

Internal discontent

When the Armada was defeated during the first weeks of August 1588, the crisis of Elizabeth’s reign was reached and successfully passed. The last years of her reign were an anticlimax, for the moment the international danger was surmounted, domestic strife ensued. There were moments of great heroism and success—as when Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, Raleigh, and Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk, made a second descent on Cádiz in 1596, seized the city, and burned the entire West Indian treasure fleet—but the war so gloriously begun deteriorated into a costly campaign in the Netherlands and France and an endless guerrilla action in Ireland, where Philip discovered he could do to Elizabeth what she had been doing to him in the Low Countries. Even on the high seas, the days of fabulous victories were over, for the king of Spain soon learned to defend his empire and his treasure fleets. Both Drake and Hawkins died in 1596 on the same ill-conceived expedition into Spanish Caribbean waters—symbolic proof that the good old days of buccaneering were gone forever. At home the cost of almost two decades of war (£4 million) raised havoc with the queen’s finances. It forced her to sell her capital (about £800,000, or roughly one-fourth of all crown lands) and increased her dependence upon parliamentary sources of income, which rose from an annual average of £35,000 to over £112,000 a year.

The expedition to the Netherlands was not, however, the most costly component of the protracted conflict; indeed, the privateering war against Spain more than paid for itself. The really costly war of the final years of Elizabeth’s reign was in Ireland, where a major rebellion in response to the exclusion of native Catholics from government and to the exploitation of every opportunity to replace native Catholics with Protestant English planters tied down thousands of English soldiers. The rebellion was exacerbated by Spanish intervention and even by a Spanish invasion force (the element of the Armada that temporarily succeeded). This Nine Years War (1594–1603) was eventually won by the English but only with great brutality and at great expense of men and treasure.

Elizabeth’s financial difficulties were a symptom of a mounting political crisis that under her successors would destroy the entire Tudor system of government. The 1590s were years of depression—bad harvests, soaring prices, peasant unrest, high taxes, and increasing parliamentary criticism of the queen’s economic policies and political leadership. Imperceptibly, the House of Commons was becoming the instrument through which the will of the landed classes could be heard and not an obliging organ of royal control. In Tudor political theory this was a distortion of the proper function of Parliament, which was meant to beseech and petition, never to command or initiate. Three things, however, forced theory to make way for reality. First was the government’s financial dependence on the Commons, for the organ that paid the royal piper eventually demanded that it also call the governmental tune. Second, under the Tudors, Parliament had been summoned so often and forced to legislate on such crucial matters of church and state—legitimizing monarchs, breaking with Rome, proclaiming the supreme headship (governorship under Elizabeth), establishing the royal succession, and legislating in areas that no Parliament had ever dared enter before—that the Commons got into the habit of being consulted. Inevitably, a different constitutional question emerged: If Parliament is asked to give authority to the crown, can it also take away that authority? Finally, there was the growth of a vocal, politically conscious, and economically dominant gentry; the increase in the size of the House of Commons reflected the activity and importance of that class. In Henry VIII’s first Parliament, there were 74 knights who sat for 37 shires and 224 burgesses who represented the chartered boroughs and towns of the kingdom. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, borough representation had been increased by 135 seats. The Commons was replacing the Lords in importance because the social element it represented had become economically and politically more important than the nobility. Should the crown’s leadership falter, there existed by the end of the century an organization that was quite capable of seizing the political initiative, for as one disgruntled contemporary noted: “the foot taketh upon him the part of the head and commons is become a king.” Elizabeth had sense enough to avoid a showdown with the Commons, and she retreated under parliamentary attack on the issue of her prerogative rights to grant monopolies regulating and licensing the economic life of the kingdom, but on the subject of her religious settlement she refused to budge.

By the last decade of her reign, Puritanism was on the increase. During the 1570s and ’80s, “cells” had sprung up to spread God’s word and rejuvenate the land, and Puritan strength was centred in exactly that segment of society that had the economic and social means to control the realm—the gentry and merchant classes. What set a Puritan off from other Protestants was the literalness with which he held to his creed, the discipline with which he watched his soul’s health, the militancy of his faith, and the sense that he was somehow apart from the rest of corrupt humanity. This disciplined spiritual elite clashed with the queen over the purification of the church and the stamping out of the last vestiges of Roman Catholicism. The controversy went to the root of society: Was the purpose of life spiritual or political? Was the role of the church to serve God or the crown? In 1576 two brothers, Paul and Peter Wentworth, led the Puritan attack in the Commons, criticizing the queen for her refusal to allow Parliament to debate religious issues. The crisis came to a head in 1586, when Puritans called for legislation to abolish the episcopacy and the Anglican prayer book. Elizabeth ordered the bills to be withdrawn, and, when Peter Wentworth raised the issue of freedom of speech in the Commons, she answered by clapping him in the Tower of London. There was emerging in England a group of religious idealists who derived their spiritual authority from a source that stood higher than the crown and who thereby violated the concept of the organic society and endangered the very existence of the Tudor paternalistic monarchy. As early as 1573 the threat had been recognized:

