Mortimer - The time travellers guide to Elizabethan England

Contents

About the Book

The past is a foreign country this is your guidebook.

We think of Queen Elizabeth I as Gloriana: the most powerful English woman in history. We think of her reign (15581603) as a golden age of maritime heroes like Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Francis Drake, and of great writers, such as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. But what was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 15902, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the poverty, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of that time?

In this book Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a prospective traveller to late sixteenth-century England would ask. Applying the groundbreaking approach he pioneered in his bestselling The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England, the Elizabethan world unfolds around the reader.

He shows a society making great discoveries and achieving military victories and yet at the same time being troubled by its new-found self-awareness. It is a country in which life expectancy is in the early thirties, people still starve to death and Catholics are being persecuted for their faith. Yet it produces some of the finest writing in the English language and some of the most magnificent architecture, and sees Elizabeths subjects settle in America and circumnavigate the globe. Welcome to a country that is, in all its contradictions, the very crucible of the modern world.

About the Author

Ian Mortimer is the author of the bestselling The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England, eight other books and many peer-reviewed articles on English history between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was awarded the Alexander Prize (2004) for his work on the social history of medicine in seventeenth-century England. In June 2011, the University of Exeter awarded him a higher doctorate (D.Litt) by examination, on the strength of his historical work. He also writes historical fiction, published under his middle names (James Forrester). He lives with his wife and three children on the edge of Dartmoor, in Devon.

Also by Ian Mortimer

The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer

The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of Englands Self-Made King

1415: Henry Vs Year of Glory

The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England

List of Illustrations

George Gower, Queen Elizabeth I: The Armada Portrait, c.1588, Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Marcus Gheeraedts the Elder, portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, Private Collection.

Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, London, first published in Civitates Orbis Terrarum, vol. 1, 1572, The British Library Board, Maps.C.29.e.1, A.

Claes Janszoon Visscher, Visschers view of London, 1616, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Joris Hoefnagel, A Fte at Bermondsey, c.1569, reproduced by permission of Lord Salisbury/Hatfield House.

Robert Peake, portrait of Elizabeth Buxton (ne Kemp), c.158890, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Bess of Hardwick as a Young Woman, 1550s, English School, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire; The Devonshire Collection National Trust Photographic Library; Angelo Hornak; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Hans Ewoutsz, portrait of Lady Mary Fitzalan, His Grace The Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle; The Bridgeman Art Library.

George Gower, portrait of Elizabeth Knollys, Lady Layton, 1577, Montacute House, Somerset; The Phelips Collection National Trust Photographic Library; Derrick E. Witty; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Nonsuch Palace, first published in Civitates Orbis Terrarum, vol. 5, 1598, based on a 1582 drawing by Joris Hoefnagel.

Anthuenis Claeissins, A Family Saying Grace Before the Meal, 1585, Private Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Robert Peake, Queen Elizabeth I being carried in Procession (Eliza Triumphans), c.1601, Private Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Portrait of Lord Burghley, English School, Burghley House Collection, Lincolnshire; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Court of Wards and Liveries, Presided Over by the Master of the Court, Lord Burghley, c.1598, English School, Private Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Isaac Oliver, A Party in the Open Air. Allegory on Conjugal Love, 15905, held at the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, SMK Photo.

Isaac Oliver, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c.1585, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge; The Bridgeman Art Library.

William Segar, portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1598, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Isaac Oliver, Portrait of a Young Man, c.15905, The Royal Collection, 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Nicholas Hilliard, portrait of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Portrait of Christopher Marlowe, The Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge.

Dancers and musicians from the Album of Johannes Cellarius, c.16006, German School, British Library; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Interior of a Farmhouse, Muse Municipal, Bergues; Giraudon; The Bridgeman Art Library.

A True Description of the Naval Expedition of Francis Drake, who with Five Ships Departed from the Western Part of England on 13th December 1577, Circumnavigated the Globe and Returned on 26th September 1580 with One Ship Remaining, the Others Having been Destroyed by Waves of Fire, c.1587, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Theodor de Bry, How They Dance at Important Celebrations, Paris, Muse de la Marine; akg-images.

The Spanish Armada which Threatened England in July 1588, English School, National Maritime Museum; IAM; akg-images.

The Ark Raleigh, the flagship of the English Fleet, from Leisure Hour, 1888, English School, Private Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Queen Elizabeth I Receives Dutch Ambassadors, Dutch School, Neue Galerie, Kassel, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel; The Bridgeman Art Library.

The Thames at Richmond, with the Old Royal Palace, c.1620, Flemish School, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Old Houses in the Butcher Row, Smiths Antiquities of London, 1791.

Treswell Survey of 16 Fleet Lane, by kind permission of The Clothworkers Company.

Jan Siberechts, Wollaton Hall and Park, Nottingham, 1697, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

Washerwomen at a river, illustration to the alchemic treatise Splendor Solis, The British Library Board, Harley 3469, f.32v.

Leg amputation, sixteenth-century woodcut, from Walter H. Riff, Die groe Chirurgi oder vollkommene Wundarznei, akg-images.

Vagrant being whipped out of town, from Raphael Holinshed, The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 1577.

Marguerite de Valois dancing la volta at the Valois Court, French School, Muse des Beaux-Arts, Rennes; akg-images; Erich Lessing.

Four Gentlemen of High Rank Playing Primero, The Right Hon. Earl of Derby; The Bridgeman Art Library.