From Poverty to the Rule of the Seas
When Elizabeth came to the throne, hardly any poor nation would have bowed to England; on the day she died, England ruled the seas and rivaled Italy and France in culture.
A Learned and Witty Mind
She had all the learning a queen could carry with dignity. During her reign she went on studying languages: she corresponded with Mary Stuart in French, spoke Italian with the Venetian ambassador, and once rebuked the Polish ambassador in Latin. She translated Sallust and Boethius, and knew enough Greek to read Sophocles and translate plays of Euripides. She claimed to have read as much as any Christian prince, which may not be an exaggeration, and she read history almost daily. At times she wrote verse, composed music, and played the lute fairly well, and the virginals too. Yet she had the sense to belittle her accomplishments and to distinguish education from intelligence. When an ambassador praised her languages, she answered that teaching a woman languages was no great feat; the hard part was teaching her to hold her tongue. Her mind, like her speech, was quick and precise, and her wit was well timed.
Francis Bacon recorded her saying that her commands to high officers were like new clothes, tight at first but loosening with wear. She wrote her letters and speeches in a style of her own, intricate and artificial, full of strange turns, yet genuinely eloquent.
Her shrewdness outran her reason. Walsingham wrote that she lacked the capacity to grasp great matters, though he may have judged harshly because of her ingratitude toward him. Her skill lay in feminine finesse and keen perception rather than in elaborate logic, and events sometimes showed her instinctive experience to be wiser than argument. It was her indefinable spirit that dazzled Europe, enchanted England and carried the country forward. She restored the Reformation, yet she herself embodied the Renaissance: the full enjoyment of this earthly life and the effort to make it beautiful. Though not notably pious, she was a model of vitality.
Sir John Hayward, whom she had imprisoned for a book thought to encourage young Essex's rebellion, wrote nine years after regaining her favor that if anyone ever had the gift of winning hearts, it was this queen. She combined gentleness with majesty and attended to the smallest matters with full authority. All her senses were active: while her eyes were on one person, her ears heard another, she judged a third and spoke to a fourth, her mind everywhere yet so composed that she seemed elsewhere. She pitied some, praised others, thanked some and jested with others, condemned no one and overlooked no office, and distributed her smiles and glances so cleverly that people's hearts overflowed with double delight.
Palaces, Masques and Holidays
Her courtiers were like her and loved what she loved, turning her taste for music, games, plays and fine speech toward poetry, love songs, drama, masques and a prose new to England. In her palaces at Whitehall, Windsor, Greenwich, Richmond and Hampton Court, ladies, knights, ambassadors, musicians and servants moved with royal ceremony and romantic gaiety. A special office, the Revels Office, arranged amusements ranging from riddles and backgammon to elaborate masques and performances of Shakespeare's plays. On Ascension Day, Christmas, New Year, Twelfth Night, Candlemas and Shrovetide there were sports, tilting, masking, plays and pageants.
The masque, which came to England from Italy in her time, combined drama, poetry, music, allegory, clowning and ballet. Created by playwrights and artists, it was staged with elaborate machinery at court or on great estates, with masked ladies and gentlemen in rich costume taking the parts. Elizabeth loved drama, especially comedy. Had she and Leicester not shielded the theaters from Puritan attacks, no one knows how much of Shakespeare would have survived to be staged in our own day.
Royal Progresses
Not content with five palaces, she traveled through England almost every summer, to see and be seen, to watch the nobles and to enjoy their obligatory homage. A crowd of courtiers followed her, enjoying the change but complaining of poor lodgings and worse beer. Townsmen in velvet and silk greeted her with speeches and gifts. Nobles bankrupted themselves to entertain her, and impoverished gentlemen prayed that her route would pass them by. She rode on horseback or in an open litter and responded cheerfully to the crowds lining the roads. People rejoiced to see their unconquerable queen and were charmed by her gracious words and infectious high spirits, and their affection was renewed.
Splendor, Intrigue and Reward
The courtiers copied her gaiety and informality, her love of dress and ceremony, and her ideal of the complete gentleman. She enjoyed the rustle of rich gowns, and the men around her, like women, dressed in Eastern fabrics cut in the Italian fashion. Pleasure was her daily program, yet her men had to be ready for military ventures overseas. Seducers had to be careful, for she held herself responsible to the families of her maids of honor; she banished the Earl of Pembroke from court over his affair with Mary Fitton.
As at every court, intrigue flourished. Women competed for men, men for women, and all for the queen's attention and the income it brought. The same grave men who praised love and virtue in verse were greedy for pensions, gave and took bribes, seized monopolies and shared in the plunder of piracy. The queen, herself acquisitive, tolerated the bribery of her underpaid officials. Through her gifts or her indulgence Leicester became the richest lord in England; Sir Philip Sidney acquired vast lands in America; Raleigh received, according to the book, forty thousand acres in Ireland; the second Earl of Essex won the monopoly on importing sweet wines; and Sir Christopher Hatton rose from royal servant to Lord Chancellor. Beyond rewarding diligence, she admired a shapely leg, for these pillars of society were not yet hidden in long trousers. For all her faults, she put idle talent to work, set able men to hard tasks, turned their minds to high aims, gave dignity to their bearing and stirred their taste for poetry, drama and art. Around that court and that dazzling woman gathered nearly all the genius of England.
Elizabeth and Religion: A Divided Nation
But at court and in the nation a fierce struggle over the Reformation was under way, one that many believed might bewilder and destroy the queen. Elizabeth held the Protestant faith, while two-thirds and perhaps three-quarters of the people were Catholic. Most judges and all the clergy were Catholic. Protestantism was confined to the southern ports and the manufacturing towns; Protestants were a majority in London, where their numbers grew with refugees fleeing persecution on the Continent, but in the almost wholly agricultural north and west they were few.
The Protestants were far more ardent than the Catholics. In 1559 John Foxe published a stirring account of the sufferings of earlier Protestants; written in Latin, it appeared in English in 1563 as Acts and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs, and it inspired English Protestants for a century. In the sixteenth century Protestantism had the zeal of a new movement fighting for the future, while Catholicism rested on beliefs and traditions deeply rooted in the past.