You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Elizabeth I governed England for forty-five years — a feat all the more remarkable because contemporary political theory held female rule to be unnatural, because she never married and so left the succession dangerously unresolved, and because the reign coincided with the bloodiest phase of Europe's confessional wars. She inherited a divided realm, an empty treasury, an unsettled Church (Lesson 3), and a hostile Catholic power across the Channel, and she bequeathed a stable, solvent, and culturally confident state to a peaceful Scottish successor. This lesson examines how she did it: through the tight, professional Privy Council dominated for forty years by William Cecil; through a court in which faction was balanced and managed; through a Parliament summoned rarely and kept, for the most part, within bounds; and above all through her handling of the two intertwined questions that overshadowed the reign — the succession and the presence in England of her Catholic rival and heir-presumptive, Mary Queen of Scots.
Two great debates run through the topic. The first concerns the nature of Elizabethan governance and, especially, the character of her parliaments. For a generation the field was dominated by Sir John Neale's thesis of a rising, increasingly assertive House of Commons — a "Puritan choir" of opposition MPs whose challenges foreshadowed the constitutional conflicts of the early Stuarts. Since the 1980s a powerful revisionist reaction — Sir Geoffrey Elton, Michael Graves, Penry Williams — has demolished much of that picture, recasting Parliament as a largely cooperative legislative and fiscal body and the apparent "conflicts" as either Council management or genuine but exceptional flashpoints. The second debate concerns the succession: whether Elizabeth's refusal to marry or name an heir, and her long refusal to execute Mary Queen of Scots, were dangerous irresponsibility or shrewd statecraft that kept her options open and her rivals off balance.
The organising question is this: was Elizabethan government a skilfully managed personal monarchy in which a cooperative Parliament, a balanced court, and a patient handling of the succession served a queen firmly in control — or an increasingly contested and dangerously improvised regime, storing up the unresolved problems (the succession above all) that a rising Parliament and a Catholic claimant made acute?
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y107 (British period study & enquiry): England 1547–1603 — The Later Tudors. It is examined in two ways:
Because Y107 is a period study, examiners reward command of how government developed and how the succession problem evolved across the reign; keep asking how each institution and crisis affected the stability of royal authority. Our sequence groups the material around Council, Parliament, faction, and the succession — a pedagogical arrangement of our own, not a transcription of the specification's ordering (refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording). This lesson develops the government thread opened in Lessons 1 and 2 and connects closely to the religious challenges of Lesson 5, since the Catholic plots centred on Mary Queen of Scots and the succession.
The Privy Council was the executive core of Elizabethan government — the body where policy was debated and the daily business of the realm transacted. Understanding it is fundamental, because the stability of the reign rested largely on the quality of the Council and the length of service of its leading members.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Size | Typically around 19 members early in the reign, shrinking to about 13 by the 1590s — smaller, tighter, and more professional than under earlier Tudors |
| Composition | A mix of trusted nobles, a few churchmen, and (increasingly) able professional administrators of gentry origin, all appointed and removable by the queen |
| Frequency | Met very frequently — often daily — when the court was in session, handling everything from foreign dispatches to local disorder |
| Functions | Advising the monarch, framing and implementing policy, managing finance, supervising local government and the JPs, conducting foreign correspondence, and meeting threats to security |
| Cardinal principle | The Council advised; the queen decided. Elizabeth guarded this distinction jealously, and her councillors' frequent frustration was precisely that they could not compel her — only persuade |
| Councillor | Service | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| William Cecil, Lord Burghley | 1558–1598 | The indispensable minister: Principal Secretary (1558–1572), then Lord Treasurer (1572–1598); cautious, methodical, Protestant, a peerless administrator — the architect of the reign's stability |
| Sir Francis Walsingham | 1573–1590 | Principal Secretary and spymaster who built England's intelligence network, uncovered the Throckmorton and Babington plots, and pressed a militant "forward" Protestant foreign policy |
| Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester | 1562–1588 | The queen's lifelong favourite; leader of the "forward Protestant" interest; commanded the ill-fated Netherlands expedition of 1585–87 |
| Sir Christopher Hatton | 1577–1591 | Risen through the queen's personal favour; Lord Chancellor from 1587; an effective manager of the Commons |
| Sir Robert Cecil | 1596–1603 | Burghley's son and political heir; Secretary; managed the final years and engineered the peaceful succession of James VI of Scotland |
The royal prerogative was the body of powers the monarch could exercise without parliamentary consent. Elizabeth treated certain "matters of state" — religion, her marriage, the succession, and foreign policy — as prerogative matters on which Parliament might advise only when invited. Her insistence on this boundary is the crux of most of her clashes with the Commons, and the test-case of whether Parliament was "rising" or being firmly kept in its place.
The figure of William Cecil deserves particular emphasis, because the stability of the reign is in large part his achievement and that of the office he raised to pre-eminence — the Principal Secretaryship. Originally a modest household post, the Secretaryship became under Cecil the central coordinating office of the state: the Secretary handled the correspondence, set the Council's agenda, managed intelligence, and stood at the queen's elbow. Cecil's genius lay in patient, methodical administration and in a temperamental match with the queen — both cautious, fiscally prudent, and instinctively defensive. For forty years he was the indispensable man.
The deeper analytical point concerns change and continuity in the style of Tudor government. Elizabethan government was not a "revolution"; it worked through inherited institutions — Council, Secretaryship, Exchequer, the courts. What distinguished it was the quality of management and the continuity of personnel: the long tenure of Cecil and a small group of able colleagues gave the regime a coherence and institutional memory that the faction-ridden minority of Edward VI (Lesson 1) had wholly lacked. When Burghley died in 1598 and the queen aged, that coherence frayed — the Essex crisis and the monopolies storm of the 1590s are, in part, symptoms of the end of the Cecilian equilibrium that had defined the reign's middle decades.
