The Elizabethan World

Susan Doran, Norman Jones, Susan Doran, Norman Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317565789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated collection of essays conveys a vivid picture of a fascinating and hugely significant period in history. Featuring contributions from thirty-eight international scholars, the book takes a thematic approach to a period which saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the explorations of Francis Drake and Walter Ralegh, the establishment of the Protestant Church, the flourishing of commercial theatre and the works of Edmund Spencer, Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare.

Encompassing social, political, cultural, religious and economic history, and crossing several disciplines, The Elizabethan World depicts a time of transformation, and a world order in transition. Topics covered include central and local government; political ideas; censorship and propaganda; parliament, the Protestant Church, the Catholic community; social hierarchies; women; the family and household; popular culture, commerce and consumption; urban and rural economies; theatre; art; architecture; intellectual developments; exploration and imperialism; Ireland, and the Elizabethan wars. The volume conveys a vivid picture of how politics, religion, popular culture, the world of work and social practices fit together in an exciting world of change, and will be invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the Elizabethan period.

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

Susan Doran and Norman Jones

The idea of a book on the ‘Elizabethan World’ may seem to give an undue importance to England in the second half of the sixteenth century. Certainly, other volumes in this series have a better claim to use the all-encompassing term ‘world’. Even Andrew Pettegree’s The Reformation World or Beat Kümin’s The European World, 1500–1800 incorporate an entire continent, not to mention its overseas empires. England from 1558 until 1603, however, was just a kingdom, within a relatively small archipelago off Continental Europe; it had no permanent colonies, was limited in its military manpower and consequently exercised far less power and influence on the Continent than either Valois France or Habsburg Spain. So why the ‘Elizabethan World’?

Elizabethan England occupies an unusual and important historical space in the world. In all of the ‘Anglo zone’ – those global places where English is spoken and written – Elizabethan history and culture have long enjoyed a mythic status. The ‘Golden Age of English Literature’ is securely, if not entirely accurately, located in the Elizabethan period, as it was a time when the commercial theatre flourished, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney produced their poetic masterpieces and William Shakespeare was in full creative bloom. The Church of England traces its roots back to the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement of the Church, reveres John Jewel and Richard Hooker as its founders, and sees the Elizabethan ‘middle way’ as a crucial element in the Anglican identity. The Elizabethan period also marks the foundation of the early British Empire owing to Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe and Walter Ralegh’s sponsorship of the early colonisation of Roanoke (renamed Virginia in Elizabeth’s honour). The events and people of the time are some of the most colourful and best known in British history; the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 provides one of its most famous victories and seems to mark England’s emergence as a naval power; Elizabeth I is perhaps the best known of its monarchs; and who hasn’t heard of William Shakespeare? While Hollywood has obviously contributed to the period’s fame in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the people and events in Elizabeth’s reign appeared much earlier as subjects of novels by Sir Walter Scott, a play by Friedrich Schiller, operas by Rossini and Donizetti and a significant number of Victorian paintings and children’s books.

In this volume, we have decided to deal with the issue of the ‘world’ in three ways. First, we have invited historians to recapture aspects of the ‘worldview’ of Elizabethans by looking at such matters as political ideas, popular culture, economic preoccupations and the nature of local communities. Second, we have asked some of our contributors to consider how Elizabethans interacted with the outside world and understood England’s place in it. Third, we have commissioned essays that confront, and sometimes challenge, the myths relating to the importance of the Elizabethan period in the history of the English-speaking world. Given that the book is built around the reign of Elizabeth I, we have also included essays on the Queen herself, the political environment within which she worked and the nature of governance during her period of rule.

Histories of the Elizabethan era written before the late twentieth century tended to focus on the Queen herself, high politics, political institutions, foreign policy and religion. Scholars of the 1920s, 1930s and mid-century decades, tempered in the fights with Fascism and Communism, sought to understand the creation of the political institutions that shaped the freedoms being defended against modern ‘isms’. Sir John Neale’s histories of parliament, for example, teased out the origins of the modern parliamentary system dominated by the House of Commons, though in doing so ignored the power and importance of the Elizabethan aristocracy and clergy. Important political biographies included Neale’s popular 1934 biography of the Queen, which portrayed her as a master politician, and Conyers Read’s volumes on Sir Francis Walsingham and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, all of which remain unsurpassed in their archival mastery. By the third quarter of the twentieth century, however, the historiography began to move away from biographies, towards studies that contextualised high politics within state and local institutions. Wallace MacCaffrey wrote beautifully detailed books on the Elizabethan regime and the Queen herself. Penry Williams studied the structures of government, having earlier breathed life into the Council of Wales. Sir Geoffrey Elton concentrated on the actual functioning of state institutions, writing on Elizabethan parliaments and challenging the earlier interpretations of Sir John Neale. R. B. Wernham investigated the making of Elizabethan foreign policy, using the Armada crisis as the fixed star around which his work turned. However, approaches to the politics of Elizabeth’s reign have changed greatly in more recent decades. For one thing, historians are as much (if not more) interested in political ideas and culture as in political events and institutions. They have also extended their interests to embrace, far more than did their predecessors, the cultural ideas and values about the economy and society in general. This trend will be evident in many of the essays here.

