Elizabethan era

• 1. Introduction

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  The Elizabethan era carries the name of Queen Elizabeth I, who reigned over England from 1558 to 1603. On the subject of faith, she once said, "I have no desire to make windows into men's souls." That single line captures a monarch who ruled through balance rather than force. Historians have often called her reign England's golden age. They point to a more effective government, a prospering economy fed by trans-Atlantic trade, and a flowering of poetry, music, and theatre. Yet that same period sat beside real danger. England's chief rival, Habsburg Spain, clashed with it across Europe and the Americas. Secret plots against the queen's own life ran through the era from beginning to end. How did one woman hold together a kingdom fresh from religious civil war? How did she keep Spain at bay while England's poets, musicians, and playwrights flourished?

• 2. Rule and Money

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  Elizabeth inherited a nearly bankrupt treasury when she took the throne. Her frugal spending policies gradually rebuilt the crown's finances. The government cleared its debts by 1574. Roughly a decade after that, the treasury held a surplus of £300,000.

  Sir Thomas Gresham founded the Royal Exchange in 1565, the first stock exchange in England and one of the earliest in Europe. It proved to be a development of major importance, not just for England's economy but eventually for the wider world. Taxes in England stayed lower than in other European countries of the period, and the economy expanded as a result. Wealth was distributed unevenly, but there was more of it to go around by the end of Elizabeth's reign than there had been at the start.

  Some of that prosperity came from stealing directly from Spanish treasure ships. English raiders also struck poorly defended settlements and took part in selling African slaves. Militarily, Elizabethan England avoided major defeats without winning much outright, but it did build a genuinely powerful navy in the process.

  That same appetite for plunder on the high seas was about to put England on a direct collision course with Spain.

• 3. Plots and Conspiracies

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  In 1570, the Ridolfi plot aimed to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne. Officials in Madrid, Paris, and Rome backed such schemes, hoping a Catholic monarch would return England to the old faith. In 1584, the Throckmorton Plot was uncovered after Francis Throckmorton confessed his part in a plan to overthrow the queen and restore the Catholic Church.

  The Babington Plot led most directly to Mary's execution. Its discovery relied on a double agent, Gilbert Gifford, working under the direction of Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's highly effective spy master.

  The Essex Rebellion broke out in 1601. Just before the uprising, supporters of the Earl of Essex, among them Charles and Joscelyn Percy, younger brothers of the Earl of Northumberland, paid to have Richard II staged at the Globe Theatre, apparently hoping to stir public anger at the crown.

  At Essex's trial, the actor Augustine Phillips of the Chamberlain's Men testified that the conspirators paid the company forty shillings "above the ordinary" rate to perform the play. The players themselves reportedly thought it too old and "out of use" to draw much of a crowd.

  In her later years, Elizabeth granted James VI of Scotland an annual subsidy that helped keep peace between the two kingdoms. His courtiers kept up a "secret correspondence" with her ministers, and it grew clear he would succeed her.

  Plots did not stop when Elizabeth's reign ended. In the Bye Plot of 1603, two Catholic priests planned to kidnap King James and hold him in the Tower of London until he agreed to tolerate Catholics. The 1605 Gunpowder Plot went further, aiming to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament. It was discovered in time, and eight conspirators were executed.

  Among those executed was Guy Fawkes, who became the iconic evil traitor of English lore even though the crown he had targeted was no longer Elizabeth's own.

• 4. The Navy and the Armada

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  Henry VIII had launched the Royal Navy, but his successors Edward and Mary let it shrink into little more than a coastal defense force. Elizabeth made naval strength a top priority instead. She risked open war with Spain by backing the "Sea Dogs," privateers such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, who raided Spanish ships carrying gold and silver from the New World.

  In 1573, English shipwrights introduced new hull designs, first shown on a ship called the "Dreadnaught," that let vessels sail faster, maneuver better, and carry heavier guns. Older warships had tried to grapple and board an enemy vessel. The new English ships instead stood off and fired broadsides meant to sink the enemy outright.

  In 1588, Philip II of Spain sent the Spanish Armada to invade England, and it turned into a fiasco. Superior English ships and seamanship foiled the invasion and destroyed the Armada, marking the high point of Elizabeth's reign. Spain's plan had required tight coordination between its invasion fleet and its army on shore, coordination that never came together. Poorly designed Spanish cannons also reloaded far too slowly in close combat.

  Had Spain actually landed its army in 1588, the historian Parker has argued the consequences could have been dire. The Spanish force was larger, more experienced, better equipped, and better financed than anything England could field. England's own defenses were thin and outdated, with too few soldiers, most only partly trained. Parker suggests Spain could have captured London within a week, and a Catholic uprising in the north or in Ireland might have sealed a total English defeat.

  The following year, England's own Drake-Norris Expedition to Spain ended in failure, and the advantage won at the Armada evaporated as Spanish naval power revived. A second English armada in 1596 captured and sacked Cadiz, one of the war's most significant English victories. Further Spanish invasion fleets failed again in 1596, 1597, and 1601.

  The war between England and Spain finally ended with the Treaty of London, signed the year after Elizabeth died.

• 5. Colonizing the New World

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  Christopher Columbus's voyages had electrified Western Europe, England included, decades before Elizabeth took power. King Henry VII commissioned the explorer John Cabot to search for a northern route to the Spice Islands of Asia, launching England's long hunt for a Northwest Passage. Cabot reached Newfoundland in 1497. He sailed again the following year and was never heard from again.

