Daily Life in Elizabethan England (3 page)

Unfortunately for Mary, she was unable to resist meddling in English politics. Many Catholics wanted to see her replace Elizabeth as Queen of England, and Mary was only too willing to entertain the idea. Northern England was still home to large numbers of Catholics, and in 1569 several of the northern earls led a rebellion against Elizabeth, thinking to place Mary on the throne. The rebels were swiftly suppressed, but the incident was a reminder of the threat posed by Elizabeth’s Catholic rival. The following year, the pope issued a Bull, or papal decree, excommunicating Elizabeth and declaring her deposed, a move that further strained relations between the two queens.

Mary’s interactions with Catholic conspirators only intensified after the Northern Rebellion. During 1570–71 a plot was organized by Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine banker, to have Mary wed the Duke of Norfolk, the highest-ranking nobleman in England, with an eye to creating a powerful Catholic alliance to topple the Queen. The plot was discovered, and Norfolk, already under suspicion for his involvement with the rebellion of 1569, was executed for treason. Many people urged Elizabeth to have Mary executed as well, but she was extremely reluctant to kill a queen, knowing the implications to herself.

In the meantime, relations with Spain were deteriorating. At first Elizabeth had worked to preserve something of the alliance between England and Spain created by her sister’s marriage to Philip II, but the atmosphere of religious conflict on the Continent made this increasingly difficult. In the Low Countries, a population that had come to embrace Protestantism was still under the rule of the Catholic Philip II. Rebellion erupted in 1566–67. At first Protestantism was widely spread throughout the area, but over time a successful Spanish counteroffensive succeeded in regaining the southern provinces (equivalent to modern-day Belgium), leaving
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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

only the northern provinces (the modern Netherlands) in a state of rebellion. Popular sentiment in England was strongly in support of the Protestant rebels, and many Englishmen volunteered to fight in the Netherlands against Spain, even though Spain and England were still officially friends.

Even Elizabeth, who still wanted to eke out what remained of the Spanish alliance, was not happy about the presence of a large Catholic force suppressing Protestantism practically on England’s doorstep.

Spain’s very size and power made it a threat, and the situation was made worse by Spain’s vast and profitable empire in the New World. Elizabeth was reluctant to undertake the risks and expense of war, but she turned to more subtle means of undermining Spanish power. In particular, she gave her support to the sea-dogs, privateers who preyed on Spanish shipping.

Perhaps the greatest was Francis Drake, who circled the globe in 1577–80, wreaking havoc on Spanish shipping and colonies and returning home with a phenomenal 4,700 percent profit for those who had invested in the voyage. The Queen herself was the largest shareholder.

By 1584 the international situation was becoming extremely ominous.

A Catholic fanatic had assassinated William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch Protestants, reminding Elizabeth that Europe’s mounting religious conflict could threaten her very life. The Catholic faction that dominated France was negotiating an alliance with Spain, and Antwerp was on the verge of falling to a Spanish siege. Elizabeth concluded a treaty with the Dutch Protestants and sent an English army to aid them in their cause.

Under the circumstances, Mary Stuart was a grave liability. She continued to be at the center of plots against Elizabeth. In 1583 a Catholic Englishman named Francis Throckmorton was arrested and found to be carrying a list of leading Catholics and potential landing places for an invading army. Under torture, he revealed plans for a major Spanish invasion of England.

The Queen’s advisors urged the death of Mary, but still Elizabeth

resisted. In 1586 a further plot was uncovered in which a young Catholic gentleman named Anthony Babington had engaged with several accom-plices to assassinate the Queen. Mary had given her explicit assent to the scheme. After a trial and prolonged vacillation by Elizabeth, an order was sent in 1587 for Mary’s execution; but after Mary was beheaded, Elizabeth denied that she had ordered the execution and made a show of punishing those involved.