At the beginning it was but a cap, a surplice, and a tippet [over which Puritans complained]; now, it is grown to bishops, archbishops, and cathedral churches, to the overthrow of the established order, and to the Queen’s authority in causes ecclesiastical.


Puritans were a loyal opposition, a church within the church. Elizabethan governments never feared that there would or could be a Puritan insurrection in the way they constantly feared that there could and would be an insurrection by papists. Perhaps 1 in 5 of the peerage, 1 in 10 of the gentry, and 1 in 50 of the population were practicing Catholics, many of them also being occasional conformists in the Anglican church to avoid the severity of the law. Absence from church made householders liable to heavy fines; associating with priests made them liable to incarceration or death. To be a priest in England was itself treasonous; in the second half of the reign, more than 300 Catholics were tortured to death, even more than the number of Protestants burned at the stake by Mary. Some priests, especially Jesuits, did indeed preach political revolution, but many others preached a dual allegiance—to the queen in all civil matters and to Rome in matters of the soul. Most laymen were willing to follow this more moderate advice, but it did not stem the persecution or alleviate the paranoia of the Elizabethan establishment.

Catholicism posed a political threat to Elizabethan England. Witches posed a cultural threat. From early in Elizabeth’s reign, concern grew that men and (more particularly) women on the margins of society were casting spells on respectable folk with whom they were in conflict. Explanations abound. Accusations seem to have often arisen when someone with wealth denied a request for personal charity to someone in need, with the excuse that the state had now taken over responsibility for institutional relief through the Poor Laws; guilt about this refusal of charity would give way to blaming the poor person who had been turned away for any ensuing misfortunes. Sometimes magisterial encouragement of witchcraft prosecutions was related to the intellectual search for the causes of natural disasters that fell short of an explanation more plausible than the casting of spells. Sometimes there was concern over the existence of “cunning men and women” with inherited knowledge based on a cosmology incompatible with the new Protestantism. This was especially the case when the cunning men and women were taking over the casting of spells and incantations that had been the province of the Catholic priest but were not the province of the Protestant minister. Certainly, the rise in incidence of witchcraft trials and executions can be taken as evidence of a society not at peace with itself. As the century ended, there was a crescendo of social unrest and controlled crowd violence. There were riots about the enclosure of common land, about the enforced movement of grain from producing regions to areas of shortage, about high taxes and low wages, and about the volatility of trade. The decades on either side of the turn of the century saw roaring inflation and the first real evidence of the very young and the very old starving to death in remote areas and in London itself. Elizabethan England ended in a rich cultural harvest and real physical misery for people at the two ends of the social scale, respectively.

The final years of Gloriana’s life were difficult both for the theory of Tudor kingship and for Elizabeth herself. She began to lose hold over the imaginations of her subjects, and she faced the only palace revolution of her reign when her favourite, the earl of Essex, sought to take her crown. There was still fight in the old queen, and Essex ended on the scaffold in 1601, but his angry demand could not be ignored:


When the queen died on March 24, 1603, it was as if the critics of her style of rule and her concept of government had been waiting patiently for her to step down. It was almost with relief that men looked forward to the problems of a new dynasty and a new century, as well as to a man, not a woman, upon the throne.

United Kingdom Flag



Official nameUnited Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Head of stateSovereign: Queen Elizabeth II
Head of governmentPrime Minister: David Cameron
Official religionSee footnote 2.
Monetary unitpound sterling (£)
Population(2014 est.) 64,518,000
Total area (sq mi)93,628
Total area (sq km)242,495
Urban-rural populationUrban: (2011) 79.6%
Rural: (2011) 20.4%
Life expectancy at birthMale: (2008–2010) 78.1 years
Female: (2008–2010) 82.1 years
Female: (2006) 99%
GNI per capita (U.S.$)(2013) 39,110
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