Elizabeth I of England

"At the height of the siege [of Malta], and sensitive as ever to the realities of European politics, Elizabeth herself had warned that "if the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what peril might follow to the rest of Christendom". Elizabeth, the daughter of the schismatic Henry VIII, was kept on her throne with the help of extreme Protestants – followers of John Calvin. But in her private opinions she herself kept her distance from them. Elizabeth had deeper discernment, and was aware that if the Turks came in victorious, so that the Crescent prevailed against the Cross, then Europe as a recognizable society with its inherited moral values must change for the worse; the world Englishmen had always known would disappear."

"With the Turkish fleet destroyed, Spain for the time was without a rival in the Mediterranean large enough to challenge her or check her. The response of the nominally Catholic King of France to the great victory was secretly to offer Sokolli a firm alliance against Spain... In besieged Leyden, Dutch Calvinists there who followed the Prince of Orange wore little brass crescents in their caps. But though excommunicated by the old Pope as a heretic and treated by him as a usurper, Elizabeth of England showed greater political penetration. For her, Lepanto was not so much a victory for Spain or the Pope as a triumph for all Christendom – a guarantee that the values upon which Western Europe had been established would survive. To show exactly what she thought, the Church of England which she had established by law was ordered to hold services of thanksgiving."

"Now you, the whole world's ornament, the Queen On whose behalf both winds and oceans fight, Rule on with God, far from ambition seen, And succour still the pious with your might, That England you, you England long hold dear, Whom good men love as much as wicked fear."

"Unallied and alone, queen Elizabeth maintained a glorious and successful war against the greatest power and the richest potentate in Europe. She distressed him in the West Indies. She insulted him in Spain. She took from him the empire of the sea. She fixed it in herself. She rendered all the projects of universal monarchy vain; and shook to the foundations the most exorbitant power, which ever disturbed the peace, or threatened the liberties of Europe... She, who seemed to have every thing to fear in the beginning of her reign, became in the progress of it terrible to her enemies... [S]he preserved her subjects in peace and plenty. While the glory of the nation was carried high by achievements in war: the riches and the strength of it were raised by the arts of peace to such a degree, as former ages had never seen, and as we of this age feel in the consequences."

"She considered the interest of no kingdom, no state, nor people, no not even the general interest of the reformation, as zealous a protestant as she was, nor the preservation of a balance of power in Europe, as great a heroine as she was, in any other light than relatively to the interest of England. She assisted, or opposed, she defended or attacked, just as this interest directed."

"She disappointed, divided, and weakened her enemies. She prepared the opportunities, which she afterward improved. She united, animated, and enriched her people; and, as difficult as that may seem to be for a prince in such a situation, she maintained her own dignity, and supported the honour of the nation."

"She considered herself as queen of a country cut off from the Continent, and separated by the sea from all other countries, except Scotland... The situation of an island affords great advantages, when they are wisely improved; and when they are neglected, as great disadvantages may result from this very situation. The reign, now before us, is a glorious and unanswerable proof, that the halcyon days, so much boasted of, and so seldom found, days of prosperity, as well as peace, may be enjoyed in an island, while all the neighbouring continent is filled with alarms, and even laid waste by war."

"[S]he united the great body of the people in her and their common interest, she inflamed them with one national spirit, and, thus armed, she maintained tranquillity at home, and carried succour to her friends and terror to her enemies abroad."

"A warm concern for the interest and honour of the nation, a tenderness for her people, and a confidence in their affections, were appearances that ran through her whole public conduct, and gave life and colour to it. She did great things, and she knew how to set them off according to their full value, by her manner of doing them."

"By the late 1570s, Elizabeth had developed an amicable correspondence with the Ottoman sultan Murad III, advising him that they both hated those idolatrous Catholics, and that she would be happy to act as his subject in return for a political and commercial alliance. Murad was rather perplexed—as we know from his advisers’ writings—to hear from a female ruler of a tiny country on the edge of Europe that he’d never heard of."

"Official papal policy was to excommunicate Christians trading with Muslims, but Elizabeth was now beyond such edicts. By the 1580s Elizabeth had a resident ambassador in Istanbul (then Constantinople) and consuls throughout North Africa and the Middle East, including in places like Aleppo and Raqqa. As reformed Protestants, many of them would have felt safer traveling in Muslim lands under Ottoman protection than in Catholic Europe, where arrest and the Inquisition invariably awaited them."