Elizabeth summoned Parliament only ten times in forty-five years (in thirteen sessions), and it sat for a small fraction of the reign. This infrequency is itself analytically significant: Parliament was an occasional event, summoned for the Crown's purposes, not a permanent partner in government — a point the revisionists stress against Neale.
| Reason | Detail |
|---|---|
| Taxation | The overriding reason: only Parliament could grant the subsidy (direct taxation), and the cost of war (especially after 1585) drove most summonses |
| Legislation | Statute required parliamentary assent — the Religious Settlement (1559), treason and recusancy laws, the Poor Laws, and economic regulation all needed it |
| Legitimacy and counsel | Parliamentary endorsement lent royal policy added authority and gave the political nation a sanctioned voice — useful so long as it stayed within bounds |
| Issue | Date | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Succession and marriage | 1563, 1566 | The Commons (and Lords) petitioned Elizabeth to marry and name a successor; she rebuffed them sharply, insisting these were prerogative matters and forbidding further debate — in 1566 she briefly interfered with the subsidy's progress to make her displeasure felt |
| Free speech (Wentworth) | 1576, 1587 | Peter Wentworth argued that the Commons must be free to debate any matter, including those the queen had forbidden; he was twice committed to the Tower by the House itself at the Crown's prompting |
| Religion / Puritan bills | 1570s–1580s | Puritan-minded MPs (and the Privy Councillors who sometimes used them) tried to introduce bills to reform the Church; Elizabeth vetoed them and warned the House off her Settlement (Lesson 5) |
| Monopolies | 1597, 1601 | Mounting anger at royal monopolies — exclusive trading licences granted to courtiers — produced the fiercest Commons protest of the reign; Elizabeth defused it in 1601 by conceding while framing the retreat as royal generosity in her "Golden Speech" |
Note the pattern in these flashpoints: they cluster on prerogative matters (succession, religion) and on grievance (monopolies), not on a sustained programme to enlarge Parliament's constitutional power. This is the heart of the revisionist case against Neale — that there was friction, but not a rising "opposition" with a constitutional agenda. The monopolies retreat of 1601, in particular, shows Elizabeth managing discontent through timely concession, not being overpowered by it.
The Elizabethan court was not a mere theatre of ceremony but the arena of politics — the place where, in a personal monarchy, proximity to the queen translated into power, patronage, and influence over policy.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Definition | Faction was the informal, shifting grouping of courtiers and councillors competing for the queen's favour, the distribution of offices and patronage, and the direction of policy |
| Mechanisms | Personal intimacy, marriage alliances, control of access to the queen, and the building of clienteles through the patronage one could dispense |
| Why it mattered | Under personal monarchy, the ruler's favour was power. Elizabeth deliberately balanced factions — playing Cecil against Leicester, caution against adventure — so that no single interest could dominate her or her policy |
For most of the reign Elizabeth's balancing of these interests was a source of stability: rivalry was channelled into competition for her favour rather than into open conflict. The chief division was between the cautious, defensive, fiscally prudent Cecil interest and the militant "forward Protestant" Leicester interest, which pressed for intervention against Spain and the Catholic threat. The system worked, however, only so long as the queen retained the energy and authority to hold the balance — and in the 1590s, with Leicester and Walsingham dead and the queen ageing, it began to break down, culminating in the failed rising of the Earl of Essex in 1601, the only armed challenge to Elizabeth from within the political establishment, and one whose utter collapse (Londoners did not stir) demonstrated the underlying stability of the regime even in the queen's old age. Paul Hammer argues persuasively that the rising was the product of Essex's exclusion from patronage as the Cecil interest consolidated its grip — faction turning destabilising only when the balance that normally contained it broke down.
The single greatest weakness of Elizabethan government was one the queen would not resolve: the succession. Elizabeth never married and never named an heir, and for the whole reign the question of who would succeed her hung over English politics, sharpened after 1568 by the presence in England of the obvious Catholic claimant, Mary Queen of Scots.
| Anxiety | Detail |
|---|---|
| A disputed succession meant civil war | The living memory of the fifteenth century made a contested succession the ultimate nightmare; an unmarried, childless queen left the realm exposed |
| A Catholic heir threatened the Settlement | If Elizabeth died without a Protestant heir, the whole religious settlement (Lesson 3) might be undone — hence the pressure to marry and produce a Protestant successor |
| The queen's own mortality | A serious bout of smallpox in 1562 nearly killed Elizabeth and terrified the political nation, prompting the parliamentary petitions of 1563 and 1566 |
Elizabeth's refusal to settle the succession has been read in opposite ways. To her contemporaries — and to some historians — it was dangerous irresponsibility, gambling the realm's future on her own survival. To others it was calculated statecraft: to name an heir was to create a rival and a focus for disloyalty (as Mary Stuart's presence showed), and to marry was to surrender authority to a husband or entangle England in foreign alliance. By keeping the question open, Elizabeth kept suitors, factions, and foreign powers guessing and dependent on her favour. The truth is probably that both readings capture something: her caution was politically shrewd in the short term but left a genuine long-term danger that was resolved, in the end, only by the deft management of her ministers and the biological accident of a plausible Protestant claimant in James VI.
Mary Queen of Scots — Catholic, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, and thus with a strong claim to the English throne — arrived in England in 1568 as a fugitive, having been driven from Scotland. Her presence transformed the succession question from an abstraction into an immediate and dangerous reality.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.