

her newest court favourite, a stepson of Leicester’s and in some ways his successor in her affections. In his early twenties, handsome and brash, the young Earl felt no shame in taking liberties with the Queen, who was both flattered and indulgent with him. She gifted him monopolies on wine imports and continually appointed him to military positions. Elizabeth sent Essex to Ireland to crush the rebellion there in 1599, supported by an army of an unprecedented size. She was enraged when he met secretly with the leader of the Irish rebels, Hugh O’Neill, just a few months after arriving

in Ireland and then left again for England without leave to do so and having accomplished nothing there. When he burst into Elizabeth’s private chambers upon his return to London, the queen determined that these offences could not stand. She stripped him of his offices and priveleges and ostracised him from court when she learned that Essex had spoken publicly afterwards of seeing her without her wig and her layers of poisonous make-up. Essex was placed under house arrest and deprived of his monopolies. In desperation, in February 1601, he sought to lead an insurrection against Elizabeth, not to depose

her, but to extract concessions from her and force the removal of his great rival, Robert Cecil. However, he was unable to attract enough support to be successful, and was executed for treason on the 25th of February 1601. Essex’s death seemed to drain the last of Elizabeth’s energies from her. By then, the Queen was growing older and weaker all the time, and it fell to Robert Cecil, now Elizabeth’s chief minister and the undisputed head of the government after he had orchestrated Essex’s destruction, to oversee a subtle resolution of the succession question. He knew that if Elizabeth

had thus far refused to name a successor, she was not going to do so now. Hence, Cecil entered into secret negotiations with King James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary Queen of Scots. James was now well into his thirties and a successful king in his own right in Scotland. He was also a firm Protestant and he remained the nearest claimant to the English throne. From England, Cecil advised him of the manner by which he should write to Elizabeth, to put her in the best frame of mind to name him as her heir. James listened

well and his overtures were received warmly by the Queen. Elizabeth would never formally name him as her heir, but she was more than aware in her final years that unless she named somebody else, the throne would inevitably fall to her Scottish cousin once she died. Thus, in her own strange way, Elizabeth had made preparations for the end of the House of Tudor and the rise of the House of Stuart to unite England and Scotland under one king, something which successive English monarchs of the medieval era had failed to achieve through force of arms. In March

1603, Elizabeth fell seriously ill. She was nearing her seventieth year by then. Suffering from a fever and from sores in her mouth and throat, Cecil urged her to take to her sickbed, saying she must rest. “Little man,” she snapped back at him, “must is not a word to use to princes,” showing that even at the end she was still a force to be reckoned with. She died in her bed at Richmond Palace not long after this, on the morning of the 24th of March 1603. She was 69 years old and had ruled England for forty-four

and a half years. Besides her few mementoes of Leicester and her other loved ones, a locket ring was found among the Queen’s few obviously sentimental possessions. The ring opened to reveal two tiny miniatures, one of Elizabeth and one of another young woman dressed in a much older Tudor fashion. Historians theorize that the woman featured in the second miniature was her mother, Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth had never known her, Anne having been executed on her father’s orders when Elizabeth was just two years old. But her untimely death had hung like a shadow over Elizabeth, dictating many of

her choices, notably her unwillingness over almost two decades to order the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and her own decision to never marry. In the weeks following Elizabeth’s death, James VI and his Scottish entourage made their way south at a leisurely pace, meeting his new subjects along the way. Cecil had put everything in place and James was crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 25th of July 1603 as James I of England and Ireland and VI of Scotland. In Ireland, the injection of thousands of troops and the appointment of an effective military commander to oversee

affairs there, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, had seen O’Neill and his Irish confederates defeated in the spring of 1603. Tyrone surrendered a week after Elizabeth’s death, believing she was still alive, though James ultimately offered very lenient peace terms. With the war over in Ireland, and both Elizabeth and her Spanish nemesis, Philip II, dead, the pathway to peace opened up and the Treaty of London in 1604 brought the First Anglo-Spanish War to an end. It was something of a stalemate, but given that England had survived war with the superpower of the sixteenth century, it was very much

an English victory. The reign that followed would see many of the projects which Elizabeth’s reign had commenced come to fruition, with the first English colonies settled in North America at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607 and in New England from 1620 onwards. England would remain a Protestant state therafter. Elizabeth I was a very complicated woman. During a long reign of 45 years, she presided over one of the most important periods in English history. When she rose to the throne England was in a confused state, toing and froing over and back between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, while

as a state within Europe England had declined enormously from being one of the most centralised and powerful kingdoms of medieval Europe to becoming something of a minnow in the fifteenth century, wracked by instability and civil war. All of that changed during Elizabeth’s reign. The duration of it allowed for the firm establishment of the country as a moderate Protestant power, while her long confronatation with Spain reasserted England as a force to be reckoned with in European politics. The small kingdom effectively defeated Spain, the superpower of the day, in the Anglo-Spanish War and provided crucial support to

the Dutch rebels in the early days of their war of independence. Ireland was about to be reduced fully to English rule and while the first permanent English colonies were not settled in the Caribbean and North America until the reign of her successor, King James I, the groundwork was firmly laid during Elizabeth’s reign. And yet there were strange elements to her time as queen. She was a woman who was haunted by the fate her mother had suffered at the hands of her father and who spent much of her life prevaricating over both the prospect of marrying

and removing the threat posed by Mary Queen of Scots. In the end, there is no doubt that her reign was a success, though its success was owing as much to figures like Drake, Raleigh, Cecil and Walsingham as it was to queen herself. What do you think of Queen Elizabeth I? Was she truly England’s greatest queen, or have historians simply lionized her because of successes which were achieved during her reign which had little to do with her own role as ruler of the realm? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank

you very much for watching!