Elizabeth I's reign was remembered as much or more for what it did not contain as for what it did. It did not contain a successful invasion of England by foreign enemies in support of Catholicism (far more likely than later generations would remember). It did not contain the type of internal religious wars or, at the least, extreme and bloody religious persecution experienced almost everywhere else in Europe during her reign, and which would lead England itself to Civil War only 40 years later, under other, less agile, monarchs. It did not end with the assassination or overthrow of the monarch by conspiracies organized by France, Spain, Mary of Scotland, and/or the Pope. It did not reveal yet another example of the disastrous rule of women like Mary I and Mary, Queen of Scots; the one unable to function without male direction, the other unable to resist romantic entanglements, both based on spectacular bad judgment of men and politics. It did not contain endless uprisings in which the turbulent Tudor nobles raised personal armies and marched against or deposed the current king, or the types of disastrous internal power plays which had destroyed the chief ministers of her young brother, Edward. It did not require a foreign king or a jumped-up English noble as king of England to provide firm and secure rule in a brutally warlike age.

Yet none of the 45 years of the reign was free from the danger of some or (at times) all of these disasters. Some biographies of Elizabeth paint her reign as one long, mostly tranquil sea voyage, the initial dangers of her youth overcome, and a happy ending (crowned by Shakespeare) ending in the thrilling colonization of a New World. In reality, Elizabeth's reign was one long turbulence more or less effectively controlled by one strong-willed, controlling, difficult woman who never for one moment appears to have relaxed her guard against any or all of the difficulties she must have cooly analyzed at her succession. The famous "Ditchley portrait" - perhaps the most recognizable portrait of the great Queen - shows her standing upon a map of her realm and Europe, triumphant and serene. But for the happy conjunction of the times and the woman, the story could have ended far otherwise.

Visscher's magnificent panorama of a revitalized London, 1616.
Medieval St. Paul's Cathedral is upper center; Shakespeare's "Globe" theatre
is the second round building, center foreground.

The memory of Elizabeth's reign is inextricably linked with the works of William Shakespeare, only the most marvelous of an extraordinary flowering of learning, literature, and culture which includes the magnificent poetry of Marlowe, Sidney, and Spencer, the polymath learning of a Ralegh or Sir Francis Bacon, the stirrings of science, the exploration of new worlds, the explosion of a vitalized and exuberant architecture. The hard-won peace and stability of the reign was one of many factors leading to this mini-Renaissance, and for that, Elizabeth is rightly praised. She was raised in the great traditions of a Renaissance prince, patron of arts and artists. Decades of internal stability helped create a new sense of possibilities, that turbulence between a dying and new order that helped inspire Spencer in his ode to his Eliza. They would not have existed without her England; she would not have been glorified without them.

Yet often she was penurious and hated spending on foreign wars; as a result, most of her subjects lived two slow generations and more in peace and increasing prosperity. The great religious compromise of 1559, while it displeased radicals on both sides, gave the mass of English churchgoers a stable, national faith in place of the wild swings of earlier reigns. Her instinctive understanding of a spectacular, prideful monarchy accessible to the people was a gift singularly lacking in her successors, the Stuarts. Pride in themselves, and in their independence from hostile Europe, cemented all ranks of her people over the slow decades of peace. Even though that peace faltered towards the end, it was foreign war, not civil war, that her people suffered.

One feature of Elizabeth's intelligent grasp of possibilities was her judgment of men and their motives. Both her half-sister, Mary I, and Mary, Queen of Scots, suffered from terrible judgment of the men around them. Much of Elizabeth's glory came from the painstaking statesmanship of a Cecil, the mania for security of a Walsingham, the contributions of all the men who made up her Council over long decades. But it was Elizabeth's finger which, crooked, brought their influence to court and her shrewdness in judging their talents which helped to make them, and her, succeed.

Elizabeth had many weaknesses, some of them serious in a monarch. She was intellectually arrogant; often right, she was grudging when she was wrong. Her temper as she aged became uncertain, although to the end she could charm anyone she chose. She was excessively vain and increasingly domineering. Her political judgments were shrewd but her mind was inflexible and had difficulty grappling with new concepts in statecraft. Perhaps most significantly, she believed absolutely in the divine nature of kingship, although she was generous in granting access to her subjects. As long as she lived, it was the prince's right to rule the people and the people should be grateful for such care. Under Elizabeth, there would be no real changes, no moves to parliamentary democracy. Her turbulent youth had left her too fond of the stability she knew.

The final irony may be that, when she died, perhaps no one recalled how unlikely it had seemed on her accession that a "weak and feeble woman" could rule a nation alone.

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Sources:

Quotations from The Faerie Queene from the online text, Renascence Editions. Portion of Visscher's magnificent panorama of London, original 1616, variant 1625, from "Londinium Florentissima Britanniae Urbs."