A State Built on Wool

WELSH ANNEXATION AND SCOTTISH

RESISTANCE

Under pressure from certain barons, chief among them the energetic and unbending Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, however, Henry died and another lengthy reign began, of a very different stamp, under his son Edward I. He was first to take over the title of Prince of Wales for his eldest son.

A heavy reverse came with the French invasion of Edward's duchy of Aquitaine in 1294. The costs of war in France meant a severe extra tax burden for the English people. Edward also strove to promote a union of England and Scotland through the marriage of his son and the girl heir to the Scottish crown; when she died in 1290, he set out to impose himself as overlord of the Scottish realm, with considerable success until the Scots found a leader in William Wallace, and after Wallace's capture and execution in London, the guerrilla-style campaigns of Robert Bruce gradually won the country back. It was on yet another expedition to subdue the Scots that Edward died in 1307.

The reverse of the Great Seal of Edward I

AN EMERGING PARLIAMENT

The emergence of the parliament of England as a power in the land is generally traced back to Edward's reign. The enormous cost of his war campaigns, and the need to justify them to the taxpayers, made him call numerous parliaments, with representatives from shires and boroughs to supplement the lords. He was not the first to call a parliament; it grew out of the Great Council from 1265, when Simon de Montfort was first to call on the chief towns each to send two representatives in addition to two knights from each shire. This was because de Montfort could rely on towns for support, and for a long time to come parliament was in effect a tool of the king, or the king's government, summoned when it was needed, expected to assent to requests for funds and taxes, and dissolved when its assent was given.

The lords, the church, the towns – these were the three estates which combined to form parliament, for the reason that they controlled the country's wealth. From the lords and the church also came the members of the king's immediate Council and the royal household. The king's Council was the origin of what would later be the House of Lords. Under the feudal system, a lordship was not a hereditary benefit, but reverted to the king on the holder's death; by the fourteenth century it was becoming more common for an eldest son to inherit an earldom or baronage, just as it was by now accepted that the eldest son of the king should succeed to the throne. But in England, unlike the countries of Europe, the concept and social distinctions of 'nobility' did not apply to the children of a lord, but only to the lord himself. By the time of Edward I's death, the country knights and the town burgesses were already identified as the 'Community', whose interests were not necessarily identical to those of lords and church. In the reign of Edward II, which afforded plenty of opportunity for discontent and concern for the national welfare, they formed the custom of meeting together during the course of a parliament, to discuss their own concerns. By the middle of the fourteenth century this gathering had become sufficiently formal to have its own clerk to record proceedings and its 'speaker' to report its views and present its claims to the full parliament. In this way, without formal statute or charter, the House of Commons began its emergence as a separate if still junior chamber to the House of Lords.

FRIENDS, FAVOURITES – AND MURDER

In 1322, with a new and stronger right- hand man, Hugh Despenser, Edward reasserted royal control over a country which was slipping into baronial anarchy, but Scottish raids, a French invasion of Gascony, and the barons' resentment against Despenser's personal empire-building, wrecked everything. His queen, Isabella, sister of the King of France, went to Paris to negotiate a peace, but once there; she stayed, and became the mistress of Roger Mortimer, an exiled magnate of the Welsh marches and bitter opponent of Despenser. Isabella and Mortimer landed in England with an army of Dutch mercenaries in 1326 and Edward II, deserted by everyone, became their prisoner. He was compelled to abdicate in favour of his fourteen-year-old son Edward HI, and in 1327 he was murdered in Berkeley Castle.

For three years, Roger Mortimer, his status confirmed as Earl of March, was the de facto ruler of England. He acquired vast estates in the Marches and south Wales, made inglorious peace treaties with Scotland and France and for a time held off opposition until in 1330 the eighteen-year-old king finally shook off his mother's control and with the aid of the Earl of Lancaster arrested Mortimer and had him hanged at Tyburn like a common thief.

