Igaya, Dhainny Rheim T.

BSA2B

ELIZABETH I, Queen of England and Ireland, born on Sunday the 7th of September 1533, and,
like all the Tudors except Henry VII, at Greenwich Palace, was the only surviving child of
Henry VIII by his second queen, Anne Boleyn. With such a mother and with Cranmer as her
godfather she represented from her birth the principle of revolt from Rome, but the opponents
of that movement attached little importance to her advent into the world. Charles V's
ambassador, Chapuys, hardly deigned to mention the fact that the king's amie had given birth
to a daughter, and both her parents were bitterly disappointed with her sex. She was, however,
given precedence over Mary, her elder sister by sixteen years, and Mary never forgave the
infant's offence. Even this dubious advantage only lasted three years until Elizabeth's mother
was beheaded.

Elizabeth thus lost all hereditary title to the throne, and her early years of childhood can hardly
have been happier than Mary's. Nor was her legitimacy ever legally established; but after Jane
Seymour's death, when Henry seemed likely to have no further issue, she was by act of
parliament [Act of Succession, 1544] placed next in order of the succession after Edward and
Mary and their issue; and this statutory arrangement was confirmed by the will which Henry
VIII was empowered by statute to make. Queen Catherine Parr introduced some humanity into
Henry's household, and Edward and Elizabeth were well and happily educated together,
principally at old Hatfield House.

They were there when Henry's death called Edward VI away to greater dignities, and Elizabeth
was left in the care of Catherine Parr, who married in indecent haste Thomas, Lord Seymour,
brother of the protector Somerset. This unprincipled adventurer, even before Catherine's death
in September 1548, paid indelicate attentions to Elizabeth. Any attempt to marry her without
the council's leave would have been treason on his part and would have deprived Elizabeth of
her contingent right to the succession. Accordingly, when Seymour's other misbehaviour led to
his arrest, his relations with Elizabeth were made the subject of a very trying investigation,
which gave Elizabeth her first lessons in the arts of self-defence. She proved equal to the
occasion, partly because she was in all probability innocent of anything worse than a qualified
acquiescence in Seymour's improprieties and a girlish admiration for his handsome face. He or
his tragic fate may have touched a deeper chord, but it was carefully concealed.

For the rest of Edward's reign Elizabeth's life was less tempestuous. She hardly rivalled Lady
Jane Grey as the ideal Puritan maiden, but she swam with the stream, and was regarded as a
foil to her stubborn Catholic sister. She thus avoided the enmity and the still more dangerous
favour of Northumberland; and some unknown history lies behind the duke's preference of the
Lady Jane to Elizabeth as his son's wife and his own puppet for the throne. She thus escaped
shipwreck in his crazy vessel, and rode by Mary's side in triumph into London on the failure of
the plot. For a time she was safe enough; she would not renounce her Protestantism until
Catholicism had been made the law of the land, but she followed Gardiner's advice to her
father when he said it was better that he should make the law his will than try to make his will
the law.

It was not so much Elizabeth's religion as her nearness to the throne and the circumstances of
her birth that endangered her life in Mary's reign. While Mary was popular Elizabeth was safe;
but as soon as the Spanish marriage project had turned away English hearts Elizabeth
inevitably became the centre of plots and the hope of the plotters. Had not Lady Jane still been
alive to take off the edge of Mary's indignation and suspicion Elizabeth might have paid forfeit
for Wyat's rebellion with her life instead of imprisonment. She may have had interviews with
French agents who helped to foment the insurrection; but she was strong and wary enough to
avoid Henry II's toils; for even in case of success she would have been the French king's
puppet, placed on the throne, if at all, merely to keep it warm for Henry's prospective daughter-
in-law, Mary Stuart. This did not make Mary Tudor any more friendly, and the Spaniards cried
loud and long for Elizabeth's execution.
She was sent to the Tower in March 1554, but few Englishmen were fanatic enough to want a
Tudor beheaded. The great nobles, the Howards, and Gardiner would not hear of such a
proposal; and all the efforts of the court throughout Mary's reign failed to induce parliament to
listen to the suggestion that Elizabeth should be deprived of her legal right to the succession.
After two months in the Tower she was transferred to Sir Henry Bedingfield's charge at
Woodstock, and at Christmas, when the realm had been reconciled to Rome and Mary was
expecting issue, Elizabeth was once more received at court. In the autumn of 1555 she went
down to Hatfield, where she spent most of the rest of Mary's reign, enjoying the lessons of
Ascham, and planting trees which still survive.

She had only to bide her time while Mary made straight her successor's path by uprooting
whatever affection the English people had for the Catholic faith, Roman jurisdiction and
Spanish control. The Protestant martyrs and Calais between them removed all the alternatives
to an insular national English policy in church and in state; and no sovereign was better
qualified to lead such a cause than the queen who ascended the throne amid universal, and
the Spaniards thought indecent, rejoicings at Mary's death on the 17th of November 1558.
"Mere English" she boasted of being, and after Englishmen's recent experience there was no
surer title to popular favour. No sovereign since Harold had been so purely English in blood;
her nearest foreign ancestor was Catherine of France, the widow of Henry V, and no English
king or queen was more superbly insular in character or in policy.

