Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Elizabeth I > Status Update

‘By the later 1590s it had become a commonplace to speak of the ‘halcyon’ government of Elizabeth, but these were not halcyon years. Rather they were marked by war-weariness, high taxation, inflation, a succession of bad harvests, and recurrent plague. Real wages were at their lowest point in centuries, and there was a corresponding rise in crime and vagrancy.’

‘And yet no privy councillor was ever sacked, and offers of resignation were never accepted, Davison excepted. If the privy council was stuck with Elizabeth, Elizabeth seems to have been stuck with her privy council. She coped with a power relationship which was often troublesome and even threatening by distancing herself from the privy council, whose meetings she hardly ever attended.’

‘With Elizabeth’s accession, and for as long as she remained childless, Katherine Grey had an apparent statutory right to succeed, since Henry’s will was annexed to the Succession Act. Mary Stewart had the stronger hereditary claim. However, not only Henry’s will but the common law with respect to aliens was prejudicial to her position in the order of succession’

‘The privy council itself was reconstructed, excluding those who owed their positions to their personal ties with Mary and to their more than formal Catholicism. The result was a smaller and more effective privy council, with twenty former members dismissed (including all the clerics) and only ten new men admitted (none of them clerics). At the same time the royal household was reordered’

‘However, what made Elizabeth a particularly odd kind of protestant was her negative attitude towards preaching, which protestants regarded as the ordinary means of salvation. Her second archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, was scandalised when she told him that three or four preachers ought to be sufficient for a shire.‘

‘Lady Bryan had charge in turn of the three royal infants and was clearly devoted to their welfare. A letter she wrote to Sir Thomas Cromwell in the aftermath of Anne’s fall gives most of what little is known about Elizabeth’s infancy: she was having painful teething problems; she was short of suitable clothes, something which her mother would not have allowed to happen’