Let's Thank Henry VIII and Elizabeth I
Coming to power in 1558 after the death of her sister, Mary I -- better known as Bloody Mary for the burning at the stake of about 300 protestant dissidents in her 5 year reign, desperately trying to restore England to the Papal rule that their father, Henry VIII, had dismissed -- Elizabeth I was the last of the Tudor monarchs and even though Irish catholics still curse her today for imposing English rule over their country and setting the stage for centuries of bitter wars and ultimate partition she earned well the title of Good Queen Bess.
Elizabeth reigned for 45 years and had she been anything like her sister she would have executed 9 times as many religious dissidents. Instead, she executed about the same number of dissidents as Mary and most of these executions occurred in her last 20 years which were marked by an aggressive Counter Reformation movement from the Continent and Ireland infiltrating as many as 800 foreign trained catholic priests into her country, most of whom came from Douai in France.
Imagine 800 Sunni mullahs being infiltrated into renegade Shia based Iran to force allegiance to the Sunni power base in Saudi Arabia -- accepted as the leading power base by all Muslim nations -- and you get the picture. Same religion, different power base! England under Elizabeth was a bit like current Iran under Ahmadinejad -- hated by the other nations for continuing to buck the larger and better funded religious system but defiant against them and determined to shore up Iran’s independence by extending his power over his nearest neighbor, Iraq. Ireland was Elizabeth’s Iraq!
Ireland was a particular problem for Elizabeth because it was run along feudal lines by the catholic priests and thus had the potential to harbor subversives and act as a launching pad for a foreign-backed invasion. By extending English crown control over Ireland – and suppressing rebellions against this measure – Ireland could be said to be England's first colony but it was not colonized in the same sense that later colonies in the New World were and neither was it plundered in the same sense that India was because it offered scant prospects for migrants wanting a better life and because it had nothing worth plundering it didn’t attract the plunderers either. It was purely a strategic political decision.
The financial cost of pacifying Ireland was particularly draining but Elizabeth saw it as being vitally necessary for the security of England. The notion of modernizing the Irish – breaking the slave-based feudal system and initiating modern farming methods of diversification and crop rotation - came later.
In that the Brits, the Scots and the Irish have as much been shaped by each other as they have by foreign invaders – the Romans, the Germanic tribes, the Vikings, the Roman Catholic missionaries and the Normans - and traders moved freely between the two islands, the extension of English crown control was not so much an invasion of racially distinguishable aliens but a drawing together of people who had common ancestors. Indeed, the English who did settle in Ireland easily assimilated and over the generations, like the New World emigrants, assumed a different identity and wanted independence from England in much the same that Henry VIII wanted independence from Rome.
Basically, the subversives plotting against Elizabeth were not simple folk but members of prominent families closely tied to French, Spanish and Roman ruling families. Ordinary people in England, Ireland and Scotland had far more important things to think about, such as filling their bellies, protecting their kids and keeping the wolf from the door – and most of them still clung to their ancient pagan traditions in any case. Roman Christianity itself was imposed on these people, the biblical stories were not those of their ancestors, and most simple folk endured the changes that Elizabeth brought with as much resignation as their ancestors endured the changes that the Roman priests brought.
It must never be forgotten that religion in Elizabethan times was a matter of political allegiance not one of ritual or personal conscience. Catholics owed allegiance to the Pope, a foreign power in Rome -- and gave money to support that foreign power – and faced with ruling a kingdom under threat from forces within and without there was no way Elizabeth wanted her country to be sandwiched between Papist Ireland and Papist Europe. England did not have the wherewithal to take on wealthy Europe, so impoverished Ireland was the logical mark.
The Church of England was established by her father to remove Papal influence – to pronounce England as a separate and independent nation, not a vassal of a Pope who carried on the tradition of the ancient Roman Empire without giving benefit for moneys paid to him - and to this end he ordered the recording of births, deaths and marriages of every person in the kingdom for the very first time. The fact that so many of us can trace our ancestry back to the 1500s - and no earlier - is due entirely to the fact that before disestablishment from Papal rule ordinary English men and women were treated like animals, unworthy of mention. For this we should thank him; and, for bravely maintaining English independence and extending English administrative rule to Ireland, his daughter, Elizabeth, deserves the gratitude of the Irish, too.
Elizabeth's famous quote - "I will not make mirrors into men's souls" - was aimed at the catholics to assure them that if they lived quietly and showed her their allegiance by ‘going through the motions’ she would let them be.
The Act of Uniformity made attendance at a Church of England compulsory. Catholics who refused to 'go through the motions' -- the recusants -- were fined. Most catholics did what was required to show allegiance and prospered, but for the few leading catholic families who rebelled against her she attempted reconciliation with bribes of knighthoods. Failing that, the penalty for those who targeted her for assassination was death.
Some members of the catholic community were indeed serious subversives, and that she survived numerous risings and plots -- especially those instigated by the French-raised Mary Queen of Scots -- is remarkable.
Also, the international threat was compounded by the Pope publicly dispensing English catholics from allegiance to her, essentially sanctioning her assassination.
