A sorrowful old age
The last years of Elizabeth were very sad. The execution of Essex may have weighed on her, and she sat for hours brooding. She kept up the pleasures of the court and sometimes bravely feigned cheer, but she was heartsick and her health was failing. The English no longer loved her; they felt she had lived too long and should make way for a younger sovereign. Her last Parliament protested more than any before against her intrusions on parliamentary liberty, her pursuit of the Puritans, her growing demands for money and her grants of trade monopolies to favorites. Against expectation, the queen yielded on the monopolies and promised to correct the abuse. The members came to thank her and knelt as she delivered what is called her Golden Speech, on 20 November 1601, the book says.
She told them no jewel was dearer to her than their love, and she counted it the glory of her crown to have reigned with it. Bidding them rise, she said that to wear a crown looks more glorious to those who see it than to those who bear it, and that were it not for conscience and the duty God had laid on her, she would gladly give up the office. She added that although they had had mightier and wiser rulers, they had never had and never would have one who loved them more.
The question of succession
Elizabeth had postponed naming an heir as long as she could. While Mary Stuart lived as the true heir to the throne, Elizabeth could not allow her to endanger the Protestant settlement. After Mary's execution, her son James VI of Scotland was the natural heir, and though he was weak-willed and flawed, his Protestantism consoled the queen. She knew Robert Cecil and other courtiers were in secret correspondence with James to smooth his accession and secure their own futures. All Europe whispered that she would die of cancer, but she was dying of living too long, and her spirit could no longer bear the weight of the years.
The death of the queen
When her godson Sir John Harington tried to cheer her with witty verses, she stopped him, saying that when you feel the sun of your life on the edge of the roof you take less pleasure in such trifles. In March 1603 she exposed herself to the winter wind, caught a chill and burned with fever for three weeks, spending most of her illness sitting on cushions. She refused doctors and had musicians play for her. At last her courtiers persuaded her to go to bed. Archbishop Whitgift knelt at her bedside and prayed, and when he tried to rise she ordered him to continue; when the old man's knees were weary she signaled him to pray on, and he was relieved only when she slept late at night. She never woke. John Manningham wrote in his diary that she departed at about three that morning, meekly like a lamb, easily as a ripe apple falls from the tree. It was 24 March 1603.
The English, who had long awaited the end, were moved all the same. Many felt a brilliant age had closed and a strong hand had left the helm, while others, like Shakespeare, feared a chaotic interregnum. Bacon called her a great queen. If Plutarch were alive and comparing great lives, he said, he would be puzzled, for he could find no woman her equal. He praised her learning, rare in her sex and seldom found even among princes, and said that this part of the island had never known a better forty-odd years than her reign, for her wise government, her settlement of true religion, lasting peace, justice and mild treatment of the nobility, achieved despite religious strife, troubled neighbors, Spanish ambition and the enmity of Rome, and with her standing alone.
The verdict
Looking back as historians, we must shade the picture a little and weigh the faults. Elizabeth was neither saint nor scholar but a passionate, fiery woman who loved life. In her time the true religion was not wholly established, and not all her subjects could, in Shakespeare's phrase, eat in safety what they planted under their own vines and sing the song of peace. Her wise rule owed much to her colleagues. Her hesitations often, perhaps through the changing times, bore good fruit, but at times they produced a weakness in policy that only her enemies' disorder saved her from. Yet she not only escaped her difficulties but advanced, by fair means and foul. She drew Scotland out of French control and closer to England. She made it possible for Henry of Navarre, in return for attending Mass in Paris, to issue the Edict of Nantes, which gave French Protestants freedom of worship. Under her, science and literature flourished as the people grew rich. She continued her father's despotism but softened it with humanity and charm, and since she had neither husband nor child she regarded England as her child, loved it truly and spent her life in its service. She is counted England's greatest ruler.
Merry England: the people at work
A new chapter, 'Merry England, 1558 to 1625', asks what kind of country made Elizabeth strong and gave Shakespeare his language and inspiration. How did these bold, outspoken, high-spirited Englishmen live, work, dress, think, love, build houses and sing? In 1581 England had about five million people, most of them in farming. Many worked the land as sharecroppers, others paid fixed rents, and a growing number were yeomen owning their land outright. The enclosure of common land went on, because sheep paid better than crops. Serfdom had almost vanished, but evictions caused by enclosure created a wretched laboring class that sold its strength dangerously to farm owners or worked in the shops of growing towns.
Apart from the capital, towns were still small. Norwich and Bristol, the largest after London, had no more than twenty thousand people each. But there was a bright side: townsfolk were friendly with one another, and even in London most houses had gardens or stood near open fields, so that people could pick the flowers Shakespeare names in his verse.
Fuel, cloth and fish
Houses were heated with wood and industry used charcoal, but in the sixteenth century wood grew very dear, and the growing demand for coal in the cities drove landowners to look for underground deposits. German workmen were hired to improve mining and metalwork. Elizabeth banned coal burning in London, but economic need overrode her order. As weavers and fullers fled the Netherlands from Alva's oppression, cloth shops multiplied in England, and Huguenot refugees brought their industrial and commercial skills. In 1589 an English clergyman, William Lee, invented a semi-automatic stocking-knitting frame. Fishing was a leading industry, protected by the state to train men for the sea and provide a reserve for the navy. For that reason Elizabeth, borrowing a Catholic custom, ordered her subjects to abstain from meat two days a week and during Lent.