"With characteristic pragmatism as well as a keen eye for symbolic revenge, Elizabeth stripped lead and tin from deconsecrated Catholic churches to export to the Ottomans as munitions in their wars with the Shia Persian empire—“which the Turk buys of them,” wrote an outraged Spanish ambassador to England, “almost for its weight in gold, the tin being vitally necessary for the casting of guns and the lead for purposes of war.” The trade was so successful that it was replicated in the Barbary states of North Africa, where again English armaments were traded for gold and sugar (hence Elizabeth’s infamously bad teeth). English merchants also traveled as far as Persia, playing the Shah off against his Ottoman adversaries in a dangerous geopolitical game, aimed at neutralizing the Catholic threat of imminent Spanish invasion and keeping the ailing English economy afloat."

"Greatest of all the Queen's services to England was the peace she gave her. When a divided Christendom was wracked by cruel ideological passions, within their watery bounds the English were at peace and unity. It was of this Elizabeth was most proud, and deservedly, for it was she who had saved them from the maelstrom by her diplomacy, her womanly dissimulation and cunning and, after her brief initial intervention in the religious wars of Scotland and France, her determination to spare both her people and purse from the waste, folly and destruction of war."

"Perhaps no figure in English history has inspired more myth than Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603). She had many personas: the Virgin Queen, Gloriana, Good Queen Bess to her supporters; the bastard and heretic daughter of the whore, Anne Boleyn, to her detractors. In her day, scores of poets and artists promoted these various images. Since then, legions of writers, some scholarly, some popular, as well as playwrights and film-makers, have sought to relate the achievements of her reign and explain the mystique she exercised over her people. She herself was well aware of that mystique, cultivating it so effectively that it is almost impossible to pin down the "real" Elizabeth. Still, it is necessary to try, if only because so many of the age's triumphs and failures were intimately bound up with her words and actions."

"Like her father, Henry VIII, with whom she identified publicly, she was a larger-than-life personality. As with King Hal, this makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction. This much is inarguable. Elizabeth was young when she took the throne: 25 years old. She was also good-looking- an advantage that she was not reluctant to exploit. In addition, the new queen was highly intelligent, witty, hardworking, and well educated. She was fluent in Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and, of course, English. She wrote poetry and could speak effectively when she chose to do so. Elizabeth was also, like her father, something of a scholar: she once translated Boethius' On the Consolations of Philosophy into English for her own amusement. She also took after her father in being both musical and athletic. She played the virginals (a primitive keyboard instrument), danced, and hunted with enthusiasm. A final, crucial similarity to Henry VIII was that Elizabeth I was vain and imperious. Men could flirt with her- indeed, she encouraged them- but they had to be careful not to go too far, for she never forgot that she was queen."

"If even Mary's good qualities proved to be counter-productive, Elizabeth's bad ones sometimes worked in her favor. For example, her imperious nature, quick temper, and sharp tongue did much to counter any assumptions that she was weak because she was a woman. The most common charge leveled against her, also linked to contemporary assumptions about her gender, is that she was indecisive. Thus, Robert Devereaux, earl of Essex (1565-1601), complained to the French ambassador in 1597 that "they labored under two things at this Court, delay and inconsistency, which proceeded from the sex of the queen.""

"Indeed, Queen Elizabeth was capable of making her Privy Council and parliaments wait an agonizingly long time while she made up her mind. In some crucial cases (marriage, what to do about Mary Queen of Scots), it could be argued that she never did so. But it could also be argued that she had been taught by hard experience the dangers of committing herself too early or too definitely. After all, Elizabeth had grown up in a perilous environment in which overt commitment to one side or the other- in politics or religion- could lead to disgrace, even death. As queen, she ruled a country which was seemingly at the mercy of bigger, more powerful neighbors. What often struck her subjects (and later male historians) as indecisiveness now looks like prudence, even a mastery of herself and of the situation at hand. In particular she was a virtuoso at playing two sides off each other, so that they would not turn against her- or England."

