Queen Elizabeth I: Queen of England's Golden Age

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Ah, so hello and welcome to yet another episode of Biographics. I'm your interim host, Carl Smallwood, that's Car with a K, and Smallwood spelled the way it sounds, S-M-A-W-L-W-O-D. And today, we're talking about Queen Elizabeth I, Queen of England's Golden Age. And as with all the videos here on Biographics, this one is based on an original script submitted to us by a member of our writing team. That member of the writing team today being Ben Adelman. You can follow them at the social media links below, which are found alongside my own, as well as all those other bells and whistles YouTubers like to ask you to click. That improves analytics, like the like button, that little bell, leave a comment with feedback, suggestions, and ideas for future videos, and subscribe for more videos like this. Normally, I'd ask at the end, but I've been told by, you know, the bigwigs behind the scenes, the early in the video, I ask people to do that, the more likely those things are to happen.

During the 16th century, England, women were treated as little more than property. Yeah, things kind of suck back then, and most men, particularly powerful men, believed that women were irrational, overly emotional, and generally unfit to handle their own affairs, much less rule an entire country. There's definitely not any men out there like that. Therefore, when Elizabeth I was crowned Queen of England in 1558, few believed she had the right temperament and intelligence to handle the stresses of personally running an entire country, as monarchs in those days did. The best they could have hoped for, they said, was that she would marry a man who would rule in her name and secure the succession by having children, preferably boys, for obvious reasons.

But Elizabeth would prove all of her naysayers wrong. For over 40 years, she and her group of talented advisers would oversee what has been called England's Golden Age, or more simply, the Elizabethan Era. A time of stability and relative prosperity at a time when most of Europe was being torn apart by internal strife and war. In order to make sure no one took power from her, she refused to marry, claiming that instead, she was married to the nation. Initially causing widespread consternation amongst her many subjects, the decision would eventually endear her to the English people, who revered her as the Virgin Queen, sent down from high by God himself to defend England and the Protestant religion against the powerful forces of Catholic Europe who sought to destroy them, in particular, Spain.

The Elizabethan Age would prove to be the height of the English Renaissance, as a new appreciation for the arts, music, and particularly theater flourished during Elizabeth's reign. This is not to say that things were perfect by any means. The income inequality between rich and poor was as lop-sided as it had ever been, and Elizabeth herself suffered from numerous flaws, including vanity, jealousy, and paranoia that drove the people around her mad.

For most of the first part of her life, Elizabeth found herself at the center of all sorts of court intrigue and plots that would put her life in danger because of her proximity to the throne of England. She was born on September 7th, 1533, the daughter of the famed King Henry VII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Both parents were disappointed with her sex. She was supposed to be a boy, the long-awaited heir to the throne. That was, after all, one of the main reasons that Henry had divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. And I've already covered King Henry VII in the previous Biographics videos, which, if it's been edited and he's up on the site, will be here somewhere, linked down below. And he'd married Anne to, like, you know, try and bear him a son, breaking off from the Catholic Church in the process, a, like, you know, the results of which can still be felt to this day.

Before she turned just 3 years old, the young princess's life was feverishly altered when her mother was convicted of being an adulteress and beheaded. A scandal that most historians today view as little better than judicial murder. While Henry quickly moved on, marrying Jane Seymour and finally getting a son, Edward, Elizabeth was declared to be a bastard, since her parents' marriage had been invalidated. And even at a young age, Elizabeth was known as being quite perceptive, asking of her caretakers why they suddenly stopped calling her princess in favor of Lady Elizabeth. And it can't have been an easy childhood for Elizabeth, considering she had a dead mother and a father who was obsessed with the idea of having a male heir. Only the king's sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr, made any serious attempt to parent her. It could be argued that she raised herself, although she did have the benefit of being a child of a monarch, so she received an education that was as fine as any prince in Europe. And she quickly impressed her teachers with her intelligence. She also read extensively and had at least some fluency in eight other languages besides the King's English.