As far as Elizabethan religious history was concerned, debates over recusancy, puritanism and the birth and nature of the Anglican tradition of worship were raging in the nineteenth century as emancipated Catholics, High Church, Low Church and Dissenting scholars fought to establish the legitimacy of their denominational positions. Despite doing us the service of publishing great source collections, these men used history to defend their own denominational identities and theological propriety. They consequently constructed religious pigeonholes which led, as Christopher Haigh once remarked, to debates among historians about how many puritans can fit into a minibus. These denominationally biased histories practically ignored the broad middle ground of opinion and practice – all those men and women who conformed quietly to the law and became Elizabethan Protestants of some sort. ‘Prayer Book Protestants’ had to wait until the late twentieth century to find scholars who would represent them.

The denominational pigeonholes began to fall apart after 1980 as scholars such as Patrick Collinson, Christopher Haigh and Judith Maltby started to ask new sorts of questions about how religion was lived rather than attempting to count pious noses. The realisation that the English Reformation should be seen as ‘Reformations’, rather than a linear progression towards triumphant Protestantism, also opened up new questions about Elizabethan religion, emphasising the process of reform and its cultural results rather than religion per se. As Peter Kaufman points out in this volume, there were many fashions of godliness, many of them lumped together as ‘puritanism’, but varying widely in their sentiments, their ecclesiology, and their social impact. Strikingly, a search in the Royal Historical Society’s bibliography for works published after 2000 that include the word ‘puritan’ in their titles produces only four hits. A search for titles including the terms ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ produces hundreds of hits. And once culture was introduced, the great majority of people who simply conformed became a legitimate subject of study. Prayer-book worship is now seen as a major new cultural form. Simultaneously as the interest in puritans, those putative heralds of the Civil War and American values, declined, the religious culture of Elizabethan Catholics has become a very active field of research.

The social history of the era was, until the later twentieth century, more about Dogberry and his funny fellows than about serious social scientific understanding. F. W. Emmison, for instance, edited record collections that gave us anecdotal materials for social history, without providing thorough contextual analyses. The quality of the prose written by A. L. Rowse has kept his social/cultural history of Elizabeth’s reign in print, but, once again, it is anecdotal rather than analytical. The revolution in social history set off by scholars such as Keith Wrightson, David Levine and Margaret Spufford, as well as the Cambridge Population Group, has changed the foci of research to local communities and the building of large data sets that allowed patterns to be seen across la longue durée.

Overall then, a number of new questions and methods has widened the study of the Elizabethan world. Broadly expressed, our understanding of it is now firmly located in cultural history rather than in the history of events. Recently, scholars have been much more interested in the ways that events can be situated in value systems than in detailing the actual events themselves. Indeed, only now is it appropriate to talk of an Elizabethan ‘world’ as only now is an understanding of the worldview of Elizabethans high up the agenda of scholars. These kinds of approaches, as can be seen in this volume, borrow from anthropology, sociology, literary theory, gender studies, political theory, religious studies and other fields for insights into the sources. For instance, feminist questions about Elizabeth’s place as a female monarch in a patriarchal culture have led to fruitful explorations that have resulted in new readings of the evidence. Placing religion into political culture has led to the discovery of the ‘monarchical republic’ of Elizabethan England, a world run by men whose reading of Roman history encouraged a new understanding of the English state. This interest in cultural expression has refreshed the study of Elizabethan popular culture and social history. Both areas are now being studied in their own right but also are now tied to more elite culture.

The elite culture of Tudor England is also benefiting from a fresh look. For a long time, the Latinate, pan-European education and outlook of educated Elizabethans were overshadowed by scholarly interest in vernacular culture. However, as the cultural turn has taken hold, it has become more and more difficult to ignore the fact that educated Elizabethans were reading the classics and the Latin works of their Continental colleagues. It came as a revelation to us, as editors, to see that it was necessary to reach into the rising generation of scholars to find a person, Freyja Cox Jensen, who could understand this Latinate culture. Perhaps the universities and the neo-Latin authors are now to receive the attention they deserve.

The trend in political history therefore is away from the study of governmental structures and toward the exercise of government. The debates over monarchical republicanism were stimulated in part by the study of local units of administration. However, these same local studies are bumping up against the historical neglect of the administrative activities of the Crown. In the post-Eltonian world, major institutions of the central government have been neglected. A full study of the Elizabethan Privy Council is in progress, but still a long way from completion. Studies of the court have tended to be cultural, rather than administrative. The governmental role of the aristocracy is in need of further work. If the mid-twentieth century ignored them because of its Marxist/liberal assumptions about the uselessness of nobles, the current age likes their culture but neglects their power. So, although the study of the Elizabethan age is vibrant, there is still much to do. Furthermore, many issues are contested. In this volume, for example, David Dean disagrees with Natalie Mears about the ways in which parliament was used by privy councillors, and there are also disagreements over the ways in which gender influenced behaviour in Elizabethan court and culture, with Natalie Mears and Susan Doran finding gender less important in understanding Elizabethan politics than does Anne McLaren.