She was the unmistakable child of the age so far as Englishmen shared in its characteristics,
for with her English aims she combined some Italian methods and ideas. "An Englishman
Italianate," ran the current jingle, "is a devil incarnate," and Elizabeth was well versed in Italian
scholarship and statecraft. It is clear enough that, although, like her father, she was fond of
ritual, she was absolutely devoid of the religious temperament, and that her ecclesiastical
preferences were dictated by political considerations. She was sincere enough in her dislike of
Roman jurisdiction and of Calvinism; a daughter of Anne Boleyn could have little affection for a
system which made her a bastard, and all monarchs agreed at heart with James I's aphorism
about "no bishop, no king." It was convenient, too, to profess Lutheran sympathies, for
Lutheranism was now an established, monarchical and comparatively respectable religion,
very different from the Calvinism against which monarchs directed the Counter-reformation
from political motives. Lutheran dogma, however, had few adherents in England, though its
political theory coincided with that of Anglicanism in the 16th century. The compromise that
resulted from these conflicting forces suited Elizabeth very well; she had little dislike of
Catholics who repudiated the papacy, but she was forced to rely mainly on Protestants, and
had little respect for any form of ecclesiastical self-government. She valued uniformity in
religion, not as a safeguard against heresy, but as a guarantee of the unity of the state.

The outlines of her foreign policy are sketched elsewhere, and her courtships were diplomatic.
Contemporary gossip said that she was debarred from matrimony by a physical defect; and
her cry when she heard that Mary queen of Scots had given birth to a son is the most womanly
thing recorded of Elizabeth. Her features were as handsome as Mary's, but she had little
fascination, and in spite of her many suitors no man lost his head over Elizabeth as men did
over Mary. She was far too 'masculine' in mind and temperament, and her extravagant
addiction to the outward trappings of femininity was probably due to the absence or atrophy of
deeper feminine instincts. In the same way the impossibility of marriage made her all the freer
with her flirtations, and she carried some of them to lengths that scandalized a public
unconscious of Elizabeth's security. She had every reason to keep them in the dark, and to
convince other courts that she could and would marry if the provocation were sufficient. She
could not marry Philip II, but she held out hopes to more than one of his Austrian cousins
whenever France or Mary Stuart seemed to threaten; and later she encouraged two French
princes when Philip had lost patience with Elizabeth and made Mary Stuart his protegee. Her
other suitors were less important, except Leicester, who appealed to the least intellectual side
of Elizabeth and was always a cause of distraction in her policy and her ministers.

Elizabeth was terribly handicapped by having no heirs of her body and no obvious English
successor. She could not afford to recognize Mary's claim, for that would have been to alienate
the Protestants, double the number of Catholics, and, in her own phrase, to spread a winding-
sheet before her eyes; for all would have turned to the rising sun. Mary was dangerous enough
as it was, and no one would willingly make his rival his heir. Elizabeth could hardly be
expected to go out of her way and ask parliament to repeal its own acts for Mary's sake;
probably it would have refused. Nor was it personal enmity on Elizabeth's part that brought
Mary to the block. Parliament had long been ferociously demanding Mary's execution, not
because she was guilty but because she was dangerous to the public peace. She alone could
have given the Spanish Armada any real chance of success; and as the prospect of invasion
loomed larger on the horizon, fiercer grew the popular determination to remove the only
possible centre of a domestic rising, without which the external attack was bound to be a
failure. Elizabeth resisted the demand, not from compassion or qualms of conscience, but
because she dreaded the responsibility for Mary's death. She wished Paulet would manage
the business on his own account, and when at last her signature was extorted she made a
scapegoat of her secretary Davison who had the warrant executed.

The other great difficulty, apart from the succession, with which Elizabeth had to deal, arose
from the exuberant aggressiveness of England, which she could not, and perhaps did not want
to, repress. Religion was not really the cause of her external dangers, for the time had passed
for crusades, and no foreign power seriously contemplated an armed invasion of England for
religion's sake. But no state could long tolerate the affronts which English seamen offered
Spain. The common view that the British Empire has been won by purely defensive action is
not tenable, and from the beginning of her reign Englishmen had taken the offensive, partly
from religious but also from other motives. They were determined to break up the Spanish
monopoly in the new world, and in the pursuit of this endeavour they were led to challenge
Spain in the old. For nearly thirty years Philip put up with the capture of his treasure-ships, the
raiding of his colonies and the open assistance rendered to his rebels. Only when he had
reached the conclusion that his power would never be secure in the Netherlands or the New
World until England was conquered, did he despatch the Spanish Armada. Elizabeth delayed
the breach as long as she could, probably because she knew that war meant taxation, and that
taxation was the most prolific parent of revolt.

With the defeat of the Spanish Armada Elizabeth's work was done, and during the last fifteen
years of her reign she got more out of touch with her people. That period was one of gradual
transition to the conditions of Stuart times; during it practically every claim was put forward that
was made under the first two Stuarts either on behalf of parliament or the prerogative, and
Elizabeth's attitude towards the Puritans was hardly distinguishable from James I's. But her
past was in her favour, and so were her sex and her Tudor tact, which checked the growth of
discontent and made Essex's rebellion a ridiculous fiasco. He was the last and the most wilful
but perhaps the best of her favourites, and his tragic fate deepened the gloom of her closing
years. The loneliness of a queen who had no husband or children and no relatives to mention
must at all times have been oppressive; it grew desolating in old age after the deaths of
Leicester, Walsingham, Burghley and Essex, and Elizabeth died, the last of her race, on the
24th of March 1603.