EDWARD III: A MILITARY KING

Edward III was determined to be a military king who would restore the Plantagenet prestige and fortunes. Scotland was to be subjugated as a vassal state; Gascony was to be reclaimed – and, as grandson of King Philip the Fair of France, he aspired to the French throne. Allied to the Netherlands and the Austro-German 'Holy Roman Empire', he embarked on the war with France which would continue, with intermissions, as the 'Hundred Years War', and which, despite some famous English victories, would end in the complete eradication of English rule in France with the

The Great Seal of Edward III

sole exception of the town of Calais, and would in turn precipitate the internal upheavals of the ‘Wars of the Roses’.

THE BLACK DEATH

But from 1348, for a time the true ruler not only of England but of all Britain and Western Europe was a bacillus, later known as Pasteurella pestis, spread by the flea-infested black rat. The interwoven diseases caused by this tiny organism, bubonic plague, pneumonic plague and septicaemic plague, collectively known as the Black Death, advanced inexorably across the country from ports on the south coast during the summer of that year. Its cause undetectable, its symptoms untreatable, it was the greatest natural disaster ever to befall England/ The human tolls of floods, storms and wars were far less than the death-count of this silent and irresistible invasion. Town and country were equally at risk. In London, with some seventy thousand inhabitants, around a third of the population perished; and this was probably the case with the rest of the country. In a population generally supposed to be around four million persons in 1348, something like 1.300.000 perished by 1350. A second outbreak, in 1361, decimated, or more than decimated, the reduced population, and there would be four lesser epidemics before the end of the century.

Our modern view of the fourteenth century as a time of universal, if often naive religious belief, might presuppose a collapse of national morale in the face of what could only be considered a divinely ordained catastrophe. But there is little evidence of this, and, on the contrary, the resilience of European communities in the face of the Black Death was as strong as it was in both earlier and later disasters on a less vast scale. Perhaps the main victim of popular opinion was the church, which, as intermediary between the people and God, had totally failed to predict or prevent the onset of God's wrath. During the plague outbreaks, many people sought protection in the remedies of quack doctors or country superstition rather than in prayer. The church itself lost a high proportion, between a third and a half, of its priests. In his history of these events, The Black Death, Philip Ziegler notes that: 'The villagers observed with interest that the parish priest was just as likely, indeed more likely, to die of the plague than his parishioners'. As with a tidal wave or volcanic eruption, those who survived were more likely to congratulate themselves and dedicate themselves to the business of living (and procreation) than to spend time in considering the spiritual implications of what had happened.

THE CHANGING FACE OF ENGLAND

Historians are agreed that the estimated four million of 1348 constituted 'overpopulation' in the sense that the working population was greater than required for the available amount of work, as generated by the economic and social system. There was surplus labour available, wages fell, and there was privation and hunger where too-large family groups had use of too-small plots of land within the manor. The consequence of the plague was to reverse this situation. Many manors were untenanted, fields were left to revert to wilderness, and the wages of rural workers rose sharply as they found their services in demand, while agricultural prices fell and the cost of manufactured articles rose sharply. Larger estates were often rented off in small units. Struggling to oppose a sense of universal social upheaval, government with its limited resources found it impossible to cope; a cloth industry arose in many parts of the country, from Westmorland to Somerset, and from Yorkshire to the Cotswolds. The interdependence of weaver and sheep farmer did much to develop the internal economy and to foster a sense of national cohesion. A class of middlemen and wholesalers managed the trade, so that the activities of small farmers and cottage-based weavers culminated in a substantial industry which not only catered for the home market but quickly became a large export trade, which in turn benefited the seaports and the shipbuilding industry.

CHAUCER’S ENGLAND

This was the age of Chaucer's England – the first era in which we gain a picture of English life written in the English language. Geoffrey Chaucer, London wine merchant, member of parliament, royal diplomat, for even his own generation above all a poet – 'first finder of our fair language', said his younger contemporary Thomas Hoccleve – was the leading light in the first great age of English literature. Among his works, The Canterbury Tales has always enjoyed the greatest popular acclaim, but this collection of verse stories and linking passages, veering from high literary modes to crude folk humour, shot through with sardonic and satirical vision, is not intended as a realistic or complete portrayal of English life.