After King Henry died in 1547, Elizabeth's peril only grew. As Admiral Thomas Seymour, the new king's uncle, came up with a scheme to marry her in order to increase his own power. Whether Elizabeth wanted to marry him or not did not seem to be a consideration. And there is considerable historical evidence that Seymour engaged in, to put it lightly, and to not get demonetized, inappropriate behavior with the teenager, possibly in an attempt to groom her into allowing him to have sex with her and be an heir. His scheme thankfully fell apart in 1549. He was arrested and beheaded for treason. Elizabeth, though interrogated extensively, would admit to nothing wrong.

In 1553, after Edward died without an heir, the crown passed to Elizabeth's sister, Mary. A devout Catholic, Mary announced her intentions to return England to the papal fold, marrying Philip of Spain, another devout follower of the old religion. In 1554, what public support Mary may have had basically evaporated overnight following the marriage. And Mary made things worse by trying to force the issue, burning some 300 Protestants at the stake for heresy during her reign, earning her the nickname Bloody Mary. The hopes of the English Protestants were pinned firmly on Elizabeth, now heir to the throne, and she was accused of being a part of a number of plots to depose Mary in favor of her, despite the fact that it was unlikely she'd ever been directly involved with any of them. The paranoid Mary locked up her sister in the Tower of London, and there was a lot of talk amongst her advisers about putting Elizabeth on trial and executing her, though this never really came to fruition. Fortunately for Elizabeth, cooler heads prevailed, and thus her life was spared.

As a result, when Mary died in 1558, having borne no children, Elizabeth, at just age 25, was crowned the Queen of England. Her government faced a number of important issues, including religious matters, the crown being deeply in debt, as well as the ever-present question of who would succeed Elizabeth as monarch if something happened to her. Quite an appropriate question, given how many kings and queens have died in the last two decades. Most of the powerful men around her, including Parliament and the Privy Council, encouraged her to find a husband who, and I quote, "might relieve her of those labors which are fit only for men." In other words, a man who would rule the country in her name while she focused on the proper womanly duties of bearing children that would one day wear the crown themselves.

And this raised a number of issues, like, because who should she choose? There was no shortage of foreign princes and monarchs aspiring to marry her. At one point, there were ambassadors from a dozen different countries vying for her hand in marriage. However, as shown by the public outcry over Mary's Spanish husband, England was quite an insular, xenophobic place at the time, and many were less than enthusiastic by the idea of a foreigner ruling over them, particularly a Catholic one. So the other option was, well, marry an Englishman. And there was no shortage of those clamoring for a hand as well. And if she was going to choose any of them, it probably would have been Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. The two had been firm friends since childhood, and for most of her reign, he was her favorite courtier, insisting on him attending to her as much as possible. But Dudley faced the problem that, if Elizabeth's subjects would face if they were to marry her, rival court factions, jealous of his influence over her, scheming to undermine him at every possible turn. He was accused of all sorts of nefarious plots, including that he had his own wife murdered in order to try and marry the queen, an allegation that doggedly pursued him for centuries after his death.

There have been many reasons put forward as to why the queen never chose to marry. There's been supposition that she had a mental aversion to the very concept of marriage, and when your dad is King Henry VII, yeah, that tracks, because who wouldn't associate marriage with danger after having him for a parent? Others have said that she may have been afraid of childbirth, which was a perilous procedure in those days. Again, yeah. Others have argued that she may have been incapable of having children, or perhaps suffered from any number of gynecological issues that would make having sex too painful to contemplate or render her infertile. But the most likely reason that she refused to marry is simply that she just didn't want to give up the power she'd been entrusted with, that she believed God had bestowed upon her. She would be expected to be subservient and submissive to her husband, queen or not. And if she gave birth to her son, she could expect pressure to be put on her to abdicate in favor of him, or even that she might be forcibly deposed in favor of him.

