Elizabeth I’s Defense of English Protestantism

As the Dutch revolt unfolded, Philip II became increasingly infuriated with Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), who had succeeded her half sister Mary Tudor as queen of England. Philip had been married to Mary and had enthusiastically seconded Mary’s efforts to return England to Catholicism. When Mary died in 1558, Elizabeth rejected Philip’s proposal of marriage and promptly brought Protestantism back to England. She had to squash uprisings by Catholics in the north and at least two serious plots against her life. In the long run, however, her greatest challenges came from the Calvinist Puritans and Philip II.

The Puritans were strict Calvinists who opposed all vestiges of Catholic ritual in the Church of England. After Elizabeth became queen, many Puritans returned from exile abroad, but Elizabeth resisted their demands for drastic changes in church ritual and governance. The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, issued under her authority in 1563, incorporated elements of Catholic ritual along with Calvinist doctrines. Puritans tried to undercut the crown-appointed bishops’ authority by placing control of church administration in the hands of a local presbytery, that is, a group made up of the minister and the elders of the congregation. Elizabeth rejected this Calvinist presbyterianism.

The Puritans nonetheless steadily gained influence. Known for their emphasis on strict moral lives, the Puritans tried to close England’s theaters and Sunday fairs. Every Puritan father—with the help of his wife—was to “make his house a little church” by teaching the children to read the Bible. Believing themselves God’s elect—those whom God has chosen for mercy and salvation—and England an “elect nation,” the Puritans also pushed Elizabeth to help Protestants on the continent. After Philip II annexed Portugal and began to interfere in French affairs, Elizabeth dispatched seven thousand soldiers in 1585 to help the Dutch rebels.

Philip II bided his time as long as Elizabeth remained unmarried and her Catholic cousin Mary Stuart, better known as Mary, queen of Scots, stood next in line to inherit the English throne. In 1568, Scottish Calvinists forced Mary to abdicate the throne of Scotland in favor of her one-year-old son James (eventually James I of England), who was then raised as a Protestant. After her abdication, Mary spent nearly twenty years under house arrest in England. In 1587, when a letter from Mary offering her succession rights to Philip was discovered, Elizabeth overcame her reluctance to execute a fellow monarch and ordered Mary’s beheading.

Now determined to act, Philip II sent his armada (Spanish for “fleet”) of 130 ships from Lisbon toward the English Channel in May 1588. The English scattered the Spanish Armada by sending blazing fire ships into its midst. A great gale then forced the Spanish to flee around Scotland. When the armada limped home in September, half the ships had been lost and thousands of sailors were dead or starving. Protestants throughout Europe rejoiced.

By the time Philip II died in 1598, the costs of fighting the Ottomans, Dutch, English, and French had finally bankrupted the treasury. In his novel Don Quixote (1605), the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes captured the disappointment of thwarted Spanish ambitions. Cervantes himself had been wounded at Lepanto. His novel’s hero, a minor nobleman, reads so many romances and books of chivalry that he loses his sense of proportion and wanders the countryside futilely trying to mimic the heroic deeds he has come across in his reading.

Elizabeth made the most of her limited means and consolidated England’s position as a Protestant power. In her early years, she held out the prospect of marriage to many political suitors; but in order to maintain her—and England’s—independence, she never married. Her successor, James I (r. 1603–1625), came to the throne as king of both Scotland and England. Shakespeare’s tragedies Hamlet (1601), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1606), written around the time of James’s succession, might all be read as commentaries on the uncertainties faced by Elizabeth and James. But Elizabeth’s story, unlike Shakespeare’s tragedies, had a happy ending: she left James secure in a kingdom of growing weight in world politics.