Elizabeth At War
The inheritance into which Elizabeth Tudor entered in 1558 at the age of 25 was something of a poisoned chalice. When she was still a babe in arms her father, Henry VIII, had severed the English church from Catholic Christendom. She was still in her teens when the regime of her young half-brother, Edward VI, had hurried the nation farther along the Protestant path. And she had yet to enter her twenties when her half-sister, Mary, had embarked on a determined reversal of the religious policy of the two preceding reigns in order to restore England to papal obedience. Her subjects and, indeed, interested parties throughout Europe, watched carefully to see what course Queen Elizabeth would set for her realm. But some people did more than watch. Through the media of sermons, books and pamphlets they brought pressure to bear upon public opinion and upon the young queen. But there were others who were prepared to go even further. Plots, intrigues and assassination attempts formed the leitmotif of her entire reign.
As a divinely-anointed monarch Elizabeth knew she had to settle the religious issue, and enforce it in a world bitterly divided between Catholics and Protestants. The task had to begin with Elizabeth’s own convictions. What, then, did she believe? She had been brought up by a governess and a group of tutors, most of whom were of the ‘Christian humanist’ persuasion, which is to say that their theology was basically Calvinist (the systematic Protestantism advocated by the French reformer, John Calvin) and their religious ethos intellectual – more of the head than the heart. During Mary Tudor’s reign she’d had to keep her real beliefs secret and outwardly conform to Mary’s religion. One result of this experience was that she had little patience with religious enthusiasts of any persuasion. She expected all her subjects to