"Elizabeth, again like her father, learned to use the possibility of matrimony as a diplomatic trump card or, more crudely, as bait: after all, marriage to the queen of England would be a peaceful and inexpensive way for Spain or France to win that country into an alliance and, perhaps, even back to Catholicism. Throughout the first half of the reign, especially during foreign policy crisis, she entertained a steady stream of French princes and German dukes, all of whom offered undying love- and diplomatic alliance. Unlike her father, however, she knew that marriage was a card that she could only play once. Once played, her freedom of maneuver and, with it, that of her country, would be virtually eliminated. Instead, she preferred to play potential suitors against each other in a brilliant game of amorous, albeit duplicitous, diplomacy."

"Elizabeth, unlike Mary, born of both an English mother and an English father, seems to have felt real affection for her people. Certainly, she had the common touch, frequently going out amongst them on summer-long cross-country progresses, or being carried in an open chair through the streets of London. At such moments Elizabeth played to the crowd, ordered "her carriage... to be taken where the crowd seemed thickest, and stood up and thanked the people.""

"Remember and consider that this very day...eighty-two years sithence began a new resurrection of this kingdom from the dead, our second happy reformation of religion by the auspicious entrance of our late royal Deborah (worthy of eternal remembrance and honour) into her blessed and glorious reign."

"[Elizabeth is] descended by father and mother of mere English blood, and not of Spain, as her sister was."

"The wisest woman that ever was; for she understood the interests and dispositions of all the princes in her time, and was so perfect in the knowledge of her own realm, that no counsellor could tell her anything she did not know before."

"[T]he Memory of that Princess (which amongst English-men ought ever to be gratefull and sacred)."

"[In 1588] the Queen with a masculine Spirit came and took a View of her Army and Camp at Tilbury, and riding about through the Ranks of Armed men drawn up on both sides her, with a Leader's Truncheon in her Hand, sometimes with a martial Pace, another while gently like a Woman, incredible it is how much she encouraged the Hearts of her Captains and Soldiers by her Presence and Speech to them."

"On Wednesday the twenty-third of March [1603] she grew speechless. That afternoone, by signes, she called for her Councill, and by putting her hand to her head, when the King of Scottes was named to succeed her, they all knew hee was the man she desired should reign after her."

"The greatest prince that perhaps this country ever saw."

"With 1588 the crisis of the reign was past. England had emerged from the Armada year as a first-class Power. She had resisted the weight of the mightiest empire that had been seen since Roman times. Her people awoke to a consciousness of their greatness, and the last years of Elizabeth's reign saw a welling up of national energy and enthusiasm focused upon the person of the Queen. In the year following the Armada, the first three books were published of Spenser's Faerie Queene, in which Elizabeth is hymned as Gloriana. Poets and courtiers alike paid their homage to the sovereign who symbolized the great achievement. Elizabeth had schooled a generation of Englishmen."

"Victory over Spain was the most shining achievement of Elizabeth's reign, but by no means the only one. The repulse of the Armada had subdued religious dissension at home. Events which had swung England toward Puritanism while the Catholic danger was impending swung her back to the Anglican settlement when the peril vanished in the smoke of the burning Armada at Gravelines."

"Lest I offend, I hasten to explain that I have no motive to reduce Elizabeth in stature, or to diminish her vitality, if such a thing were possible. I know that her power to overawe, having first won the devotion of those personally and politically closest to her, has rarely been equalled."

"Not surprisingly, the cult of Elizabeth grew directly in proportion to the perceived Catholic menace. In the autumn of 1626, while ladies at court were dallying with the Mass, and while Spanish forces appeared ascendant in Europe, the anniversary of Elizabeth's accession produced a resounding clamour of bells. "Today these bells rang merrily in remembrance of famous Queen Elizabeth" wrote one London correspondent on 17 November. Similarly in 1630 there was "universal ringing of bells for Queen Elizabeth's coronation" on 17 November... This anniversary ringing, quite innocent of official prompting, combined elements of reassurance and defiance, as if the commemoration of Elizabeth could somehow restore the virtues of her reign. "Our Elizabeth" had become the unofficial patron saint of England."

"Queen Elizabeth of famous memory,—we need not be ashamed to call her so! ... that Lady, that great Queen."