All this while, Spain had been making preparations to remove Elizabeth by force, gathering a massive fleet in various Spanish ports. The fleet was to sail to the Spanish Netherlands, rendezvous with the Spanish army stationed there, and make the short crossing to England. In the summer of 1588, the Invincible Armada set sail.

The expedition was a disastrous failure. The English ships, smaller, more agile, better crewed, and more heavily armed with cannons, harassed the Spanish fleet as it sailed up the English Channel. In the face of bad weather,

A Brief History of Tudor England

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A fight at sea. [Holinshed]

the Spanish anchored at Calais; during the night the English set several of their own ships on fire and sent them in among the Spanish ships, forcing the Armada to disperse. The next day there was heavy fighting off the Flemish coast, as winds from the west forced the Spanish ships eastward, and several of them were lost to the coastal shoals. It proved impossible to rendezvous with the army, and the adverse winds made it impossible for the Armada to sail back into the Channel. The fleet was forced to make its way around the British Isles, battered by storms and decimated by malnutrition and disease, until about half the original fleet finally made it back to Spain in mid-September.

The war with Spain dragged on inconclusively for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign. The Spanish sent several subsequent armadas, but none met with any success; the English sent raids to Spanish ports, with minimal effect. In the mean time, England’s military entanglements spread. The Dutch provinces continued their war for independence with English assistance. The Protestant Henri of Navarre inherited the French crown as Henri IV in 1589, and Elizabeth sent multiple expeditions to help him secure his throne.

Elizabeth’s greatest problem was in Ireland, where centuries of resistance to English domination were coming to a head. Already in 1579–83

there had been a protracted rebellion by one of the leading Irish lords in the southern part of the country. In 1580 the Spanish had sent a small and unsuccessful expedition to Kerry. In 1596 Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone and perhaps the most powerful man in northern Ireland, began a major revolt against England, assisted by Spanish supplies. In 1599 Elizabeth sent Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, to suppress the revolt, but he proved
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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

thoroughly incompetent as a military commander. He was recalled and promptly became embroiled in a plot to take over the government. The scheme failed miserably: Essex was imprisoned and, ultimately, executed.

The money and supplies required for supporting these military efforts strained the English economy in the 1590s. The situation was exacerbated by a series of bad harvests in 1594–97. A likely contributing factor in these repeated crop failures was a climatic downturn that began around the time of Elizabeth’s accession and would last through the 1600s. Known to historians as the Little Ice Age, the trend brought colder and wetter weather, even freezing the Thames River in 1565 and 1595. Grain shortages in the mid-1590s led to runaway inflation, famine, and civil unrest. Repeated visitations of the plague only worsened the sense of crisis.

Yet these years of domestic troubles were also in many ways the cultural pinnacle of Elizabeth’s reign. England’s first permanent theater was built in London in 1576; in 1598–99 it was moved to the south bank of the Thames and renamed the Globe. The Globe and the other burgeoning theaters of late Elizabethan London would host the works of some of the most renowned playwrights in the English language: Christopher Marlowe was at the apex in the late 1580s and early 90s, Ben Jonson was on the rise by 1600, and William Shakespeare penned many of his most famous plays during the final decade of Elizabeth’s reign. Poetry too was enjoying a golden age: Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queen
appeared in 1590, and Shakespeare’s earliest published poetry in 1593. At the geopolitical level, some of the initial groundwork was laid that would lead to the emergence of the British Empire: the first attempt to found an overseas colony was in 1585 in Roanoke—although the colony did not survive, the English claim to Virginia (named for Elizabeth as the Virgin Queen) would be revived with colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth under Elizabeth’s successor. In 1600 Elizabeth chartered the East India Company, which would ultimately become the agent for Britain’s imperial expansion in Asia.