So, I know everyone out there was finding what I was saying very, very interesting, which takes a word from today's sponsor, which means I need my business anchor. And of course, my behind-the-scenes co-hosts, Brad and Nisha, who is today's sponsor. And today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. Ah, the space of square. So, I feel like I'm a pretty old hat at this by now. So Squarespace is, is a service that lets you make websites. Well, Squarespace allows entrepreneurs to easily create and customize their own websites. It's suitable from beginners to professionals, which, you know, that covers us. We're neither beginner nor professional, we're somewhere in the middle. Beginner falls don't try and do that again. Okay, you're not, you're not Barney Stinson. But Squarespace, uh, you can use it to blog, you can engage with your audience, and you can also sell products, content, or time, or just advertise your business. Of course, yes. You might be thinking, well, I don't have a business to advertise. Well, do you have a social media platform that's advertising you? And don't you hate that the social media profile has to look the way the social media site wants it to? Wouldn't you like to go back to the Myspace days and customize it to be in tune with your personality and tell people who you really are at a glance? You can do that with Squarespace. You can even have it play music when people arrive if you really want to. So if you do want to make a website using Squarespace, you can. I can't stop looking at the snoo. No one can. That's why we have it. Brad, it's really good. It's good for audience retention. So, like, we looked at the analytics and say, 1% more people watch these spots if I'm, you know, petting my antier. I said, 30% more people are really weirded out, but it's worth it. So if you do want to use Squarespace to make a website, you can look through their vast array of templates and customize them to your liking using the tried and true method of dragging and dropping. And I love dragging and dropping. Yeah, Squarespace have made their own engine which allows you to drag and drop things wherever you want on the website. Uh, so you can even do this with the templates. You can load up a template and then move things around your heart's content. Cuz you know what? Not everyone's as creative as they think they are. Everyone needs that little bit of help. Don't know, like, oh, I like this. I'll change the color and the font and add an antier and a PNG. Ooh, what font should I pick? Comic Sans. That'll do. Well, if you like to use Comic Sans, you can, and you can use it on your website to do a variety of different things. You could set up a course and teach people. Yeah, and even charge for your time. Can you imagine? Would you trust any course from someone who picked Comic Sans? He's like, those things in like, graphic design is my passion. It's like a clip art frog. Yes. So you can create a course and you can charge for your time, whether that be a one-time fee or a subscription. Mhm. You can also blog. You can. And again, people might think, well, I don't want to blog. Do you have a social media profile that's a microblog? That is a blog, isn't it? Like, do you hate being limited to 280 characters? So basically, anything you can do with a website, you can do on Squarespace. Mhm. Including perhaps one of the most important ones for content creators, which is analytics. Analytics online are king, and the idea is to have them all at your fingertips. Is one that is incredibly useful, and more websites should make them easily available to anyone using them, and it annoys me when they don't. I need to make you a t-shirt that says "Analytics are king." They are so good. Like, you said, people love it when we talk to the antier. So thank you to today's sponsor, Squarespace. Check out Squarespace at squarespace.com/biographics for 10% off your first purchase of a website. Slain using the code biographics. And as is customary with sponsor spots here at Biographics, let's end on a bonus fact not found anywhere else in the video.

So guys, did you know there was once a man who saved himself from a volcanic explosion with pee? And crime? No, they're two very different things. So, one of the few people to survive the 1902 eruption of the appropriately named Mount Pelée, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, was a guy called Ludger Sybaris. And he was a person who'd been arrested and was in a jail cell when the volcano erupted. And he was one of the few people to have survived that eruption due to the very thick walls of the cell and a judicious application of his own pee, which he threw at the window to block out the hot ash and to cool themselves down. And there is a picture of them out there from the swamp, and they, they look metal. They got burnt, they got real burnt, they got it real bad, but they survived thanks to crying and pee.

