Elizabeth I (2: 1568-1603)

Elizabeth and the three goddesses
by Hans Ewerth, c. 1569
Public domain.

Ten years into the reign

By 1568 Elizabeth had been on the throne for ten years. She had established the Church of England, and was commemorated in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563) as the new Constantine. She had put off either marrying or naming her successor. She had survived the scandal over the death of Robert Dudley’s wife in 1560, and her attack of smallpox in 1562.  However, the regime was fragile. Her advisors sensed a lack of direction and found themselves unable to pursue a concerted policy. The international scene was becoming more dangerous. France was rent by religious wars and the Netherlands were on the brink of revolt against Spanish rule. Above all, the question of the succession had not been settled.

The arrival of Mary, Queen of Scots

When Mary landed in England in 1568 and threw herself on Elizabeth’s mercy, Elizabeth’s position became more precarious as, to many Catholics, she was the rightful queen. She would have preferred to restore her to Scotland, but she needed the new Regent, the Earl of Moray, as an ally. Not knowing what else to do, she detained her and set up an enquiry into the Darnley murder. The enquiry reached no conclusion and Elizabeth was left with the problem of what to do about Mary.

Revolt and excommunication

In 1569 two Catholic northern earls revolted and in November they took over Durham cathedral. 

In February 1570 Pius V published his bull Regnans in Excelsis,  pronouncing the sentence of excommunication against her. In 1571 a Florentine merchant, Roberto di Ridolfi orchestrated a plot by which Philip would bring an army over from the Netherlands. The Duke of Norfolk would depose Elizabeth and marry Mary. Norfolk was executed in 1572 but Elizabeth was reluctant to move against Mary. 

In 1574 the first Catholic missionaries arrived in England, sent by William Allen, the head of the English College in Douai. In 1577 Cuthbert Mayne,  the first Catholic martyr, was executed. By 1580 there were a hundred seminarians working clandestinely in England.  The most famous of these, the Jesuit, Edmund Campion, was executed in 1581.

The Alençon courtship

The troubled European background was becoming even more dangerous. On 24 August 1572 perhaps 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered at after the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in Paris. Elizabeth showed her horror at the massacre very publicly, but she still believed that an alliance with France could be the best protection against Spain. In the summer of 1579 the 24- year-old  Duke of Alençon (later of Anjou) arrived in England to court the 45-year-old queen. Cecil was cautiously in favour, and believed that Elizabeth was still capable of bearing a child. But could she marry a Catholic?

François, Duke of Alençon
Elizabeth's last and possibly
most serious suitor
Public domain.

The ‘forward Protestants’ in council, Leicester and her Secretary, Francis Walsingham, were fiercely opposed and the match was deeply unpopular in the country. When Alençon sailed away in 1582, the last of Elizabeth’s courtships was over. She would never give birth to an heir.

It is probably in the aftermath of the abortive courtship that the Sieve Portrait was painted, that commemorated Elizabeth as the vestal virgin Tuccia, who proves her virginity by carrying water in a sieve.

The Sieve Portrait
by Metsys the Younger
Public domain.

The Throckmorton plot

Mary Queen of Scots was at the centre of a number of Catholic conspiracies. In 1583 Walsingham uncovered a plot by a Catholic gentleman, Francis Throckmorton, to coordinate an invasion of England led by her cousin, the Duke of Guise, and backed by Spain. But though it was clear that Mary was involved, the evidence was not conclusive enough to persuade the queen to sign a warrant for her death.  

Mary, Queen of Scots
in captivity,
by Nicholas Hilliard
Public domain.

The Netherlands

The assassination of the Dutch leader, William the Silent, on 10 July 1584 pushed Elizabeth into a role she never wanted – that of champion of Protestantism. She reluctantly agreed to send troops under Leicester to the Netherlands. Within weeks the Dutch States General offered him the title of Governor of the Netherlands. Before he left England Elizabeth had ordered him to refuse any such office; she had stated that her aim was to offer protection to the Dutch fighting Catholic tyranny but she had no wish to usurp the authority of Philip, the legitimate ruler of the Netherlands. She reacted with fury when she learned that Leicester had disobeyed her orders, but she was forced to back down. This again showed the disadvantage of being a woman ruler who could not herself command troops in the field, and had to rely on male commanders to obey her orders.

The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots

Elizabeth’s hand was forced by the Babington conspiracy of 1586, a direct plot to assassinate Elizabeth. In a dictated letter of 17 July 1586 (composed by Mary in French and then drafted in English by her secretaries )she endorsed the plot and was trapped. A gallows mark was drawn on the letter before it was passed to Walsingham on 19 July. He then added a forged postscript, though this was not used in evidence against Mary. 

Mary was tried and found guilty, but Elizabeth was most reluctant to order her execution. She told her parliament in November: 

Whereof to think it grieveth me not a little, considering … that by me it should be said that by [against] hereafter, a maiden queen hath been the death of a prince, her kinswoman. A thing in no sort deserved by me, howsoever by the despite of malice it may be reported of me. 

It was only on 1 February that she signed the death warrant. Mary was executed six days later, to outrage throughout Catholic Europe. It made the attempted Spanish invasion of England inevitable.

The defeat of the Armada

By the summer of 1587 preparations were underway for the Armada. This put Elizabeth, as a woman ruler, at a disadvantage. In her speech at Tilbury on 8 August 1588 she tried to turn her sex to her advantage: 

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king. 

When the Armada was dispersed, she wrote a prayer of thanksgiving: 

I most humbly, with bowed heart and bended knees, do render my humblest acknowledgements and lowliest thanks, and not the least for that the weakest sex hath been so fortified by Thy strongest help that neither my people might lack by my weakness nor foreigners triumph at my ruin.

Gloriana

By now, Elizabeth’s virginity, was being used to create the cult of the Virgin Queen as shown in her portraits.

The Armada Portrait,
Elizabeth, ruler of the world
Public domain.

She was described as the personification of all the goddesses

Are you then travelling to the temple of Eliza? Even to my temple are my feeble limbs travelling. Some call her Pandora, some Gloriana, some Cynthia, some Belphoebe, some Astraea – all by several names to express several loves. Yet all those names meet to create but one soul. I am of her own country, and we adore her by the name of Eliza. Thomas Dekker (1599).

She herself took a more realistic view of her power and position in her 'Golden Speech', delivered on 30 November 1601:

To be a kinge and weare a crowne is a thinge moare glorious to them that see it then it is plesante to them that bear it. For my selfe, I was never so muche intized [enticed] with the potent name of a kinge, or royall authoritie of a queene, as delited that God hath made mee his instrumente to maynetayne his truthe and glorie and this kingdom from dishonore, domage [damage], tyranye, and opressione.

While the cult of Elizabeth was at its height at the end of the queen's reign, she was well aware of multiple problems: the European situation, a revolt in Ireland, the insubordination of the Earl of Essex, the financial problems of the crown, a series of bad harvests that were causing great hardship.

Conclusion

1. Elizabeth, especially at the end of her reign, was presented as a powerful ruler, who had seen off her enemies and reigned triumphant.
2. The reality was more complex. No European ruler in this period was secure, and Elizabeth's problems were compounded, and only partly overcome, by her sex.
3. But the fact, that in spite of her refusal to marry, the crown passed peacefully to her successor, James VI of Scotland, shows that she must be seen, overall, as a successful monarch. Whether she was a great queen is a matter of judgement.