From the start of Elizabeth's reign, it was expected that she would marry and the question arose whom. She never did, although she received many offers for her hand; the reasons for this are not clear. Historians have speculated that Thomas Seymour had put her off sexual relationships, or that she knew herself to be
infertile.
[63][64] She considered several suitors until she was about fifty. Her last courtship was with
François, Duke of Anjou, 22 years her junior. While risking possible losing of power like her sister, who played into the hands of King Phillip II of Spain, marriage offered the chance of an heir.
[65]
Lord Robert Dudley
In the spring of 1559 it became evident that Elizabeth was in love with her childhood friend
Lord Robert Dudley.
[66] It was said that
Amy Robsart, his wife, was suffering from a "malady in one of her breasts", and that the Queen would like to marry Lord Robert in case his wife should die.
[67] By the autumn of 1559 several foreign suitors were vying for Elizabeth's hand; their impatient envoys engaged in ever more scandalous talk and reported that a marriage with her
favourite was not welcome in England:
[68] "There is not a man who does not cry out on him and her with indignation ... she will marry none but the favoured Robert".
[69] Amy Dudley died in September 1560 from a fall from a flight of stairs and, despite the
coroner's inquest finding of accident, many people suspected Dudley to have arranged her death so that he could marry the queen.
[70] Elizabeth seriously considered marrying Dudley for some time. However, William Cecil,
Nicholas Throckmorton, and some conservative
peers made their disapproval unmistakably clear.
[71] There were even rumours that the nobility would rise if the marriage took place.
[72]
Despite several other marriage projects, Robert Dudley was regarded as a candidate for nearly another decade.
[73] Elizabeth was extremely jealous of his affections, even when she no longer meant to marry him herself.
[74] In 1564 Elizabeth created Dudley
Earl of Leicester. He finally remarried in 1578, to which the queen reacted with repeated scenes of displeasure and lifelong hatred towards
his wife.
[75] Still, Dudley always "remained at the centre of [Elizabeth's] emotional life", as historian
Susan Doran has described the situation.
[76] He died shortly after the
Armada, and after Elizabeth's own death, a note from him was found among her most personal belongings, marked "his last letter" in her handwriting.
[77]
Political aspects
Elizabeth kept the marriage question open but often only as a diplomatic ploy,
[79] treating it as an aspect of foreign policy.
[80] Though she turned down
Philip II's own offer in 1559, she negotiated for several years to marry his cousin
Archduke Charles of Austria. Relations with the Habsburgs deteriorated by 1568. Elizabeth then considered marriage to two French
Valois princes in turn, first
Henri, Duke of Anjou, and later, from 1572 to 1581, his brother
François, Duke of Anjou, formerly Duke of Alençon.
[81] This last proposal was tied to a planned alliance against Spanish control of the
Southern Netherlands.
[82] Elizabeth seems to have taken the courtship seriously for a time, and wore a frog-shaped earring that Anjou had sent her.
[83]
Parliament repeatedly petitioned her to marry, but she always answered evasively.
[84] In 1563, she told an imperial envoy: "If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married".
[79] In the same year, following Elizabeth's illness with
smallpox, the succession question became a heated issue. Parliament urged the queen to marry or nominate an heir, to prevent a
civil war upon her death. She refused to do either. In April, she
prorogued the Parliament, which did not reconvene until she needed its support to raise taxes in 1566. The
House of Commons threatened to withhold funds until she agreed to provide for the succession. The issue progressed and the House sent
Sir Robert Bell, who 'did argue very boldly' to pursue the succession question; "in the face of the Queen's command to leave it alone". "In her own words 'Mr Bell with his complices... must needs prefer their speeches to the upper house to have you, my lords, consent with them, whereby you were seduced, and of simplicity did assent unto it'."
[85] Later in that year, she confided to the Spanish ambassador that if she could find a way to settle the succession without marrying, she would do so. By 1570, senior figures in the government privately accepted that Elizabeth would never marry or name a successor. William Cecil was already seeking solutions to the succession problem.
[79] For this stance, as for her failure to marry, she was often accused of irresponsibility.
[86] Elizabeth's silence strengthened her own political security: she knew that if she named an heir, her throne would be vulnerable to a coup.