Chaucer was a member of the 'establishment' of his time, and though he recognized many of the ills of society, from brigandage to the decline in faith and holiness of the clergy, he was not a reformer in social or religious matters.

Many events still to come would test or question that moderation and tolerance. Violence was endemic at all levels of society. Henry IV would approve of the burning of heretics. Englishmen in positions of power could be as grasping, harsh and relentless as any Italian condottiere or iron-fisted Teutonic knight. An English army could wreck and raze and commit rape and looting in a captured foreign city as readily as any other. But the roots of a more measured and self-disciplined approach went very deep. They lay above all in respect for the law and in the feeling that the law was everyone's possession. It was a remedy for those who were offended against, and a warning to those who offended. The king, as ever, was its guarantor, but if the king went beyond the law, he could be made to retract, or he could be removed.

FRANCE GAINED AND LOST

In 1413 Henry IV long suffering from ill health, died and his son became Henry V. His tavern-haunting youth as ‘Prince Наl’ was the stuff of later legend. He was a pious, militant and ambitious figure whose impatience to rule was apparent from 1410. He invaded France in 1415, pursuing his claim to the French crown. The capture of Harfleur and the lucky but decisive victory of Agincourt on 25 October 1415 heralded a chain of victories which once again brought English international prestige to a high point. As master of Normandy and most of northern France, Henry was accepted as heir by King Charles VI, and in 1420 he married Catherine of Valois, Charles's daughter.

It was clear from the beginning that Henry VI's kingship of France was not to be taken for granted. The son of Charles VI intended to become Charles VII. Until 1429, the English, in alliance with the Duke of Burgundy, maintained their hold, consolidated by the crushing defeat of a French-Scottish army at Verneuil in 1424. In 1428 the siege of Orleans, held for Charles, began. Against all apparent odds, the siege was raised by a French army led and inspired by an illiterate peasant girl, Joan of Arc. She swept on through English-occupied territory to take Reims and witness the coronation of Charles VII in its cathedral. Her failure to take Paris, her capture, her trial as a witch, and her burning at Rouen in 1431 under the auspices of Norman clerics and the English army, did not put an end to Joan's achievement or her legend. The French were firmly in the ascendant. In 1431, Henry VI was brought to Paris to be crowned, but few were impressed; warfare went on with intermittent fruitless peace negotiations. Burgundy dropped its alliance. In 1437 Henry VI was deemed to have come of age, but was to remain very much under the influence of his Beaufort relations (descendants of John of Gaunt) and a dominating French wife, Queen Margaret. The 'royal saint', in John Milton's words, who founded King's College, Cambridge, and Eton College, and preferred reading to hunting, has also been castigated by historians as the king who lost the French lands. After the battle of Castillon in 1453, England was left holding only Calais.

THE WARS OF THE ROSES

Always more of a dynastic power struggle than a real civil war, the 'Wars of the Roses' as they were later named were partly a result of the loss of the French lands, which was seen by all classes in England as a national humiliation and caused intense controversy. There were no more French campaigns, or Crusades, to divert military energy. But the seeds of these wars lay in the contested claims to the throne which had existed since 1400. Even if Henry VI had been strong enough to have the Duke of York killed, the existence of divided loyalties and the opportunities for bold men to profit from a change of ruler would still have promoted conflict. The Earl of Warwick, 'Kingmaker' to later historians, was a prime example. Having assisted Edward IV to the throne, he turned against the king when in 1469 Edward announced his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, widow of a Lancastrian stalwart, with two children, five brothers and seven sisters all eager to benefit from their sudden social elevation. The furor was so great that Edward briefly fled the country in late 1470, but returned, buttressed by Burgundian forces, and first by diplomacy, then by force of arms, retrieved his position. Warwick, having gone full circle and pledged his loyalty to Henry VI, whom he released from the Tower of London, was defeated and killed at the battle of Barnet on Easter Sunday, 1471. A further battle at Tewkesbury, in which Henry VI’s son Edward was killed, confirmed the re-establishment of Edward IV Edward had learned the lesson that Henry VI had shunned; on 24 April that year, Henry was murdered. Until his sudden death in April 1483, Edward IV reigned unchallenged. His elder son, aged thirteen, was duly proclaimed as Edward V.