Single or married, Elizabeth could not rule England by herself, and she assembled around her a group of advisers that were among the most talented men in England, the envy of the courts around Europe. Europe. This included William Cecil, Baron Burghley, who was a principal adviser for most of her reign, one of her closest confidants. Another important figure was Sir Francis Walsingham, who built a formidable intelligence network of spies and informants that stretched all the way across Europe, as well as serving as a key policy maker. Elizabeth's government differed from that of her father, who was known for turning on his ministers when they lost his temper. Even when she quarreled with them, the queen was unfailingly loyal to the men closest to her, and they rewarded this loyalty by serving her faithfully for decades.

Elizabeth's court, like those of most Renaissance monarchs, was expensive to upkeep. This may seem initially like a matter of simply having expensive taste. Elizabeth, for example, had a collection of some 3,000 dresses in her wardrobe and reportedly had a new pair of shoes made for her each and every week. But it was also a function of state. In an age when many common people were still illiterate, the best way to project the power and majesty of the Queen's government was to simply flaunt its resources, which included expensive clothes, jewelry, sumptuous banquets, and fabulously decorated palaces. That said, Elizabeth was as diligent an accountant as her grandfather, Henry VII, and strove to live within her means as much as possible. Her being a queen, those means were quite extravagant, but you know what we mean. She did not undertake extensive building programs like her father, and in terms of foreign policy, worked very hard to avoid England going to war, which had always been the quickest way to drain the coffers of the state.

When it came to religious policy, on the other hand, Elizabeth immediately overturned her sister's attempts to Catholicize the country, reestablishing the Church of England with herself serving as the Supreme Governor. Personally, Elizabeth favored a policy of toleration instead of forced compliance. There were no mass burnings of heretics during her rule. She also sought to check what she saw as the excesses of some of the more extreme Protestant sects, including the Puritans. One of the reasons theater plays actually thrived under Elizabeth was her overruling of Puritan attempts to have them banned for being too sinful.

However, the situation changed in 1570 when Pope Pius V issued a bull excommunicating Elizabeth and her ministers, declaring that it was the duty of any good Catholic to overthrow the heretical pretender and restore the country to the true faith. Despite the fact that most Catholics in England remained loyal to their queen, the bull provided the impetus needed for the hardline Protestants in Elizabeth's government to persecute Catholics, particularly in light of several plots undertaken in the 1570s and 80s to assassinate the queen. Most of these plots centered around Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been forced to abdicate the throne of Scotland in 1567, as she was accused of involvement with the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. Mary was the first cousin once removed of Elizabeth, giving her a pretty strong claim to the English crown, and many Catholics, both in England and abroad, viewed her as the rightful queen.

Elizabeth was nothing if not paranoid about her safety and security on the throne, so she had Mary put under house arrest for nearly two decades. Despite the urging of her ministers, she refused to execute her cousin, since royal blood was still supposed to be sacred. Chopping the head off a fellow monarch, deposed or not, was just not the done thing back then. Something her father never listened to, but hey ho. She was finally persuaded to execute her cousin in 1587 to remove her as a threat.

By this point, however, an even bigger threat was looming from outside the country, setting up a showdown between Elizabeth and the most powerful monarch in Christendom, Spain. The kings of Spain were known as the Most Catholic Majesties, and Philip II was no exception. From his palace in Madrid, Philip oversaw a huge empire that stretched around the world. The first, it's said, that the sun never set upon the vast quantities of gold and other treasure being shipped to Spain from colonies in America and Asia. Enabling Philip to build a huge army and navy, and in 1580, he added the kingdom of Portugal to his domains, adding even more territory and wealth. Philip had once been one of many suitors for Elizabeth's hand in marriage when she first became queen, though apparently he was privately relieved when she turned him down. Elizabeth was supposedly not a lover. Now, however, he believed that it was his Christian duty to return England to the Catholic faith by any means necessary, and to do it, he built a large fleet of ships known to history as the Spanish Armada.