[87]
The "Hampden" portrait, by
Steven van der Meulen, ca. 1563. This is the earliest full-length portrait of the queen, made before the emergence of symbolic portraits representing the iconography of the "Virgin Queen".
[88] Elizabeth's unmarried status inspired a cult of
virginity. In poetry and portraiture, she was depicted as a virgin or a goddess or both, not as a normal woman.
[89] At first, only Elizabeth made a virtue of her virginity: in 1559, she told the Commons, "And, in the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin".
[89] Later on, particularly after 1578, poets and writers took up the theme and turned it into an
iconography that exalted Elizabeth. In an age of
metaphors and
conceits, she was portrayed as married to her kingdom and subjects, under divine protection. In 1599, Elizabeth spoke of "all my husbands, my good people".
[90]
Mary, Queen of Scots
Elizabeth's first policy toward
Scotland was to oppose the French presence there.
[91] She feared that the French planned to invade England and put
Mary, Queen of Scots, who was considered by many to be the heir to the English crown,
[92] on the throne.
[93] Elizabeth was persuaded to send a force into Scotland to aid the Protestant rebels, and though the campaign was inept, the resulting
Treaty of Edinburgh of July 1560 removed the French threat in the north.
[94] When Mary returned to Scotland in 1561 to take up the reins of power, the country had an established Protestant church and was run by a council of Protestant nobles supported by Elizabeth.
[95] Mary refused to ratify the treaty.
[96]
In 1563 Elizabeth proposed her own suitor, Robert Dudley, as a husband for Mary, without asking either of the two people concerned. Both proved unenthusiastic,
[97] and in 1565 Mary married
Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who carried his own claim to the English throne. The marriage was the first of a series of errors of judgement by Mary that handed the victory to the Scottish Protestants and to Elizabeth. Darnley quickly became unpopular in Scotland and then infamous for presiding over the murder of Mary's Italian secretary
David Rizzio. In February 1567, Darnley was murdered by conspirators almost certainly led by
James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Shortly afterwards, on 15 May 1567, Mary married Bothwell, arousing suspicions that she had been party to the murder of her husband. Elizabeth wrote to her:
How could a worse choice be made for your honour than in such haste to marry such a subject, who besides other and notorious lacks, public fame has charged with the murder of your late husband, besides the touching of yourself also in some part, though we trust in that behalf falsely.[98]
These events led rapidly to Mary's defeat and imprisonment in
Loch Leven Castle. The Scottish lords forced her to abdicate in favour of her son
James, who had been born in June 1566. James was taken to
Stirling Castle to be raised as a Protestant. Mary escaped from
Loch Leven in 1568 but after another defeat fled across the border into England, where she had once been assured of support from Elizabeth. Elizabeth's first instinct was to restore her fellow monarch; but she and her council instead chose to play safe. Rather than risk returning Mary to Scotland with an English army or sending her to France and the Catholic enemies of England, they detained her in England, where she was imprisoned for the next nineteen years.
[99]
Mary and the Catholic cause
Mary was soon the focus for rebellion. In 1569 there was a major Catholic
rising in the North; the goal was to free Mary, marry her to
Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and put her on the English throne.
[100] After the rebels' defeat, over 750 of them were executed on Elizabeth's orders.
[101] In the belief that the revolt had been successful,
Pope Pius V issued a
bull in 1570, titled
Regnans in Excelsis, which declared "Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime" to be a
heretic and released all her subjects from any allegiance to her.
[102][103] Catholics who obeyed her orders were threatened with
excommunication.
[102] The papal bull provoked legislative initiatives against Catholics by Parliament, which were however mitigated by Elizabeth's intervention.
[104] In 1581, to convert English subjects to Catholicism with "the intent" to withdraw them from their allegiance to Elizabeth was made a
treasonable offence, carrying the death penalty.
[105] From the 1570s
missionary priests from continental
seminaries came to England secretly in the cause of the "reconversion of England".
[103] Many suffered execution, engendering a cult of
martyrdom.
[103]
Regnans in Excelsis gave English Catholics a strong incentive to look to Mary Stuart as the true sovereign of England. Mary may not have been told of every Catholic plot to put her on the English throne, but from the
Ridolfi Plot of 1571 (which caused Mary's suitor, the Duke of Norfolk, to lose his head) to the
Babington Plot of 1586, Elizabeth's spymaster Sir
Francis Walsingham and the royal council keenly assembled a case against her.
