On This Day: Elizabethan era, considered Golden Age, begins - Nov. 17, 1558
(edited from article)
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Elizabeth I – a pioneering genius, or murderous evil monarch?
For: She was a pioneering feminist
Elizabeth came to the throne in a time when women had very little power. Royal women were disposable. Her own father, Henry VIII, had her mother, Anne Boleyn, executed. Had Elizabeth married, her husband would likely have claimed her power for his own, so she never married. “In an era that saw women as weak, inferior and unfit to rule, she overturned convention and defied prejudice, resisting all pressure to marry and risk losing power to a man,” says Russell. She remained ‘The Virgin Queen’. “She ingeniously repackaged virginity as a status symbol of female power.” If you never give anyone your hand in marriage, you never give them a chance to nick your throne.
For: She played the political game like a pro
Elizabeth’s refusal to marry was not just to avoid giving away her power in England. It was also a way to help her hold power over other countries. “It craftily kept plates spinning,” says Russell. She kept potential suitors around the world, including in France and Spain, thinking she might marry them and tie their countries together, which gave her the upper hand in Europe. “That was genius,” says Russell. Her methods led to the most stable time in modern English history, if not some romantically miffed noblemen.
Against: She killed those who questioned her
Elizabeth was not always a great leader. During battle with the Spanish Armada, she promised to reward her soldiers for their loyalty. She did not keep that promise. When a group of soldiers came to London to request the payment they were promised, she instead had them killed. Add to that, conditions on board her ships were so terrible that thousands of soldiers died in a resulting typhus outbreak than died in the battle itself. Says Russell, “Not only did she underpay her soldiers, she didn’t take care of them, so more ended up dying from lack of care…than in the battle itself.”
Against: She had people tortured for their religion
When it came to religion, Elizabeth, a protestant, severely punished those with different beliefs. “We know she burned Catholics at the stake,” says Russell, “but she also oppressed Puritans, so people that have the same religion as her but a more extreme version. It wasn’t good enough to be a Protestant. If you weren’t the right type of Protestant your organs were getting burnt in front of you.” In an attempt to eliminate the Catholic threat to her throne, Elizabeth ordered the torture and/or death of any Catholics opposing her right to rule, including priests, with the same penalty to anybody who helped them. An awful lot of people died because they annoyed her.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2HmQ3ZRvFz4VcLbBtJGX5Px/elizabeth-i-a-pioneering-genius-or-murderous-evil-monarch#:~:text=Against%3A%20She%20had%20people%20tortured,but%20a%20more%20extreme%20version.
(edited from Wikipedia)
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Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I (1533–1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death in 1603. Elizabeth was the last monarch of the House of Tudor and is sometimes referred to as the "Virgin Queen".
Elizabeth was the only surviving daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his second wife, who was executed when Elizabeth was two years old. Anne's marriage to Henry was annulled, and Elizabeth was declared illegitimate. Henry restored her to the line of succession when she was ten. After Henry's death in 1547, Elizabeth's younger half-brother Edward VI ruled until his own death in 1553, bequeathing the crown to a Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey and ignoring the claims of his two half-sisters, the Catholic Mary and the younger Elizabeth, in spite of statutes to the contrary. Edward's will was set aside within weeks of his death and Mary became queen, deposing and executing Jane. During Mary's reign, Elizabeth was imprisoned for nearly a year on suspicion of supporting Protestant rebels.
Upon her half-sister's death in 1558, Elizabeth succeeded to the throne and set out to rule by good counsel. She depended heavily on a group of trusted advisers led by William Cecil, whom she created Baron Burghley. One of her first actions as queen was the establishment of an English Protestant church, of which she became the supreme governor. This Elizabethan Religious Settlement was to evolve into the Church of England. It was expected that Elizabeth would marry and produce an heir; however, despite numerous courtships, she never did. She was eventually succeeded by her first cousin twice removed, James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots.
In government, Elizabeth was more moderate than her father and siblings had been. One of her mottoes was video et taceo ("I see and keep silent " ). In religion, she was relatively tolerant and avoided systematic persecution. After the pope declared her illegitimate in 1570, which in theory released English Catholics from allegiance to her, several conspiracies threatened her life, all of which were defeated with the help of her ministers' secret service, run by Francis Walsingham. Elizabeth was cautious in foreign affairs, manoeuvring between the major powers of France and Spain. She half-heartedly supported a number of ineffective, poorly resourced military campaigns in the Netherlands, France, and Ireland. By the mid-1580s, England could no longer avoid war with Spain.