Tudor England

THE HOUSE OF TUDOR

Among the Lancastrian nobility was Henry, Earl of Richmond, son of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and of Margaret Beaufort. His grandfather was a Welshman from a prominent Anglesey family, Owen Tudor, who had come to London and eventually obtained the post of wardrobe master in the household of Henry V's widow, Catherine of Valois. Later he secretly married the dowager queen, and they had two sons, whom Henry VI accepted as members of the nobility. Henry Tudor's was not the strongest of claims, but no Lancastrian had a better one. After an abortive attempt to invade England in December 1483, he landed at Milford Haven, in Wales, in 1485. In Wales his Tudor ancestry helped him to increase his army, and in the battle of Bosworth, 22 August 1485, he defeated Richard 111, who was killed. With Henry VII, the House of Tudor assumed the monarchy of England.

Provident, generous in spirit though careful with the royal funds, Henry VII did much to foster a sense of national renewal after the fractured decades that had gone before. His personal style was domestic rather than grandiose and he did not greatly impress his subjects. The rule of law was gradually reimposed on a country which had grown used to the retinues of great men fighting out their disputes, and where brigandage was rife. Gaps in the system remained; corruption and bribery of officials were still common.

The great Seal of henry VII Henry VII

Henry's eldest son, Arthur, died before him and it was his second son who succeeded, uncontested, as Henry VIII in 1509. At the start of his reign he married Catherine, daughter of the King of Aragon, the widow of his brother Arthur. Only one child of the union survived the future Queen Mary.

RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND

In the course of Henry's thirty-eight-year reign, England was to experience profound changes. In previous generations, revolutionary change had meant little more than a change of person at the very top, and a consequent redistribution of power among the magnates. The nature of the institutions of the country – the royal household, parliament, church, law – were not greatly affected by such changes. They followed their own paths of progress or decline. The nature of the kingship itself had altered little from feudal times. It took more than the abounding self-confidence, undoubted intelligence, and ruthless ambition of one man to achieve radical changes within one generation. But imperceptibly, through the later decades of the fifteenth century, there had grown a change of attitude within the educated community of Europe and of England. If a date could be assigned to it, it might be the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, after which a flood of refugee scholars and clerics streamed into western Europe, bringing in their luggage a host of manuscripts and commentaries which generated not only a revival of interest in the literature and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome but also a new wave of interest in mysticism, magic and the occult.

The Great Seal of Henry VIII Henry VIII

For a time, until the conquest of Moorish Granada in 1492, European Christendom was hemmed in by Islam to east and west. Crusades were proposed, but the papacy, by this time a territorial power as well as a religious one, was embroiled in the power politics of Italy and Europe and had lost the spiritual authority of the great medieval popes. The rediscovery of pagan Latin and Greek writers, the emergence of a challenging intellectual attitude to the church, the realisation that there was a vast unknown world to explore beyond the oceans, all combined to foster a spirit of enquiry different to what had existed before. It was centred on the individual, the man or woman who could bring knowledge and experience to bear on any question, and resolve it. England, on the north-west periphery, was not immune to this change in intellectual life.