[106] At first, Elizabeth resisted calls for Mary's death. By late 1586 she had been persuaded to sanction her trial and execution on the evidence of letters written during the Babington Plot.
[107] Elizabeth's proclamation of the sentence announced that "the said Mary, pretending title to the same Crown, had compassed and imagined within the same realm divers things tending to the hurt, death and destruction of our royal person."
[108] On 8 February 1587, Mary was beheaded at
Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire.
[109]
Wars and overseas trade
Elizabeth's foreign policy was largely defensive. The exception was the English occupation of
Le Havre from October 1562 to June 1563, which ended in failure when Elizabeth's
Huguenot allies joined with the Catholics to retake the port. Elizabeth's intention had been to exchange Le Havre for
Calais, lost to France in January 1558.
[110] Only through the activities of her fleets did Elizabeth pursue an aggressive policy. This paid off in the war against Spain, 80% of which was fought at sea.
[111] She knighted
Francis Drake after his
circumnavigation of the globe from 1577 to 1580, and he won fame for his raids on Spanish ports and fleets. An element of
piracy and self-enrichment drove Elizabethan seafarers, over which the queen had little control.
[112][113]
Netherlands expedition
After the occupation and loss of
Le Havre in 1562–1563, Elizabeth avoided military expeditions on the continent until 1585, when she sent an English army to aid the Protestant
Dutch rebels against Philip II.
[114] This followed the deaths in 1584 of the allies
William the Silent, Prince of Orange, and
François, Duke of Anjou, and the surrender of a series of Dutch towns to
Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, Philip's governor of the
Spanish Netherlands. In December 1584, an alliance between Philip II and the French
Catholic League at
Joinville undermined the ability of Anjou's brother,
Henry III of France, to counter
Spanish domination of the Netherlands. It also extended Spanish influence along the
channel coast of France, where the Catholic League was strong, and exposed England to invasion.
[114] The siege of
Antwerp in the summer of 1585 by the Duke of Parma necessitated some reaction on the part of the English and the Dutch. The outcome was the
Treaty of Nonsuch of August 1585, in which Elizabeth promised military support to the Dutch.
[115] The treaty marked the beginning of the
Anglo-Spanish War, which lasted until the
Treaty of London in 1604.
The expedition was led by her former suitor, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Elizabeth from the start did not really back this course of action. Her strategy, to support the Dutch on the surface with an English army, while beginning secret peace talks with Spain within days of Leicester's arrival in Holland,
[116] had necessarily to be at odds with Leicester's, who wanted and was expected by the Dutch to fight an active campaign. Elizabeth on the other hand, wanted him "to avoid at all costs any decisive action with the enemy".
[117] He enraged Elizabeth by accepting the post of Governor-General from the Dutch
States-General. Elizabeth saw this as a Dutch ploy to force her to accept sovereignty over the Netherlands,
[118] which so far she had always declined. She wrote to Leicester:
We could never have imagined (had we not seen it fall out in experience) that a man raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favoured by us, above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly touches us in honour....And therefore our express pleasure and commandment is that, all delays and excuses laid apart, you do presently upon the duty of your allegiance obey and fulfill whatsoever the bearer hereof shall direct you to do in our name. Whereof fail you not, as you will answer the contrary at your utmost peril.[119]
Elizabeth's "commandment" was that her emissary read out her letters of disapproval publicly before the Dutch Council of State, Leicester having to stand nearby.
[120] This public humiliation of her "Lieutenant-General" combined with her continued talks for a separate peace with Spain,
[121] irreversibly undermined his standing among the Dutch. The military campaign was severely hampered by Elizabeth's repeated refusals to send promised funds for her starving soldiers. Her unwillingness to commit herself to the cause, Leicester's own shortcomings as a political and military leader and the faction-ridden and chaotic situation of Dutch politics were reasons for the campaign's failure.
[122] Leicester finally resigned his command in December 1587.