Under these circumstances, there was no way Elizabeth could have avoided repressive measures and by a combination of pragmatically turning a blind eye, sporadically making an example of subversives and initiating a spy network she managed to keep things under control.
In view of the horrific Spanish Inquisition in Europe, her persecution of the catholics was relatively benign. Had the Spanish Armada succeeded in its religiously justified foreign invasion – essentially a crusade - the persecution of protestants would certainly have been far worse – it would have been a wholesale slaughter - so those who wish to view her reign in terms of persecution should bear this in mind as well as the fact that arresting and torturing people from another religion because they might be involved in foreign terrorist plots is something we still do today.
By creating the idea of the broad church, Elizabeth astutely managed to avoid the internal religious strife that was brutalizing and tearing apart the rest of Europe -- in which Bohemia was the only state with official religious toleration (but not for long.)
The Religious Settlement was without doubt her greatest achievement, allowing the modern independent nation state to manifest under her rule. By stopping the catholics and protestants from fighting each other and encouraging them instead to cooperate in the interests of England was a stroke of genius.
Elizabeth's reign was marked by a great flowering of the English language as well as a time in which the arts and sciences flourished. She was, by all accounts, an intellectual. She was fluent in three or four languages and as a little girl she was translating French hymns into sonnet form and later distinguished herself by translating Boethius De Consolatione.
She endeared herself to her subjects with two quotes:
"I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I hae the heart and stomach of a king. Ay, and of a King of England too."
"Though you have had, and may have, many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat, yet you never had, nor shall have, any that will love you better."
Her power and greatness were no doubt based on religious persecution, piracy, looting and pillage but all nations at that time were so employed, as some are today. Elizabeth’s navy, like others, consisted of privateers with an eye on the spoils of war, and the infamous Drake nearly ruined the attack on the Spanish Armada by veering off to capture a prize. It was a time when pirates ruled the seas and even Ireland had a pirate queen, Grace O'Malley, who saved her landholdings by arguing her case before Elizabeth under English rather than Irish common law and her son, Tibbot of the Ships, actually became 1st Viscount Mayo – so, some Irish did very well out of English rule, and used it to their advantage!
It should be remembered, too, that England at the time was in constant financial difficulties and was virtually a backwater, nowhere near as important as France, Germany, Portugal and, of course, Spain -- the super-power of the day -- with the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church preeminent over all. That she took on Spain and the Pope, and won, speaks volumes about just how great she was and her success no doubt influenced women everywhere.
Elizabeth died in 1603 unmarried and childless and the Tudor dynasty died with her. She was succeeded by James I, a Scot, who started the Stuart dynasty and with the union of England and Scotland steered the nation towards being a global colonial power with the foundation of the Jamestown colony in the New World.
Elizabeth reigned for 45 years and had she been anything like her sister she would have executed 9 times as many religious dissidents. Instead, she executed about the same number of dissidents as Mary and most of these executions occurred in her last 20 years which were marked by an aggressive Counter Reformation movement from the Continent and Ireland infiltrating as many as 800 foreign trained catholic priests into her country, most of whom came from Douai in France.
Imagine 800 Sunni mullahs being infiltrated into renegade Shia based Iran to force allegiance to the Sunni power base in Saudi Arabia -- accepted as the leading power base by all Muslim nations -- and you get the picture. Same religion, different power base! England under Elizabeth was a bit like current Iran under Ahmadinejad -- hated by the other nations for continuing to buck the larger and better funded religious system but defiant against them and determined to shore up Iran’s independence by extending his power over his nearest neighbor, Iraq. Ireland was Elizabeth’s Iraq!
Ireland was a particular problem for Elizabeth because it was run along feudal lines by the catholic priests and thus had the potential to harbor subversives and act as a launching pad for a foreign-backed invasion. By extending English crown control over Ireland – and suppressing rebellions against this measure – Ireland could be said to be England's first colony but it was not colonized in the same sense that later colonies in the New World were and neither was it plundered in the same sense that India was because it offered scant prospects for migrants wanting a better life and because it had nothing worth plundering it didn’t attract the plunderers either. It was purely a strategic political decision.
The financial cost of pacifying Ireland was particularly draining but Elizabeth saw it as being vitally necessary for the security of England. The notion of modernizing the Irish – breaking the slave-based feudal system and initiating modern farming methods of diversification and crop rotation - came later.
In that the Brits, the Scots and the Irish have as much been shaped by each other as they have by foreign invaders – the Romans, the Germanic tribes, the Vikings, the Roman Catholic missionaries and the Normans - and traders moved freely between the two islands, the extension of English crown control was not so much an invasion of racially distinguishable aliens but a drawing together of people who had common ancestors. Indeed, the English who did settle in Ireland easily assimilated and over the generations, like the New World emigrants, assumed a different identity and wanted independence from England in much the same that Henry VIII wanted independence from Rome.