"To report her death, like a thunder-clap, was able to kill thousands. It took away hearts from millions. For having brought up even under her wing a nation that was almost begotten and born under her, that never shouted any other ave than for her name, never saw the face of any prince but herself, never understood what that strange outlandish word 'change' signified—how was it possible but that her sickness should throw abroad universal fear, and her death an astonishment?"

"Queen Elizabeth, of Blessed Memory, ruled over her people for forty-five years, about half as long as most of them had any cause to expect to live. When she herself died, nearly seventy years old, there were very few alive who could even recall that another sovereign had ever sat on the throne of England. And though towards the end she had been not only old but also somewhat out of touch with the attitudes and ambitions of a new generation, she retained to the last the love and worship of a nation accustomed to a monarchy clothed in the splendour of divine right but also embodied in palpably real people. Whatever else the Tudors may have been, they were aggressively alive, sculpted in the round, formidable personalities of the kind that create living legends in their own lifetime and do not lose their vitality even in death. The Queen's long reign accomplished the promise of her father's rule; the age of Elizabeth is rightly regarded, not only by historians but also in the popular memory, as a time of greatness breeding greater things still than it actually witnessed."

"Elizabeth pursued the only policy open to a sixteenth-century monarch: she promoted her country's interests by promoting her own, tried to avoid military or diplomatic defeat, tried to preserve unity at home, tried to adjust her resources to the sacred cause of public display. Certainly she sought ‘greatness’, but if she had to define it she would have spoken of Henry V and Henry VIII rather than of unknown lands over the seas."

"God has put into your hands the balance of power and justice, to poise and counterpoise at your will the actions and counsels of all the Christian kings of your time."

"She seems to me incomparably more feared than her sister and gives her orders and has her way as absolutely as her father did."

"It appears to me that she is a woman of extreme vanity, but acute. I would say that she must have great admiration for the King her father's mode of carrying on matters."

"[O]ur thanks, most due, to Almighty God, what cause have we all Englishmen so to do, that is, to render most ample thanksgiving to the mercifulness of God, who hath granted, conserved, and advanced, to the seat-regal of this realm, so good, godly, and virtuous a queen; such a chosen instrument of his clemency, so virtuously natured, so godly disposed, so merciful without marring, so humble without pride, so moderate without prodigality, so maidenly without pomp."

"In the year '88, I did then live at the upper end of the Strand near St. Clement's Church, when suddenly there came a report unto us...that the Queen was gone to council, and if you will see the Queen you must come quickly. Then we all ran; when the Court gates were set open... the Queen came out in great state. Then we cried, "God save your majesty! God save your majesty!" Then the Queen turned unto us and said, "God bless you all, my good people!" Then we cried again, "God save your majesty! God save your majesty!" Then the Queen said again unto us, "You may well have a greater prince; but you shall never have a more loving prince:" and so looking one upon another awhile the Queen departed. This wrought such an impression upon us, for shows and pageants are ever best seen by torch-light, that all the way long we did nothing but talk what an admirable queen she was, and how we would adventure our lives to do her service."

"The Queen...presently undertakes Sir Philip; and (like an excellent Monarch) lays before him the difference in degree between Earls, and Gentlemen; the respect inferiors ought to their superiors; and the necessity in princes to maintain their own creations, as degrees descending between the people's licentiousness, and the annoynted Soveraignty of Crowns: how the Gentlemans neglect of Nobility taught the Peasant to insult upon both."

"The expansive notions of religious authority and godly activism that found expression in Knox and Goodman's resistance theories would also continue to shape Protestant thought and activism under Elizabeth. English Protestants literally saw Elizabeth's accession as a godsend, and when James Pilkington called for reformation in 1560, he depicted the monarch as playing an important and helpful role in establishing true religion. Rather than making the prince the necessary source of religious authority in England, however, he cast the monarch as a powerful partner in a task that God Himself laid upon all His people, a task that must proceed, with or without the monarch's assistance. Elizabeth completely rejected this limited view of her authority- just as she rejected the notion that even her most exalted subjects could demand that she name a successor or execute a fellow monarch- but to her great consternation, many of her most fervent subjects did not."

