A Country in Transition
The England of 1558 over which Elizabeth became queen was a country in transition. Until the reign of Henry VII, the monarch’s stability and power had depended on the (often fickle) loyalty of a few major nobles. No national financial system had been instituted, and the feudal system of labor of the medieval period was still very much intact. Most Englishmen owed allegiance, not to a distant reigning monarch, bur rather to the powerful, landowning noble family living nearby, and the monarch depended on the various "armies" of these nobles when England was under attack (whether from without or within – usually from within). The North of England was particularly isolated from the capital, even though the last Plantagenet, Richard III, hailed from the North. The treachery of the southern nobles contributed to his defeat at Bosworth Field. A national consciousness did not exist at this time except as a negative; the people saw themselves as distinct from the detested Scottish and French, but there was no positive worth in being English.
Henry VII
England as a national entity did not truly begin to exist until Henry Tudor defeated his rival Richard III, married Elizabeth of York (thus ending the Lancastrian-Yorkist war), and began to establish a national government. His accomplishments in this area consisted mostly of a national tax collection system which made him one of the least-loved monarchs in English history, but he did at least establish the superior power of the monarch over the nobility and the beginning of a centralized government. His people frankly despised him.
His immediate successor, his second son Henry VIII, enjoyed a popular ascendancy but did nothing to draw the country together into a cohesive whole; his personal life brought the divisive Reformation into England, and his need for money (coupled with an intense dislike of the Pope who dared to challenge Henry’s authority in Henry’s own country) wrecked the unitive power of the Catholic Church in England. His politics were national in scope, but they were the politics of tyranny, and his people cheered at his death.
Henry VIII
His son Edward VI was a study in nonentity. The most notable part of his reign occurred after his death, with the attempt to disinherit his sisters by placing Lady Jane Grey (the unfortunate little "Queen of Nine Days") on the throne.
Edward VI
Edward’s successor, poor Mary Tudor, had the best of intentions but only succeeded in ripping the fragile fabric of national unity apart with her determination to reunite with Rome and her unhappy, ill-advised marriage to the Spanish Philip II. National consciousness – a feeling of "being English" – was no doubt raised by the Spanish marriage, but the sense of Englishness was still negative, a reaction to the threat of a Spanish takeover.
Mary I
It remained for a twenty-five-year-old girl "possessed with a hundred thousand devils (the Spanish ambassador’s opinion), a young woman whose personal family history ruled out marriage (in her own mind), to unit the inhabitants of England into the English people.
Young Elizabeth
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