When said Armada set sail in May 1588, his mission was to sail through the English Channel to the Spanish-controlled Netherlands, where a large army under the Duke of Parma waited to be escorted across to England. There, they would invade, depose Elizabeth, and then Philip could install a Catholic on the throne to replace her. And if Parma's army got to shore, it was unlikely that England's own forces could have done anything to stop them. The English army at this time was small, poorly trained, and very under-equipped. If England, and by extension Elizabeth, were to be saved, the Armada had to be stopped at sea. Fortunately, for decades prior, England had steadily built up her royal navy in an attempt to become a seafaring power. Now it was time to put this power to the test.

The English fleet was under the command of Admiral Lord Howard, but most tactical decisions were made by the more famous Sir Francis Drake, the foremost of England's sea dogs. Drake had circumnavigated the globe many times and was famous for attacking and plundering many Spanish treasure ships and settlements in the New World, for which he was derided as a pirate by the Spanish but lauded as a hero by the English. In order to face down the Armada, Drake and Howard relied on a recent shift in ship design and naval tactics. Specifically, up to this point, naval battles were primarily fought with large, slow ships containing lots of soldiers. The cannons on board were designed to be fired once, and then the action would shift to hand-to-hand boarding actions. English ships at this time, though, were smaller, faster, and far more maneuverable, with cannons designed to be fired repeatedly in order to sink enemy vessels before they could get close enough to board them.

After two inconclusive engagements in the English Channel, the decisive battle came off the coast of Gravelines in Flanders on August 8th. The night before, the English sent out eight fire ships, abandoned ships that had been loaded with gunpowder, sulfur, tar, and pitch, set on fire, and then set adrift to float towards the Spanish ships at anchor. In order to keep them from being set ablaze, many of the Spanish ships cut their anchor chains and scattered, breaking up the defensive formation. The next day, the English set upon the piecemeal Spanish ships, which were shredded by gunfire. The Armada was forced to sail all the way around the British Isles in order to escape the English ships and return to Spain. Many of them wrecked by storms on their way home. The men on board either drowned or killed by locals on shore.

The defeat of the Armada was a huge blow for the Spanish, with them losing almost a third of their entire naval fleet, which amounted to about 40 or 50 ships. In regards to the number of men they lost, numbers range as high as 20,000. Conversely, the English lost only about 2,500 men, largely to disease, and the only ships they lost were the ones that they deliberately set on fire and floated towards the Spanish with the intent of exploding them.

Anyway, even though much of the advantage gained by defeating the Armada was lost the very next year when Drake led a similar disastrous expedition known as the English Armada, the event was still seen as a triumph for Elizabeth and England as a whole. For the English, it was a sign of God's divine favor, and that the queen had defended their country and their faith from a would-be invader. The war between Spain and England would rage until 1604.

Within England, Elizabeth now had almost divine status in the minds of the common people. She had always been popular with the people, but now she was an otherworldly presence, a cult of personality around her that had been compared to the Virgin Mary, which made sense considering she was also known as the Virgin Queen. Now, if anyone's curious about how accurate that title was, many have speculated on whether or not she actually was a virgin as she claimed, or did she have any secret liaisons with many of the handsome male courtiers that she gathered around her? And the answer, according to historians at least, is that she probably didn't let anyone into her bed and thus died a virgin. She knew better than anyone else that the risks to her reputation were too great for such frivolous encounters. She had to serve England, of course. Besides, considering that like most monarchs of the period, Elizabeth was never really truly alone and constantly attended by servants and courtiers. And if she had engaged in an affair with anyone, people would have found out about it sooner or later and left records of it. That was just the done thing.

Elizabeth's reign is viewed as a Golden Age in English history. At a time when the rest of Europe was being torn apart by wars of religion, Elizabeth gave her people over four decades of stable government and economic prosperity, a welcome change from the erratic reigns of her father and her siblings. The arts, especially theater, thrived during this period. Elizabeth personally sponsoring her own troop of actors, the Queen's Players, and among the playwrights who performed for her was the Bard himself, William Shakespeare.

