On This Day in Elizabethan History: Parliament Petitions Queen Elizabeth I

The Great Seal of Queen Elizabeth I, 1586. Picture acquired through Wikimedia Commons. Image public domain.

Just four days after a commission found Mary Stuart, former Queen of Scotland guilty of treason, Parliament petitioned Queen Elizabeth I to sign her cousin's warrant for execution. This was to prove an immensely difficult task, as Queen Elizabeth was understandably apprehensive to set a precedent by executing a fellow anointed sovereign.

Elizabethan Fact of the Day: Queen Elizabeth's Political Aptitude

Elizabeth I in her Parliament Robes, c.1585-1590. Painting formerly attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, and is on display in Helmingham Hall, Stowmarket. Picture acquired through Wikimedia Commons. Image public domain.

Today, I want to share an excerpt with my readers from the outstanding book The Armada by the late, great Garrett Mattingly. Mattingly's book details the causes and effects of the cold war with Spain, and the English navy's engagement and eventual defeat of the Spanish Armada. Mattingly has a gift for conveying the character of Queen Elizabeth amidst his chronology of the historical facts. It is apparent in reading Mattingly's work that he had a great admiration for Queen Elizabeth's political mastery, and he found several ways to describe her sensational gift for understanding and manipulating politics; one of these is below:

"Neither the shrewdest of her diplomatic adversaries nor her own intimate counselors ever succeeded in reading the mind of Elizabeth Tudor. No one can pretend to now. She was complete mistress of the politicians art of using words to conceal meaning on public questions and on personal relations she covered sheet after sheet with vigorous scrawl, winding her sentences like an intricate coil of serpents about her secret conclusions, hinting, alluding, promising, denying and at last gliding away from the subject with no more said than served her purpose. In council and in public negotiations she permitted herself at times the frankest outbursts, the most vehement outpourings of personal, apparently unrestrained, and those who knew her best were the least certain that they had netted from the torrent of her words the smallest fragment of her real intentions." (Mattingly, 27)

Elizabeth understood that knowledge of politics and wariness of intrigues was just as essential to governing as possessing a commanding stage presence and utilizing theatrics. She herself asserted this truth when she said,

"We princes were set as it were upon stages in the sight and view of the world."

Sources:

Mattingly, Garrett. The Armada. Mariner Books, 2005. Print.

 

How Queen Elizabeth I Ended Debt in England

With all the debt crisis’s going on in countries around the world, including my own, it seemed fitting to address the debt crisis in England when Elizabeth came to the throne, and how she solved the problem. Enjoy!

By a combination of remaining at peace with England’s enemies (even when tensions were high), making the most of her kingdom’s natural resources, and keeping state expenses at a minimum (for example, by choosing not to fund a standing army), Queen Elizabeth I was able to replenish the treasury that had been destroyed by the previous Tudor regimes, most notably during her sister Mary’s reign. Queen Mary had used her power to make England more or less a principality of Spain, and had depleted its treasury for Philip and his military whims. Her own subjects had protested against her for her choice of husband, and the country’s coffers paid dearly for her mistake.

The marriage portrait of Mary I of England and Phillip II of Spain. Picture acquired through Wikimedia Commons Image public domain.

Elizabethan Crown from 1601. Picture acquired through Wikimedia Commons Image public domain.



            By 1574, Queen Elizabeth and her financial policy had made England debt-free! The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, had addressed parliament in 1566, praising Elizabeth’s success, saying that she had “most carefully and providently delivered the kingdom from a great and weighty debt…begun four years at least before the death of Henry VIII” (quoted in Palliser, 108)
 

Elizabeth I presiding over Parliament c. 1580-1600. Picture acquired through Wikimedia Commons Image public domain.

            In the second half of her reign, Queen Elizabeth borrowed less than half as much money as she had been forced out of necessity to do in the first. Taxes, loans, and selling property and monopolies, helped her to replenish her countries finances. While the selling of monopolies (such as a monopoly over wine imports, for example) was not always popular (because sometimes the subjects who gained the monopoly were seen as unworthy, like the Earl of Essex) Elizabeth’s practices worked, and in the case of Essex and others, when she saw her error she revoked the privilege.

Elizabethan Crown from 1602. Picture acquired through Wikimedia Commons Image public domain.



            Queen Elizabeth’s solving of the debt crisis in England is just one of the many jewels in her crown of achievement. 

Sources:

 

Palliser, D.M. The Age of Elizabeth: England Under the Later Tudor's. Print.