Spanish Armada
Meanwhile, Sir
Francis Drake had undertaken a major voyage against Spanish ports and ships to the
Caribbean in 1585 and 1586, and in 1587 had made a successful raid on
Cadiz, destroying the Spanish fleet of war ships intended for the
Enterprise of England:
[123] Philip II had decided to take the war to England at last.
[124]
Portrait of Elizabeth to commemorate the defeat of the
Spanish Armada (1588), depicted in the background. Elizabeth's hand rests on the globe, symbolising her international power.
On 12 July 1588, the
Spanish Armada, a great fleet of ships, set sail for the channel, planning to ferry a Spanish invasion force under the Duke of Parma to the coast of southeast England from the Netherlands. A combination of miscalculation,
[125] misfortune, and an attack of English
fire ships on 29 July off
Gravelines which dispersed the
Spanish ships to the northeast defeated the Armada.
[126] The Armada straggled home to Spain in shattered remnants, after disastrous losses on the coast of Ireland (after some ships had tried to struggle back to Spain via
the North Sea, and then back south past the west coast of Ireland).
[127] Unaware of the Armada's fate, English militias mustered to defend the country under the Earl of Leicester's command. He invited Elizabeth to inspect her troops at
Tilbury in
Essex on 8 August. Wearing a silver breastplate over a white velvet dress, she addressed them in
one of her most famous speeches:
[128]
My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourself to armed multitudes for fear of treachery; but I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people....I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any Prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.[129]
When no invasion came, the nation rejoiced. Elizabeth's procession to a thanksgiving service at
St Paul's Cathedral rivalled that of her coronation as a spectacle.
[127] The defeat of the armada was a potent propaganda victory, both for Elizabeth and for Protestant England. The English took their delivery as a symbol of God's favour and of the nation's inviolability under a virgin queen.
[111] However, the victory was not a turning point in the war, which continued and often favoured Spain.
[130] The Spanish still controlled the Netherlands, and the threat of invasion remained.
[124] Sir
Walter Raleigh claimed after her death that Elizabeth's caution had impeded the war against Spain:
If the late queen would have believed her men of war as she did her scribes, we had in her time beaten that great empire in pieces and made their kings of figs and oranges as in old times. But her Majesty did all by halves, and by petty invasions taught the Spaniard how to defend himself, and to see his own weakness.[131]
Though some historians have criticised Elizabeth on similar grounds,
[132] Raleigh's verdict has more often been judged unfair. Elizabeth had good reason not to place too much trust in her commanders, who once in action tended, as she put it herself, "to be transported with an haviour of vainglory".
[133]
Supporting Henry IV of France
When the Protestant
Henry IV inherited the French throne in 1589, Elizabeth sent him military support. It was her first venture into France since the retreat from Le Havre in 1563. Henry's succession was strongly contested by the
Catholic League and by Philip II, and Elizabeth feared a Spanish takeover of the channel ports. The subsequent English campaigns in France, however, were disorganised and ineffective.
[134] Lord Willoughby, largely ignoring Elizabeth's orders, roamed northern France to little effect, with an army of 4,000 men. He withdrew in disarray in December 1589, having lost half his troops. In 1591, the campaign of
John Norreys, who led 3,000 men to
Brittany, was even more of a disaster. As for all such expeditions, Elizabeth was unwilling to invest in the supplies and reinforcements requested by the commanders. Norreys left for London to plead in person for more support. In his absence, a Catholic League army almost destroyed the remains of his army at Craon, north-west France, in May 1591. In July, Elizabeth sent out another force under
Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, to help Henry IV in besieging
Rouen. The result was just as dismal. Essex accomplished nothing and returned home in January 1592. Henry abandoned the siege in April.
[135] As usual, Elizabeth lacked control over her commanders once they were abroad. "Where he is, or what he doth, or what he is to do," she wrote of Essex, "we are ignorant".
[136]
Ireland
Although Ireland was one of her two kingdoms, Elizabeth faced a hostile—and in places virtually autonomous
[137]—Irish population that adhered to Catholicism and was willing to defy her authority and plot with her enemies. Her policy there was to grant land to her courtiers and prevent the rebels from giving Spain a base from which to attack England.