By the time Elizabeth died in 1603, having lived 69 years and ruled for almost half a century, many of her subjects were ready to see someone new on the throne. Willful to the end, the Queen refused to take to her bed: she passed away upright in her chair. She had never married, and there were no immediate heirs. The crown passed peacefully to James VI, son of Mary Stuart. Already king of Scotland, James now ruled England as James I, the first of the country’s Stuart kings. His subjects were delighted to have a man on the throne again, but he and his heirs proved less adept at managing England than Elizabeth. James’s son Charles would lose the throne and his life through civil war in the 1640s, and his grandson James II would be overthrown in a bloodless coup in 1688. Under the Stuarts, Elizabeth’s reign came to be idealized as a lost golden age, and the mythology of Elizabeth’s “merrie England” persists even into the 21st century.

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Society

The underlying reality that shaped English society during Elizabeth’s reign is the shape of the land itself. England is topographically complex, but at the broadest level, the country can be roughly divided into Lowland and Highland zones. Most of England falls in the Lowland zone, which consists of the central, southern, and eastern parts of the country. The land here is relatively gentle and fertile, supporting intensive agriculture and higher concentrations of population. The Highland zone lies in the north and west: the land here is rougher, more mountainous, and less fertile, supporting lower population densities. This distinction played out in various ways in the story of Elizabethan England: the Lowland zone was more densely populated, provided the bulk of the country’s staple grains, and was wealthier and more subject to social and cultural change. The Highland zone had fewer people, relied more heavily on pastoralism, and was poorer and culturally more conservative.

Local divisions within this broad framework were shaped by geographical factors. Rough and mountainous country divided populations from each other, as did marshes. But rivers acted less as boundaries and more as unifying thoroughfares. Communication was easier up and down a river than across the highlands that separated one river valley from another, so rivers and their tributaries created integrated economic and cultural zones: such was the region unified by the Thames River, which incorporated the central area of southern England from London to the Cotswolds, and the Severn River watershed, which included the adjoining areas to the west, stretching into Wales.

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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

THE POPULATION

England’s overall population was probably over 3 million when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, growing to over 4 million by the time of her death in 1603. These figures represent roughly 1/10 of the population of England today. The overwhelming majority lived in rural areas, although London was growing rapidly.

Not all of this population were ethnically or culturally English. Wales and western Cornwall were subject to the English crown: Cornwall was normally reckoned as a part of England, and Wales was integrated into the English system in many respects. Yet these regions still spoke Welsh and Cornish—languages distantly related to Gaelic and unintelligible to the English—and their linguistic distinctiveness mirrored a very distinct society and culture. Ireland was also officially under English rule, although effective English control was limited to the eastern part of the country. The population of Ireland included Englishmen and English-speaking Irishmen in the east, with the remainder of the country inhabited by Gaelic-speaking Irishmen. Scotland was still an independent kingdom, although England and Scotland came to be under a single ruler when the Scottish king, James VI, inherited the English throne in 1603. Southern Scotland spoke its own dialect of English, whereas the northern and western parts of the country still spoke Scottish Gaelic, a close relative of Irish.

Within England itself there was a significant population of foreign immigrants, typically Protestants who had fled the Continent because of wars or religious persecution. These immigrants came primarily from the Low Countries (especially Flanders), Germany, and France, with a few from Spain and Italy. The proportion of foreigners was highest in London—

perhaps around 3 percent of the population. It was much lower in other areas, and there were few in the countryside, except in areas with growing mining or cloth-making industries. Finally, by this period the Romany, or gypsies, had come across the Channel to England. The Romany were a culture largely to themselves; they had a language of their own and led wandering lives on the fringes of society. They did not generally assimi-late to mainstream English society, although they had a significant impact on the culture of vagrancy and the underworld.1

THE MEDIEVAL HERITAGE

A modern person looking to understand Elizabethan society needs

to begin by digging even further back in history, into the Middle Ages.

Although many of the definitive features of medieval feudalism and manorialism had died out by the late 1500s, Elizabethan England was deeply shaped by its feudal heritage, and many of the key structures of Elizabethan society cannot be understood without understanding their medieval roots.