Things weren't always great, however. The economic prosperity didn't extend to many of the country's poorest citizens, who were always the hardest hit during poor harvests or times of plague. In the past, these poor unfortunate souls would have been helped by the many religious houses, the monasteries and such, but those had been dissolved in the 1530s by Elizabeth's father, and now many of the poor filled the streets of cities like London, literally starving to death in the gutter, which, yeah, not great.

And speaking of which, meanwhile, Elizabeth wasn't exactly the greatest monarch to work for, and she had a fearsome, infamous temper that rivaled that of her own father and was prone to insulting and belittling even her closest advisors. When a knight, though, she famously died a virgin. Elizabeth took to surrounding herself with young courtiers who expected to flirt with her and tell her she was the most beautiful woman in all of England, even as she tried to hide the signs of advancing age by donning wigs and caking her face in increasing amounts of cosmetics to whiten her skin. For anyone curious, it took her a reported two hours to get ready each and every morning. She greatly enjoyed watching men fighting for her favor, was notoriously jealous of other women, few wives were ever permitted at court, and when relatives got secretly married without permission, she was liable to throw them in jail.

Still, when she died in 1603, people recognized that an end of an era had come. Few people could remember what life was like without her. She had ruled England for 44 years. At the time, only Henry III and Edward III had worn the crown for longer. Her death also marked the end of the Tudor dynasty that had begun with her grandfather in 1485. And it turns out that all the teeth-gnashing about the line of succession was was kind of pointless, because in the last years of her life, Elizabeth's ministers had secretly been writing to the King of Scotland, Mary Stuart's son, James, to smooth the way for a peaceful transition. When Elizabeth died, ever since, the two countries have been ruled by one monarch, and a century later, we formally fused together into one single super-nation, Great Britain, at least until we mess that one up.

And as the country descended into religious turmoil and growing disputes between King and Parliament that would eventually erupt into civil war, people looked back on the Elizabethan era with fond nostalgia. Elizabeth was Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess. Portraits of her appeared everywhere, and even today, she ranks in the upper echelon of English and British monarchs. But Elizabeth was, above all, a survivor. A woman in a man's world, the unwanted and unappreciated daughter of royalty who outlasted her enemies and assured her place in history through a combination of luck, endurance, and skill. Few monarchs prior or since have been more loved by the people of England, and it's unlikely that we'll see many like her again.

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So the reason I have this is because, uh, Americans don't know. Um, like, I think I made a video a few years ago, I wrote a script at least for a video about the Queen of England, who was like, you know, Elizabeth II at the time, not needing a passport. And the reason for that is because it says in your passport here, like, a passport is just, um, a basically just a formal request from the monarch to, you know, enter the foreign country. So it says in my passport here, "Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those to whom it may concern to allow the bearer of this passport freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary." And because this is basically just a request from the monarch to travel to a foreign nation, the queen doesn't need a passport. But I had to get a new passport, um, right around the time the queen died. So I might have probably one of like, the rarer kinds of British passports that you can have, which is a blue passport that we got because of Brexit, which sucks ass, but it's a blue passport that was, um, issued after the queen died, but still says "Her Majesty" instead of "His Majesty." So I think I might have got like, the very last production run of passports that still say "Her Majesty" instead of "His Majesty" in them. So, yeah, so I'm stuck with that for another 10 years. Oh, yeah. I forget it's great as well because obviously I passports after I, you know, it's a celebration of the region in which, um, uh, you know, you're going to too. And I love that the English passport has, has seagulls in it. Which I don't know, I don't know why a British passport has a seagull in it. Like, it makes me really know about the Scottish one. I guess I can show that off. Yeah, so you see, maybe there's a picture here, but yeah, um, the English, like, um, like animal that we have to, like, represent England is a lion wearing a crown. But Scotland have just got one over on us because they picked a unicorn. They picked like, we didn't even know that was an option. Like, Wales have got dragons, and like, Ireland's got like, you know, the some man wearing a popack, f snakes out of a staff. We kind of got short-changed in that one, didn't we? Either way, cheers everybody. Go out there and have the day you all deserve.