As she grew older, Elizabeth became celebrated for her virginity. A cult of personality grew around her which was celebrated in the portraits, pageants, and literature of the day. Elizabeth's reign became known as the Elizabethan era. The period is famous for the flourishing of English drama, led by playwrights such as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, the prowess of English maritime adventurers, such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, and for the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
Some historians depict Elizabeth as a short-tempered, sometimes indecisive ruler, who enjoyed more than her fair share of luck. Towards the end of her reign, a series of economic and military problems weakened her popularity. Elizabeth is acknowledged as a charismatic performer ("Gloriana " ) and a dogged survivor ("Good Queen Bess " ) in an era when government was ramshackle and limited, and when monarchs in neighbouring countries faced internal problems that jeopardised their thrones. After the short, disastrous reigns of her siblings, her 44 years on the throne provided welcome stability for the kingdom and helped to forge a sense of national identity.
Legacy
Elizabeth was lamented by many of her subjects, but others were relieved at her death. Expectations of King James started high but then declined. By the 1620s, there was a nostalgic revival of the cult of Elizabeth. Elizabeth was praised as a heroine of the Protestant cause and the ruler of a golden age. James was depicted as a Catholic sympathiser, presiding over a corrupt court.
The triumphalist image that Elizabeth had cultivated towards the end of her reign, against a background of factionalism and military and economic difficulties, was taken at face value and her reputation inflated. Godfrey Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester, recalled: "When we had experience of a Scottish government, the Queen did seem to revive. Then was her memory much magnified." Elizabeth's reign became idealised as a time when crown, church and parliament had worked in constitutional balance.
The picture of Elizabeth painted by her Protestant admirers of the early 17th century has proved lasting and influential. Her memory was also revived during the Napoleonic Wars, when the nation again found itself on the brink of invasion. In the Victorian era, the Elizabethan legend was adapted to the imperial ideology of the day, and in the mid-20th century, Elizabeth was a romantic symbol of the national resistance to foreign threat. Historians of that period, such as J. E. Neale (1934) and A. L. Rowse (1950), interpreted Elizabeth's reign as a golden age of progress. Neale and Rowse also idealised the Queen personally: she always did everything right; her more unpleasant traits were ignored or explained as signs of stress.
Recent historians, however, have taken a more complicated view of Elizabeth. Her reign is famous for the defeat of the Armada, and for successful raids against the Spanish, such as those on Cádiz in 1587 and 1596, but some historians point to military failures on land and at sea. In Ireland, Elizabeth's forces ultimately prevailed, but their tactics stain her record. Rather than as a brave defender of the Protestant nations against Spain and the Habsburgs, she is more often regarded as cautious in her foreign policies. She offered very limited aid to foreign Protestants and failed to provide her commanders with the funds to make a difference abroad.
Elizabethan era
The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. The symbol of Britannia (a female personification of Great Britain) was first used in 1572, and often thereafter, to mark the Elizabethan age as a renaissance that inspired national pride through classical ideals, international expansion, and naval triumph over Spain.
This "golden age" represented the apogee of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering of poetry, music and literature. The era is most famous for its theatre, as William Shakespeare and many others composed plays that broke free of England's past style of theatre. It was an age of exploration and expansion abroad, while back at home, the Protestant Reformation became more acceptable to the people, most certainly after the Spanish Armada was repelled. It was also the end of the period when England was a separate realm before its royal union with Scotland.
The Elizabethan age contrasts sharply with the previous and following reigns. It was a brief period of internal peace between the Wars of the Roses in the previous century, the English Reformation, and the religious battles between Protestants and Catholics prior to Elizabeth's reign, and then the later conflict of the English Civil War and the ongoing political battles between parliament and the monarchy that engulfed the remainder of the seventeenth century. The Protestant/Catholic divide was settled, for a time, by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, and parliament was not yet strong enough to challenge royal absolutism.
England was also well-off compared to the other nations of Europe. The Italian Renaissance had come to an end following the end of the Italian Wars, which left the Italian Peninsula impoverished. The Kingdom of France was embroiled in the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). They were (temporarily) settled in 1598 by a policy of tolerating Protestantism with the Edict of Nantes. In part because of this, but also because the English had been expelled from their last outposts on the continent by Spain's tercios, the centuries-long Anglo-French Wars were largely suspended for most of Elizabeth's reign.
The one great rival was Habsburg Spain, with whom England clashed both in Europe and the Americas in skirmishes that exploded into the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604. An attempt by Philip II of Spain to invade England with the Spanish Armada in 1588 was famously defeated. In turn England launched an equally unsuccessful expedition to Spain with the Drake–Norris Expedition of 1589. Three further Spanish Armadas also failed in 1596, 1597 and 1602. The war ended with the Treaty of London the year following Elizabeth's death.
England during this period had a centralised, well-organised, and effective government, largely a result of the reforms of Henry VII and Henry VIII, as well as Elizabeth's harsh punishments for any dissenters. Economically, the country began to benefit greatly from the new era of trans-Atlantic trade and persistent theft of Spanish and Portuguese treasures, most notably as a result of Francis Drake's circumnavigation.
The term Elizabethan era was already well-established in English and British historical consciousness, long before the accession of Queen Elizabeth II, and generally refers solely to the time of the earlier Queen of this name.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabethan_era
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