Basically, the subversives plotting against Elizabeth were not simple folk but members of prominent families closely tied to French, Spanish and Roman ruling families. Ordinary people in England, Ireland and Scotland had far more important things to think about, such as filling their bellies, protecting their kids and keeping the wolf from the door – and most of them still clung to their ancient pagan traditions in any case. Roman Christianity itself was imposed on these people, the biblical stories were not those of their ancestors, and most simple folk endured the changes that Elizabeth brought with as much resignation as their ancestors endured the changes that the Roman priests brought.
It must never be forgotten that religion in Elizabethan times was a matter of political allegiance not one of ritual or personal conscience. Catholics owed allegiance to the Pope, a foreign power in Rome -- and gave money to support that foreign power – and faced with ruling a kingdom under threat from forces within and without there was no way Elizabeth wanted her country to be sandwiched between Papist Ireland and Papist Europe. England did not have the wherewithal to take on wealthy Europe, so impoverished Ireland was the logical mark.
The Church of England was established by her father to remove Papal influence – to pronounce England as a separate and independent nation, not a vassal of a Pope who carried on the tradition of the ancient Roman Empire without giving benefit for moneys paid to him - and to this end he ordered the recording of births, deaths and marriages of every person in the kingdom for the very first time. The fact that so many of us can trace our ancestry back to the 1500s - and no earlier - is due entirely to the fact that before disestablishment from Papal rule ordinary English men and women were treated like animals, unworthy of mention. For this we should thank him; and, for bravely maintaining English independence and extending English administrative rule to Ireland, his daughter, Elizabeth, deserves the gratitude of the Irish, too.
Elizabeth's famous quote - "I will not make mirrors into men's souls" - was aimed at the catholics to assure them that if they lived quietly and showed her their allegiance by ‘going through the motions’ she would let them be.
The Act of Uniformity made attendance at a Church of England compulsory. Catholics who refused to 'go through the motions' -- the recusants -- were fined. Most catholics did what was required to show allegiance and prospered, but for the few leading catholic families who rebelled against her she attempted reconciliation with bribes of knighthoods. Failing that, the penalty for those who targeted her for assassination was death.
Some members of the catholic community were indeed serious subversives, and that she survived numerous risings and plots -- especially those instigated by the French-raised Mary Queen of Scots -- is remarkable.
Also, the international threat was compounded by the Pope publicly dispensing English catholics from allegiance to her, essentially sanctioning her assassination.
Under these circumstances, there was no way Elizabeth could have avoided repressive measures and by a combination of pragmatically turning a blind eye, sporadically making an example of subversives and initiating a spy network she managed to keep things under control.
In view of the horrific Spanish Inquisition in Europe, her persecution of the catholics was relatively benign. Had the Spanish Armada succeeded in its religiously justified foreign invasion – essentially a crusade - the persecution of protestants would certainly have been far worse – it would have been a wholesale slaughter - so those who wish to view her reign in terms of persecution should bear this in mind as well as the fact that arresting and torturing people from another religion because they might be involved in foreign terrorist plots is something we still do today.
By creating the idea of the broad church, Elizabeth astutely managed to avoid the internal religious strife that was brutalizing and tearing apart the rest of Europe -- in which Bohemia was the only state with official religious toleration (but not for long.)
The Religious Settlement was without doubt her greatest achievement, allowing the modern independent nation state to manifest under her rule. By stopping the catholics and protestants from fighting each other and encouraging them instead to cooperate in the interests of England was a stroke of genius.
Elizabeth's reign was marked by a great flowering of the English language as well as a time in which the arts and sciences flourished. She was, by all accounts, an intellectual. She was fluent in three or four languages and as a little girl she was translating French hymns into sonnet form and later distinguished herself by translating Boethius De Consolatione.
She endeared herself to her subjects with two quotes:
"I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I hae the heart and stomach of a king. Ay, and of a King of England too."
"Though you have had, and may have, many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat, yet you never had, nor shall have, any that will love you better."
Her power and greatness were no doubt based on religious persecution, piracy, looting and pillage but all nations at that time were so employed, as some are today. Elizabeth’s navy, like others, consisted of privateers with an eye on the spoils of war, and the infamous Drake nearly ruined the attack on the Spanish Armada by veering off to capture a prize. It was a time when pirates ruled the seas and even Ireland had a pirate queen, Grace O'Malley, who saved her landholdings by arguing her case before Elizabeth under English rather than Irish common law and her son, Tibbot of the Ships, actually became 1st Viscount Mayo – so, some Irish did very well out of English rule, and used it to their advantage!
It should be remembered, too, that England at the time was in constant financial difficulties and was virtually a backwater, nowhere near as important as France, Germany, Portugal and, of course, Spain -- the super-power of the day -- with the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church preeminent over all. That she took on Spain and the Pope, and won, speaks volumes about just how great she was and her success no doubt influenced women everywhere.
Elizabeth died in 1603 unmarried and childless and the Tudor dynasty died with her. She was succeeded by James I, a Scot, who started the Stuart dynasty and with the union of England and Scotland steered the nation towards being a global colonial power with the foundation of the Jamestown colony in the New World.
Labels: act of uniformity, bloody mary, catholics, church of england, elizabeth i, england, henry viii, ireland, protestants, spanish armada, spanish inquisition, tudor
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