Weir - The life of Elizabeth I

Illustrations (not included)

1 Elizabeth I at her accession. ( Hever Castle Ltd, Hever Castle, Kent)

2 Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, attr. to Steven van Meulen. (By courtesy of the Wallace Collection)

3 William Cecil, Lord Burghley. (By courtesy of the Marquess of Salisbury)

4 Lord Darnley and Mary Queen of Scots. (By courtesy of the National Trust)

5 Philip II of Spain and Mary. (By courtesy of Woburn Abbey)

6 Lettice Knollys, Countess of Leicester. (By courtesy of the Marquess of Bath and the Courtauld Institute)

7 Sir Christopher Hatton by Nicholas Hilliard. (By courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)

8 Sir Francis Walsingham by John de Critz the Elder. (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

9 Francis Duke of Alencon. (By courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library)

10 Sir Philip Sidney. (From the collection at Parham Park, West Sussex)

11 Sir Walter Raleigh. (By courtesy of the Mary Evans picture Library)

12 Sir Francis Drake. (By courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library)

13 Elizabeth I: the Armada Portrait. (By courtesy of Woburn Abbbey)

14 Sir Robert Cecil. (By courtesy of the Marquess of Salisbury)

15 Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. (By courtesy of Woburn Abbey)

16 James VI of Scotland and I of England. (From the collection at Parham Park, West Sussex)

17 Elizabeth I in old age. (By courtesy of the Methuen Collection, Corsham Court: photograph Courtauld Institute of Art)

18 The funeral procession of Elizabeth I. (By courtesy of the British Library)

Author's Preface

This is the third volume in my series of books on the Tudor monarchs. Having chronicled Elizabeth Tudor's childhood in The Six Wives of Henry VIII and her formative years in The Children of Henry VIII, I found the prospect of writing about her life as Queen of England irresistible.

This was never meant to be a political biography, nor did I intend to write a social history of the times. My aim has always been to write a history of Elizabeth's personal life within the framework of her reign, drawing on her own extensive literary remains, as well as those of her contemporaries. The manuscript was originally entitled The Private Life of Elizabeth I, but it very soon became apparent that Elizabeth's 'private' life was a very public one indeed, hence the change of title. Nor is it possible to write a personal history of her without encompassing the political and social events that made up the fabric of her life. What I have tried to do, therefore, is weave into the narrative enough about them to make sense of the story, and emphasise Elizabeth's reaction to them, showing how she influenced the history of her time.

The Elizabethan Age is a vast canvas, and there are so many aspects to Elizabeth and her reign that the writer's hardest task is choosing what to include and what to leave out. The details I have included are those which best portray Elizabeth as queen and woman, and which illustrate the many facets of her character.

There are many stories threaded through the book: Elizabeth and Leicester, Elizabeth and Mary Stuart, Elizabeth and Philip of Spain, Elizabeth and Essex, and, of course, Elizabeth and her many suitors. In presenting events chronologically, I have woven all these threads together into a single narrative - although, at times, it has felt as if I have been writing four different books!

Queen Elizabeth was such a fascinating and charismatic character that her life as queen merits a book of its own. In her time, monarchs ruled as well as reigned, and the personality of the sovereign could have a profound effect upon the history of the kingdom. This is a study of personal government at its best.

Alison Weir

Carshalton, 1998

Introduction

Elizabeth's England

Mary Tudor, the first female English monarch, had reigned for five unhappy years. The daughter of Henry VIII by his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, she had suffered a miserable youth as a result of her father's treatment of her mother, whose marriage had been annulled so that Henry could marry her lady in waiting, Anne Boleyn. A fervent Catholic, Mary had also been appalled by her father's break with Rome and later by the establishment of the Protestant faith in England by her brother, Edward VI, Henry's child by his third wife, Jane Seymour, whom he had married after Anne Boleyn was beheaded for treason. Hence when Edward died prematurely at fifteen in 1553, and Mary, his heiress, having overcome a Protestant plot to replace her with her cousin, Lady Jane Grey, ascended the throne to unprecedented public acclaim, she resolved to restore the Catholic faith. But in order to produce Catholic heirs to carry on her work, she made a fatally ill- judged and unpopular marriage with Europe's premier Catholic ruler, Philip of Spain, and at a stroke lost the love of her subjects. Matters were made worse when she reintroduced the laws against heresy and sanctioned the burning of some three hundred English Protestants - an act that would later earn her the sobriquet 'Bloody Mary' . In the last year of her reign, England lost Calais, the last outpost of her great medieval continental Empire, to the French, and Mary was blamed for it. Having suffered two phantom pregnancies and been deserted by her husband, she sickened and died, a very unhappy woman.

She left England in what her successor would describe as 'a sad state', reduced to the status of a minor power on the edge of a Europe riven by religious and political strife, and a prey to the ambitions of the two major international monarchies, Spain and France. England and Spain were technically allies against France, but the re-establishment by Elizabeth of the Protestant faith in England, which was confidently expected by many of her subjects, could not but cause dangerous discord with King Philip, who saw himself as the leader of the European Counter Reformation and had vowed to stamp out heresy. Backed by the Papacy, the Inquisition, the Jesuits and the wealth of Spain's territories in the New World, there was no doubt that he could prove a very formidable enemy if provoked. France was torn by civil and religious warfare, yet the French King, Henry II, had not only occupied Calais but was also maintaining a threatening military presence in Scotland, whose rulers were his allies. There was no money in the English treasury because much of it had gone to finance Philip of Spain's foreign wars, and the country had been stripped of its arms and munitions; its chief defences and fortresses were ruinous and, had war come, it could not have defended itself.

Internally, there was dissension and dissatisfaction. Many persons had lost confidence in the government, which was in debt to the tune of #266,000 - an enormous sum in those days. The people of England -who numbered between three and four million - having lived through a quarter-century of Reformation and Counter Reformation, were now divided by deep religious differences. The Count de Feria, Philip's ambassador in England at the time of Queen Mary's death, claimed that two thirds of the population was Catholic; he may have been exaggerating, but the fact remained that London, the seat of court and government, was aggressively Protestant and influential in public affairs. Where London led, the rest of the country eventually followed.

On the domestic front, life was not easy. England was not a wealthy country and its people endured relatively poor living standards. The landed classes - many of them enriched by the confiscated wealth of former monasteries - were determined in the interests of profit to convert their arable land into pasture for sheep, so as to produce the wool that supported the country's chief economic asset, the woollen cloth trade. But the enclosing of the land only added to the misery of the poor, many of whom, evicted and displaced, left their decaying villages and gravitated to the towns where they joined the growing army of beggars and vagabonds that would become such a feature of Elizabethan life. Once, the religious houses would have dispensed charity to the destitute, but Henry VIII had dissolved them all in the 1530s, and many former monks and nuns were now themselves beggars. Nor did the civic authorities help: they passed laws in an attempt to ban the poor from towns and cities, but to little avail. It was a common sight to see men and women lying in the dusty streets, often dying in the dirt like dogs or beasts, without human compassion being shown to them.