Debates over the role of gender and counsel return us to the person whose name denotes all we are talking about, Elizabeth. Because we recognise that readers need to have some background and framework for the remaining chapters in the volume, the rest of this introduction provides a short biography of the Queen and a broad outline of the key political events of her reign. Historians have traditionally divided the reign into roughly three periods: 1558–69, 1569–85 and 1585–1603. Although these are artificial and far from satisfactory, the compartments prove useful for providing a guide to the nature and composition of the government and the political preoccupations of the Privy Council and social elite during a long reign.

ELIZABETH’S EARLY LIFE

Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533, the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife Anne Boleyn. During the first two and a half years of her life, she was heir presumptive to the throne, taking precedence over her half-sister Mary, who had been excluded from the succession in 1533 when Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon was pronounced invalid. However, after Anne was executed in 1536, Elizabeth too was bastardised by the Church and debarred from the succession by Act of Parliament. For the remainder of her father’s life, she lived in one or other of the minor royal palaces situated in the county of Hertfordshire, and on the whole her visits to court were rare and brief. The one important exception was in June 1544 when Elizabeth, together with Mary and their younger half-brother Edward (born in 1537) joined the household of Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth and last wife, while the King was fighting in France. By this time, Elizabeth’s royal status was acknowledged, for the parliament of 1543–4 had restored her to the succession, third in line behind Edward and Mary if both died without issue, even though the taint of her bastardy was not removed.

Elizabeth’s early education seems to have been in French and Italian carried out by members of her household, notably Katherine Champernowne (subsequently Astley). Once she was restored to the succession, new tutors were appointed: William Grindal, a classical scholar, who was part of the evangelical, humanist circle based at Saint John’s College, Cambridge, and Jean Belmaine, who taught her handwriting as well as French. It is probable that Elizabeth’s famed studies in Latin and Greek began at this time when she was ten or eleven years old. Over the next few years, Elizabeth produced three works of translation that have survived: an English version of Marguerite d’Angoulême’s, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse entitled ‘Glasse of the synnefull soule’; a French translation of Erasmus’ Dialogus Fidei; and a French, Italian and Latin translation of Katherine Parr’s ‘Prayers and Meditations’. All these works show that in her adolescent years Elizabeth was exposed to the Christian humanist spiritual writings favoured by the religious evangelicals in Katherine Parr’s household.

On Henry VIII’s death, Elizabeth and her half-sister became major landowners, each inheriting manors that were worth about £3,000 a year. Mary (now in her thirties) at once set up her own independent household, but the thirteen-year-old Elizabeth was based until May 1548 in the household of her stepmother and Lord Thomas Seymour, Katherine’s new husband. Then, in early 1549, Elizabeth was suddenly placed under house arrest. Seymour (by then a widower) had attempted a coup, and the subsequent investigations revealed his plan to marry Elizabeth without first securing the consent of Edward VI’s Privy Council, a plot that amounted to treason. Under interrogation, the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth remained remarkably self-possessed, with the result that she was cleared of involvement in Seymour’s marital ambitions. Nonetheless, her reputation was tarnished by her servants’ revelations that she and Seymour had engaged in inappropriate flirtatious behaviour while they both lived in the same house and he was still married to Katherine. Elizabeth had to work hard on her image to repair the damage.

It was duri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Governing Elizabethan England
• 3 The Queen
• 4 The Council
• 5 Familia reginae: the Privy Court
• 6 Political ideas: two concepts of the State
• 7 Parliament
• 8 Centre and localities
• 9 Parish government
• 10 Censorship and propaganda
• 11 Ireland: security and conquest
• 12 New wine into old bottles: the doctrine and structure of the Elizabethan church
• 13 Parish religion
• 14 The godly, godlier and godliest in Elizabethan England
• 15 The Catholic community
• 16 Social hierarchies
• 17 Nobility and gentry
• 18 Poverty and the poor laws
• 19 Tudor troubles: problems of youth in Elizabethan England
• 20 Women
• 21 Family and household
• 22 Rebellion and disorder
• 23 Commonwealth discourse and economic thought: the morality of exchange
• 24 Commerce and consumption
• 25 Urban economies
• 26 Rural economies under stress: ‘A world so altered’
• 27 Who killed Robin Hood? Transformations in popular culture
• 28 Witchcraft and the Devil
• 29 News
• 30 Intellectual developments
• 31 Theatre
• 32 Poetry
• 33 The visual arts
• 34 Architecture
• 35 England and Europe, 1558–85
• 36 The Catholic threat and the military response
• 37 Exploration, trade and empire
• 38 Awareness and experiences of the outside world
• Index