  In 1562, Elizabeth sent out privateers known as the Elizabethan Sea Dogs, including Hawkins and Drake, to seize plunder from Spanish and Portuguese ships off West Africa. After the Anglo-Spanish war intensified in 1585, she approved further raids on Spanish ports and treasure ships in the Americas. Writers such as Richard Hakluyt and John Dee pushed for England to build an overseas empire of its own. Spain, Portugal, and France were already carving up much of the Americas, Africa, and Asia between them.

  Martin Frobisher landed at Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island in August 1576. He returned the next year and claimed the land in Elizabeth's name, but a third voyage failed to establish a settlement there.

  From 1577 to 1580, Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe. Combined with his raids on Spanish shipping and a notable victory at Cadiz in 1587, the voyage made him a celebrated hero whose exploits are still remembered. England, however, never followed up on the territorial claims his voyage implied.

  In 1583, Humphrey Gilbert sailed to Newfoundland and took possession of the harbour of St. John's, along with all land within two hundred leagues to its north and south.

  In 1584, the queen granted Walter Raleigh a charter to colonize Virginia, a territory named in her honor. Raleigh and Elizabeth wanted both quick riches and a base from which privateers could raid Spanish treasure fleets. The colonists Raleigh sent to found the Roanoke Colony vanished entirely, and why remains unexplained.

  In 1600, the queen chartered the East India Company to break the Spanish and Portuguese hold on trade with the Far East. Its first trading posts sat on coastlines that are now part of India and Bangladesh, seeds of an empire that would take shape only in the centuries after the Tudor dynasty ended.

• 6. Religion

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  In 1559, Elizabeth authorized a new Book of Common Prayer, restoring the 1552 version with some changes. It affirmed that Christ was spiritually present in Holy Communion but deliberately left the exact nature of that presence a mystery. She also had the Black Rubric removed from the Articles of Faith. That clause had let worshippers kneel for communion without implying belief in Christ's literal presence in the bread and wine.

  Apostolic succession continued unbroken through her reign, and about 98 percent of the clergy simply kept their posts. An attempt to ban music in church services was defeated as well.

  The Injunctions of 1571 forbade any doctrine that did not conform to the teaching of the Church Fathers and the Catholic bishops. Elizabeth's hostility to strict Calvinist doctrine also blocked the more radical reformers from gaining ground.

  In 1570, Pope Pius V declared Elizabeth a heretic and an illegitimate queen, and ruled that her subjects no longer owed her obedience. He sent Jesuits and seminary priests to secretly evangelize and support England's Catholics.

  After a string of plots against her life, Catholic clergy came to be treated mainly as traitors rather than as clergy. Priests who were captured were often tortured or executed unless they cooperated with English authorities. Catholics who supported their faith openly were barred from the professions and sometimes fined or imprisoned. The crown framed this as punishing treason rather than faith, but Catholics experienced it as religious persecution and honored the executed as martyrs.

  The Catholic doctrine and practice Elizabeth chose to preserve within the Church of England would later crystallize into what became known as the Via Media, in the century after her own.

• 7. Everyday Life

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  Tudor towns were overcrowded and unhygienic, with no sewers or drains and rubbish simply left in the streets. Rats thrived in these conditions, and in larger towns and cities such as London, common ailments included smallpox, measles, malaria, typhus, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and chickenpox.

  Outbreaks of the Black Death struck England repeatedly during the era, in 1498, 1535, 1543, 1563, 1589, and 1603. The disease spread quickly through rats infested with fleas. Even so, child mortality was comparatively low for the period, at around 150 or fewer deaths per 1,000 babies. A person who reached age 15 could then expect another 40 to 50 years of life.

  Most rural homes were thatched huts of one or two rooms, their walls built from timber, wattle and daub, or brick. Glass was expensive and difficult to produce, so window panes were made small and held together with a lead lattice. Families who could not afford glass used polished horn, cloth, or paper instead.

  London's population roughly doubled during the era, from about 100,000 people at the death of Mary Tudor in 1558 to about 200,000 by the death of Elizabeth in 1603. Children in the cities who begged for a living earned as little as sixpence a week.

  About one-third of the English population lived in poverty. Vagabonds, meaning able-bodied people who left their home parish to search for work, could be punished with whipping or time in the stocks. The idea of a workhouse for the able-bodied poor was first proposed in 1576.

  In Cumbria, England's poorest and most isolated region, a famine that began in 1594 dragged on for six years.

• 8. Theatre and Popular Culture

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  By 1595, roughly 15,000 people a week were paying to watch plays in London. It was during Elizabeth's reign that England's first permanent theatres were built. Before that, actors travelled from town to town, performing in the streets or outside inns.

  William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe led a wider circle of playwrights working constantly through the period. Historical subjects proved especially popular on stage, alongside the era's steady diet of comedies and tragedies.

  Elizabethan literature also produced new poetic forms, including the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse. Writers such as Edmund Spenser, Richard Hooker, and John Lyly stood alongside Marlowe and Shakespeare as the age's major literary figures.

  Jousting was an expensive and often violent sport reserved for the wealthy. King Henry II of France was killed in a tournament in 1559, and King Henry VIII, once a champion jouster himself, retired from the sport after a fall left him unconscious for hours.

  Playing cards likely reached England around 1460, having originated in Spain and Italy around 1370 and possibly in Egypt before that. By Elizabeth's reign, a standard 52-card deck was in wide use, and gambling with cards had become common across every social class, not just the wealthy.

  Accession Day, marked on the 17th of November, celebrated Elizabeth's rise to the throne with lavish court festivities and jousting during her own lifetime. The holiday did not end with her. It continued to be observed as a national celebration for decades after Elizabeth herself had died.