Erasmus, the leading scholar of the Renaissance

in north-west Europe

Universities and their scholars were still an international community based on teaching in Latin. The German invention of printing with movable type in 1455 was brought to England by William Caxton in 1476. From then, reading could not be confined to the monastery or college: books could be read at home, and hidden away, if they were on forbidden topics. The English had no great monuments of antiquity to contemplate and emulate as had the Italians, the French and the Spanish; their language had evolved from a barbarian speech, not from a classical tongue; they had no line of descent to trace back to Virgil, Aristotle or Homer. But the spirit which led to the Renaissance and the Reformation empowered them just as it empowered men like Michelangelo in Italy, Erasmus in Holland, and Martin Luther in Germany.

It brought Sir Thomas More to write his Utopia, in 1516, an exploration of how classical humanist ideals, lacking divine revelation, could be reconciled with the divinely inspired but degenerate Christianity of his day In Utopia, gold was used to make chamber pots, and military glory was contemptible.

DEFENDER OF THE FAITH AND DESTROYER OF THE MONASTERIES

Henry VIII, supreme individualist, made his own pattern out of the traditional and novel elements of his world. Patron of new music, new art, new architecture, he also relished hunting and horsemanship. Far from averse to military glory, he launched several wars against France. He was at first a strenuous defender of Catholic orthodoxy and wrote a book against the teachings of Luther; the Pope rewarded him with the title 'Defender of the Faith'. His alienation from the papacy began in 1527, when he began to seek a divorce from Catherine. Thomas Cromwell, became his chief agent in procuring parliamentary support. A series of acts of parliament traces his steps to the final Act of Supremacy in 1534. More and Bishop Fisher of Canterbury were beheaded for their refusal to accept either this or the legitimacy of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, already pregnant with his second daughter, the future Elizabeth I.

In 1536 Anne Boleyn was executed and Henry married Jane Seymour, who bore "him a son and died a few days afterwards. She was succeeded by a diplomatic marriage to Anne, daughter of the Duke of Cleves in Flanders; this was a failure in all respects and was annulled in 1540. A brief marriage to Catherine Howard followed before she was executed for adultery (an activity Henry permitted only to himself), and the king's sixth wife, Catherine Parr, survived her tempestuous husband.

Despite his increasing megalomania and despotic tendencies, Henry VIII was not a tyrant. In an address to parliament in 1543, he said: 'we at no time stand so high in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, when we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic.

MARY I AND CATHOLIC RESURGENCE

Mary had never renounced her Catholicism. The half-Spanish Mary, with many friends, advisers and relatives from her mother's country, set out on a policy which was as bold as her father's but far more foolhardy. Until Mary's death, England was an instrument of Spanish foreign policy. This led directly to the loss of Calais, in the course of a Spanish-led war with France: it had been England's last small foothold on the European continent.

The Great Seal of Mary I

CONCORD AND COMPROMISE

Elizabeth, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Anne Boleyn, was very different in her own way. Her mother's family too had inclined towards religious reform. Henry VIII's will prevailed without question and though in the eyes of traditional Catholics she was a bastard and so debarred from the throne, her accession was uncontested and greeted with general relief. It was hardly to be expected that she would continue Mary's policy.

The two crucial aspects of English society. One was veneration of the idea of monarchy. Linked to this was the belief that the monarch should be free to pursue his – and, more lately, her – own course of policy. Such a course would not necessarily be accepted tamely, or by everyone. Parliament petitioned Mary against her Spanish marriage. Wyatt led an armed revolt against it. Up and down the country, Protestants quietly ignored Mary's ban, and Catholics ignored Elizabeth's wherever they were strong enough in numbers. But the principle and the practice are both generally clear. The other vital aspect was the acceptance that the law checked, and in some respects governed, the monarch. The ultimate expression of that law lay with parliament.

NO WEAK AND FEEBLE WOMAN

The reign of Elizabeth 1 shows, not quite for the first time - her grandfather Henry VII had shown the way - but in a manner which made a deep impression on the English people, how these two ideas, in combination, could result in the monarch and her counsellors on the one hand, and parliament on the other, working together in the interest of the survival and prosperity of the nation as a whole. The queen's vanity, played up to by courtiers and sycophants, her avoidance of difficult decisions, her highly successful 'Gloriana' mythology screening her failures and lackings, has led to a campaign of detraction by some modern historians. But there is every reason to consider her one of the country's most successful, as well as remarkable, monarchs, in the execution over many years of a job which was fraught from beginning to end with difficult choices, dangerous decisions and intense pressures from many conflicting quarters.

