Great Tales from English History - Volume 2 by Robert Lacey

Author:Robert Lacey
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780316090391
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-11-29T10:00:00+00:00

ELIZABETH - QUEEN OF HEARTS

1559

ELIZABETH I WAS CROWNED IN WESTMINSTER Abbey on 15 January 1559 — a date selected by her astrologer, Dr John Dee. Cheering crowds had lined the route as she set off from the City of London the previous day, and the red-haired Queen had time for everyone, holding hands, cracking jokes and watching with rapt attention the loyal pageants staged in her honour. When the figure of Truth approached her, carrying a Bible, the twenty-five-year-old monarch kissed the holy book fervently and clasped it to her breast.

Flamboyant and theatrical, Elizabeth was very much her father’s daughter — with the dash and temper (as well as the piercing dark eyes) of her mother Anne Boleyn. Tudor to the core, she was spiky, vain and bloody-minded, with the distrustfulness of her grandfather Henry VII whose penny-pinching she also matched. At the receiving end of arbitrary power during her youth, she had lived with rejection and danger and survived to boast about it.’I thank God,’ she told her Members of Parliament a few years after she came to power, that I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the Realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.’

On the first day of her reign, the new Queen selected as her principal adviser William Cecil, her efficient estate manager whom she liked to call her‘spirit’. In fact, this hardworking servant of the Crown was anything but airy-fairy — Cecil provided ballast to the royal flightiness. At nine o’clock on the dot, three mornings a week, the dry little secretary summoned the Council to plough through the detail of administration. One early reform was to call in the much-debased‘pink’ silver pennies for re-minting: within two years the coinage was so well re-established that the government actually made a profit. Her reign also saw the creation of England’s first stock exchange. And to build up the nation’s shipping capacity — as well as its seafarers — it became compulsory in Elizabeth’s England to eat fish on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

But it was religion that was the priority after the trauma of Mary’s excesses. Traditionally minded, like her father, Elizabeth favoured beautiful vestments, crucifixes and candlesticks, insisting there should be ceremony at the heart of Sunday worship. Also like her father, she disliked the new fangled Protestant notion of allowing the clergy to marry, and made clear her disapproval of their wives. England’s Catholics were also reassured when she declined to reclaim her father’s title as Supreme Head of the Church. It was a subtle distinction, but she settled for Supreme Governor.

For their part, Protestants were pleased to see the powerful rhythms of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer restored, and hear again William Tyndale’s robust English ringing out when the gospel was read. Elizabeth offered both sides a compromise, and she promised no trouble to those who would live and let live — she did not wish to make, in Francis Bacon’s words,‘windows into men’s souls’.

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