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[ Text Only: Homepage ]
[ Graphical: Channel4 Homepage ]
• An illegitimate
queen
• Clash with Catholicism
• The Spanish superpower
• The English 'rogue state'
• Pirates and privateers
• The Armada and war
• Shift of power
• Trade and wealth
• Poverty and oppression
Elizabeth I became queen, aged 25, on 17 November 1558, following the death of her half-sister Mary I. Both were daughters of Henry VIII, and both came to the throne despite having been declared illegitimate – Mary when Henry divorced her mother, Catherine of Aragon, and Elizabeth when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was beheaded.
'Bloody Mary', who reigned only briefly from 1553 to 1558, died an unpopular queen due to her restoration of Catholicism and vicious persecution of Protestants. By contrast, Elizabeth's coronation in 1559 was marked by widespread expressions of popular support. Her first acts as monarch included returning England to the Protestant faith and reimposing the use of English instead of Latin in church services, editions of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer.
The clash with Catholicism was to dominate Elizabeth's entire reign, leading ultimately to war with Catholic Spain. Mary's husband, Philip II of Spain, was one of many suitors rejected by Elizabeth, whose refusal to marry led her to become known as the 'Virgin Queen'. Her rejection of Philip (though not her rejection of marriage altogether) was widely welcomed in England, not least because Philip and Mary had led the country into a war against France that it could ill afford – and which cost it Calais, its last territory on the continent.
State finances were a continuing problem under Elizabeth. Philip's revenues, for example, were ten times greater than those of the English monarch. The Spanish Armada that set sail for war with England in 1588 cost four million ducats, 100 times the cost of Elizabeth's defences. Spain, drawing on huge revenues from its plunder of the Aztec and Inca empires of central and south America, was the European superpower of its day.
Elizabethan England, in contrast, was something of a rogue state. Without colonies or overseas interests of its own to exploit, it had to look elsewhere for sources of revenue. When the Netherlands rose up against their Spanish masters in 1566, Elizabeth sided with them against Spain. When he started to fund Protestant privateers – licensed pirates – she encouraged Prince William, the leader of the revolt, to attack Spanish ships. English ports provided safe harbours for the privateers, and English captains and crew soon began to join them.
Among the first English privateers was Francis Drake. In 1567, he and his cousin John Hawkins had tried to break the Spanish monopoly of the African slave trade to the Americas. When they arrived off the coast of New Spain (Mexico) the following year, the Spanish opened fire and they were driven away. Drake turned his hand instead to licensed piracy.
For Elizabeth, who pretended to the Spanish that she could do nothing to stop it, this piracy provided a ready source of revenue. By licensing the privateers to rob Spanish ships, she was able to cream off huge sums for her exchequer. When Drake set sail for the Strait of Magellan in 1577, eventually raiding Peru and the west American coast before circumnavigating the world and returning to England, the booty was sufficient to enable Elizabeth to pay off the entire national debt. Drake was given £10,000 – an enormous sum in those days – for himself. His crew got nothing.
Meanwhile, Walter Ralegh, a generation younger than Drake, was establishing himself as a major backer of privateering expeditions. He earned Elizabeth's favour with his personal charm, and confirmed it with his ruthless suppression of Catholic rebellion in the first English colony, Ireland. Most notoriously, in 1580 he butchered 600 people, including women and children, on a site that is still known as the 'field of skulls' in Ireland today. Ralegh built up an immense fortune through the monopoly on wine sales and cloth granted to him by the queen, together with his privateering licences. Elizabeth benefited from her share of the profits.
Philip's patience with Elizabeth's excuses about piracy eventually wore thin, and by the mid-1580s, he had begun to prepare for war. In 1587, Elizabeth's execution of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, her cousin, provoked outrage among Catholics. And Drake's surprise attack on the Spanish fleet at Cadiz in the same year not only yielded half a million stolen ducats for the English treasury; it also made certain – once the 24 ships that had been put out of action had been repaired or replaced – that the Spanish Armada would set sail for England in 1588.
The defeat of the Armada did not mean the end of war with Spain. Indeed, Drake's attack on Lisbon in 1589 (the Spanish and Portuguese thrones had been united in 1580) ended in disaster with thousands of English killed. Drake was called before the Privy Council in disgrace.
In Ireland, too, where colonists such as Ralegh were encouraged as a bulwark against Spanish or French involvement, the Nine Years' War (also known as Tyrone's Rebellion) from 1594 to 1603 saw out the last years of Elizabeth's reign.
The licensed piracy of Drake, Ralegh and others and Spain's defeat in the war that it had triggered heralded a dramatic change in the European balance of power.
Spain, which had previously been able to exploit the treasures of the New World almost as it pleased, was losing its dominant position. Within a few years of Elizabeth's death, the Netherlanders were able to assert their independence from Spain and would soon develop an empire of their own. And although the first English colonies in the Americas – established by Ralegh in the 1580s – failed, it would not be long before others succeeded, sowing the seeds of the new English empire overseas.
At home, the privateers brought a double bonus to Elizabethan England. As well as the booty from their raids, they also helped to turn England – and London in particular – into a centre of trade and commerce. The capital's population increased fourfold during the 16th century, reaching almost 200,000 by Elizabeth's death in 1603. The population of England increased from three to four million.
The wealth showed itself in the lifestyle of the rich and influential. The Elizabethan 'prodigy houses', such as Longleat, Wollaton and Hardwick, are among the most sumptuous palaces ever built in England. The 'Elizabethan Renaissance' also saw a great flowering in the arts, most famously through the likes of Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare.
The seeds were also being sown for the revolution and civil wars of the next century. Population growth brought with it a growth in poverty, too – as the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. This was made worse by the enclosure of open field systems, forcing thousands off the land, and a succession of poor harvests, particularly in the 1590s.
Elizabeth passed a series of 'Poor Laws' that provided for parish relief for those considered to be 'deserving poor' but cracked down hard on those deemed to be 'undeserving'. Just as Drake's sailors got nothing out of his privateer's booty, neither did the bulk of Elizabeth's subjects get anything out of the increasing wealth of her reign.
The rogue state
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