AN AGE OF DISCOVERY

An important early achievement of her government was the reform of the currency, which was completed by 1561, with all the adulterated coins called in and a new silver coinage minted. With a currency that could be trusted, business confidence among the small but economically very important and politically influential merchant class was restored. First revealed to western Europe by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the Americas were by now a source of fabulous wealth in gold, silver and delicious, exotic foodstuffs. If an Englishman could grab some of the plunder by force, then he would. The line between merchant venturers and buccaneers was often too finely drawn to be visible. The population was growing rapidly, with the most informed estimates putting the total at3.01 million in 1551, and 4.1 million in 1601: an increase of a third in two generations. But trade was also growing fast, agriculture was prosperous and becoming more commercial, towns were becoming more populous and city markets were becoming larger, more varied in their goods and commodities and more sophisticated in their forms of dealing. England was still a small country measured against France and Spain, but among the smaller countries of Europe, it was one of the most influential, especially when after 1559, it was confirmed as a Protestant state.

At this time, it maybe noted, no one in England had ever eaten, or even heard of, a potato. No one had chewed or smoked tobacco. Tea and coffee were equally unknown. Oranges were exotic rarities and tropical fruits unseen. Silk was a rare and highly expensive import, as was virtually every other high quality fabric and such luxury items as fine china and glassware. These were accessible only to the wealthiest. The country's main imports were wine, manufactured cloth, timber, pig iron and furs. Its exports were corn, wool, coarse cloth and coal. The 'balance of payments' was probably weighted slightly in favour of imports over exports. For the majority of the population, the large increase in numbers brought a steady drop in living standards. It was a young population; schooling was minimal or non-existent for the majority; and it was expected that a child would work. A larger labour market depressed wages and led to unemployment and a growing drift from the country into the towns, especially London.

MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL

One factor in population growth was immigration. In the Netherlands, the eighty-year-long struggle to free the Dutch provinces from Spanish rule had begun in 1566. In France there was fierce conflict between the Protestants, known as Huguenots, and Catholics. Refugees from these troubles began to make their way into England, and in most cases they brought skills and trades which added to the country's resources, and depleted those of their countries of origin.

Elizabethan England was thus a far from peaceful, prosperous and united country. Internal stresses and external pressures were a permanent aspect of life for the queen and her government. Such a country required a far more intensive pattern of legislation and control than ever before, and a greater prescriptiveness was noticeable in the actions of government. A new law required people to eat fish twice a week. This was not on dietary grounds but to support a growing fishing industry which in turn provided a stream of experienced seamen for the Royal Navy and for merchant shipping. Reaching out to the Newfoundland Banks, the fishing industry also provided a link with the toehold settlements in the north of the New World. In 1563 the Statute of Labourers set out the pattern of work and reward for artisans and craftsmen, enforcing seven-year apprenticeships and giving special advantages to skilled crafts. Wages were to be fixed on a local basis by the justices of the peace, with the Council ready to step in if there was serious complaint. A new Poor Law in 1563 established a uniform parish rate to provide funds for paupers.

Council brought its decisions as proposals to parliament, and parliament usually passed them as laws, in the queen's name. But the Council's activities went further. Political insecurity, and the need to exercise wide control, meant that it employed an extensive network of spies and informants. Catholics had never accepted Elizabeth's rule as legitimate and who found the Act of Supremacy intolerable.

MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS

In 1568 Mary, the deposed Queen of Scots, fled from defeat by her country's Calvinist government to seek safety in England. The Scottish queen was a Catholic, who had been compelled to abdicate in favour of her baby son, James VI. By her descent from Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII and wife of James IV of Scotland, she was Elizabeth's closest living relative. Her French relations had already proclaimed her as Queen of England when Mary 1 died. Mary was nine years younger than Elizabeth, who at thirty-five was nearing the end of her child-bearing potential. The spectre of another Catholic Queen Mary caused great alarm to Elizabeth's Council. The two women never met, and for nineteen years Mary was kept in confinement, nominally on the grounds of implication in the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley. In 1569 the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland attempted a pro-Catholic rebellion which was speedily put down, but it was the first of a number of plots which eventually would cost Mary her life. In 1570 the Pope proclaimed Elizabeth a heretic and formally deposed her. It was more than a futile gesture, as it enabled her opponents to plan legally, in their terms, for her assassination. The official reaction to this open threat to the queen was the encouragement of the anti-papal, anti-Catholic feeling that would come to run deep in the English population. In 1584-85, an Act of Parliament made any Englishman ordained priest by papal authority after 1559 to be automatically guilty of treason. A hundred and forty-six priests were executed between 1584 and 1603.

THREATS FROM ABROAD AND THREATS AT HOME

Slowly, through a series of minor crises, acts of piracy, sporadic peace negotiations, diplomatic initiatives and failures over a period of fifteen years from 1571, England and Spain moved closer to an ultimate confrontation. If Philip II's desire to eliminate Europe's strongest Protestant haven was his main driving force, the permanent irritation at England's penetration and harassment of his Spanish-Portuguese empire cannot have been far behind. Francis Drake, the most successful of the buccaneer-merchant-explorers, completed his circumnavigation of the globe between 1577 and 1580 and in an act of deliberate provocation to Spain, the queen knighted him in 1581 on the deck of his ship, the Golden Hind. London merchants' money had subsidised his voyage and it triumphantly symbolised the opening of the world to English enterprise. The killing of the Dutch leader, William the Silent, by Spanish agents in 1584, sharpened the anxiety of the English government. In May 1585, the Spanish seized all English shipping in the harbours of Spain and Portugal, and the Earl of Leicester was sent to Holland with an army to support the insurgent Dutch against their Spanish rulers. This military expedition was an ignominious failure and Leicester was recalled, though he did not lose the queen's favour. In 1587 a naval expedition under Drake destroyed the Spanish fleet at Cadiz.

Madrid's invasion plans, already well advanced, had to be put back for a year. In February 1587, in the wake of a further assassination plot against the queen, organised by Anthony Babington, a Derbyshire landowner, Mary of Scotland was beheaded. Only a muted protest came from north of the border, but the act made war with Spain inevitable, which is perhaps why Elizabeth both wished and un-wished it in a way that has always been discreditable to her own reputation.

THE LAST YEARS OF ELIZABETH

England was saved from Spanish conquest, and the struggle in the Netherlands continued, with English subsidies sent to support the Dutch rebels and the French Protestants, and small-scale military expeditions. These were sometimes repaid in kind, as when the Spanish attacked and destroyed Penzance. Warfare broke out in Ireland.

The Puritan strain of parliament reflected a strong trend in the country at large. Stimulated by the long warfare with Spain and France, which promoted an anti-Catholic spirit, encouraged by the establishment of a Calvinist church in Scotland, the English church found in many of its clergy and adherents a powerful trend to accentuate its own differences to Catholicism. Elizabeth was opposed to the Puritan trend both on religious grounds and because it represented a growing threat to her governorship of the church. The queen's management left much to be desired. Many parishes had no priest; the queen left bishoprics vacant while their revenues went to the crown; and though the Church of England contained both saintly and spiritual men, like Richard Hooker, whose writings On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity did much to spell out the philosophical basis of Anglicanism, it was administered in a thoroughly materialistic spirit by officials and clergy whose prime aim was to make money from it and resist any change which imperilled their wealth and prospects. Any attempts through parliament to change things were vetoed by the queen.