"On her throne, Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen; towards the Church she was a mother, with her nobles she was an aunt, to her councillors a nagging wife, and to her courtiers a seductress."

"In 1603, Elizabeth had seemed a foolish old woman, as men looked expectantly to a Stuart king. By 1630, when Stuart kings had proved rather a disappointment, she had become the paragon of all princely virtues."

"[T]he person of our Salomon her gratious Majesty, whome I feare not to pronounce to have received the same Heroicall spirit, and most honorable disposition, as an inheritance from her famous father."

"Her mind was oftimes like the gentle air that cometh from the westerly point in a summer's morn; 'twas sweet and refreshing to all around her. Her speech did win all affections; and her subjects did try to show all love to her commands; for she would say, her state did require her to command what she knew her people would willingly do from their own love to her. Herein did she show her wisdom fully; for who did choose to loose her confidence; or who would withhold a show of love and obedience, when their sovereign said it was their own choice and not her compulsion? Surely she did play well her tables to gain obedience thus without constraint; again could she put forth such alterations, when obedience was lacking, as left no doubtings whose daughter she was."

"The queen did fish for men's souls, and had so sweet a bait that no one could escape her net-work."

"Now, if ever any person had either the gift or the skill to winne the hearts of people, it was this Queene; and if ever shee did expresse the same, it was at that present, in coupling mildnesse with majesty as she did, and in stately stouping to the meanest sort. All her faculties were in motion, and every motion seemed a well guided action: Her eye was set upon one, her eare listened to another, her judgement rane upon a third, to a fourth shee addressed her speech: Her spirit seemed to be everywhere, and yet so entire in her selfe, as it seemed to bee no where else. Some she commended, some she pitied, some she thanked, at others she pleasantly and wittily jeasted, concerning no person, neglecting no office; and generally casting forth such courteous countenances, gestures and speeches, that thereupon the people againe redoubled the testimonies of their joy and afterwards, raising every thing to the highest straine, filled the cares of all men with immoderate extolling their Prince."

"If where religion was concerned Elizabeth made "no windows into the hearts of men," she certainly left us the most unexpected window into her own soul. It is in the form of her own personal Book of Devotions... These prayers are far-and-away the most interesting of any that we have from Elizabeth's hand. They are written in a simple straightforward manner, and they reveal a deep personal faith which has every token of sincerity."

"So the development of the galleon enabled the rich and powerful colonial empire of Spain to plot the destruction of Elizabeth’s reign and the restoration of a Catholic English state. In 1582, Spain began construction of a new Armada. In light of Spain’s new military project, and with no imminent Turkish threat to English soil, Elizabeth I made the daring move to send the first English ambassador to Constantinople to bargain with Sultan Murad III of the Ottoman Empire. William Harborne was chosen for the task, having travelled to Constantinople throughout the 1570s with British merchants in the Levant Trading Company. Through her ambassador, Elizabeth and Murad corresponded back and forth in Latin, each concerned with Spanish and Habsburg dominance. Murad was quite beguiling in his treatment of the sovereign of England, referring to Elizabeth as:The pride of women who follow Jesus, the most excellent of the ladies honored among the Messiah’s people, the arbitress of the affairs of the Christian community, who trails the skirts of majesty and gravity, the queen of the realm of Ingiltere, Queen Eliz’ade. Ambassador Harborne, in turn, referred to Murad as “the most august and benign Caesar”—illustrating Elizabeth’s view that England did not perceive the Ottomans as conquerors, while also diplomatically casting Murad as the rightful successor of the Byzantine Empire. Elizabeth’s ultimate goal was to persuade Murad to attack Spain as a diversion, so that England would have time to prepare for Spain’s assault of the English coast. While Elizabeth’s proposed Anglo–Ottoman alliance was never quite realized, trade between England and the Ottoman Empire flourished under the Levant Company."

"In their political correspondence, the English and the Ottomans used the argument that they “were alike haters of the ‘idolatries’ practiced by the King of Spain”. Elizabeth I wrote a letter to Murad calling herself the “most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all the idolatry of those unworthy ones that live among Christians, and falsely profess the name of Christ”. So, in essence, Elizabeth framed her hopes of political alliance as being a partnership between the pious monotheists of England and Turkey against the idolatrous Spanish Habsburgs."