[138] In the course of a series of uprisings, Crown forces pursued
scorched-earth tactics, burning the land and slaughtering man, woman and child. During a revolt in
Munster led by
Gerald FitzGerald, Earl of Desmond, in 1582, an estimated 30,000 Irish people starved to death. The poet and colonist
Edmund Spenser wrote that the victims "were brought to such wretchedness as that any stony heart would have rued the same".
[139] Elizabeth advised her commanders that the Irish, "that rude and barbarous nation", be well treated; but she showed no remorse when force and bloodshed were deemed necessary.
[140]
Between 1594 and 1603, Elizabeth faced her most severe test in Ireland during the
Nine Years War, a revolt that took place at the height of hostilities with
Spain, who backed the rebel leader,
Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone.
[141] In spring 1599, Elizabeth sent
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, to put the revolt down. To her frustration,
[142] he made little progress and returned to England in defiance of her orders. He was replaced by
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who took three years to defeat the rebels. O'Neill finally surrendered in 1603, a few days after Elizabeth's death.
[143] Soon after a peace treaty was signed between England and Spain.
Russia
Elizabeth continued to maintain the diplomatic relations with the
Tsardom of Russia originally established by her deceased brother. She often wrote to its then ruler, Tsar
Ivan IV, on amicable terms, though the Tsar was often annoyed by her focus on commerce rather than on the possibility of a military alliance. The Tsar even proposed to her once, and during his later reign, asked for a guarantee to be granted asylum in England should his rule be jeopardised. Upon Ivan's death, he was succeeded by his simple-minded son
Feodor. Unlike his father, Feodor had no enthusiasm in maintaining exclusive trading rights with England. Feodor declared his kingdom open to all foreigners, and dismissed the English ambassador
Sir Jerome Bowes, whose pomposity had been tolerated by the new Tsar's late father. Elizabeth sent a new ambassador, Dr. Giles Fletcher, to demand from the regent
Boris Godunov that he convince the Tsar to reconsider. The negotiations failed, due to Fletcher addressing Feodor with two of his titles omitted. Elizabeth continued to appeal to Feodor in half appealing, half reproachful letters. She proposed an alliance, something which she had refused to do when offered one by Feodor's father, but was turned down.
[144]
Barbary states, Ottoman Empire, Japan
Trade and diplomatic relations developed between England and the
Barbary states during the rule of Elizabeth.
[146][147] England established a trading relationship with
Morocco in opposition to Spain, selling armour, ammunition, timber, and metal in exchange for Moroccan sugar, in spite of a
Papal ban.
[148] In 1600,
Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, the principal secretary to the Moroccan ruler
Mulai Ahmad al-Mansur, visited England as an ambassador to the court of queen Elizabeth I,
[149][150] in order to negotiate an
Anglo-Moroccan alliance against Spain.
[145][151] Elizabeth "agreed to sell munitions supplies to Morocco, and she and Mulai Ahmad al-Mansur talked on and off about mounting a joint operation against the Spanish".
[152] Discussions however remained inconclusive, and both rulers died within two years of the embassy.
[153]
Diplomatic relations were also established with the
Ottoman Empire with the chartering of the
Levant Company and the dispatch of the first English ambassador to the
Porte,
William Harborne, in 1578.
[152] For the first time, a Treaty of Commerce was signed in 1580.
[154] Numerous envoys were dispatched in both directions and epistolar exchanges occurred between Elizabeth and Sultan
Murad III.
[155] In one correspondence, Murad entertained the notion that
Islam and Protestantism had "much more in common than either did with
Roman Catholicism, as both rejected the worship of idols", and argued for an alliance between England and the Ottoman Empire.
[156] To the dismay of Catholic Europe, England exported tin and lead (for cannon-casting) and ammunitions to the Ottoman Empire, and Elizabeth seriously discussed joint military operations with Murad III during the outbreak of war with Spain in 1585, as Francis Walsingham was lobbying for a direct Ottoman military involvement against the common Spanish enemy.
[157] Anglo-Turkish piracy also started to thrive during that time.
[158][159][160]
The first Englishman to reach Japan,
William Adams, was a former employee of the
Barbary Company, which had been established in 1585. He set foot in Japan in August 1600, as a pilot for the
Dutch East India Company. He would play a key role as a counselor to the Japanese
Shogun, and helped establish the first diplomatic contacts and commercial treaties between England and Japan.
