Erik Visits a Non-American Grave, Part 1,952

This is the grave of Queen Elizabeth I, who is buried on top of Queen Mary.

Hmmm…..there’s a lot one could say about these two queens. So let’s just make a few points here.

The burial of Elizabeth on top of Mary seems so appropriate for the English Reformation. Let’s try to erase the monument to one queen by placing the more successful one on top of her. It’s such a weird time in history. Henry VIII was such a moron (in fact, Trump is kind of a Henry VIII figure). He can’t produce a male heir so let’s just break with the church so he can get divorced, proceeds to marry six times, produce all of one male heir, who is sickly; and unleashes a social revolution he can’t control. Turns out that if you destroy historical authority to create your own authority, you’ve opened a Pandora’s Box that you can’t put away again just because you say you are the church. So by the time Edward VI died in 1553, there were so many social forces abuzz in Britain that no line of succession was going to be easy. Even though Edward VI was still a teenager when he died, he really did believe in the Reformation, leading him to try and push Lady Jane Grey as his successor, which of course didn’t work. But Mary was not able to turn back the clock, because such a thing is nearly impossible. There were of course plenty of English who wanted to return to Catholicism, but it sure wasn’t all of them.

Maybe Mary could have played this out. She did marry Phillip II of Spain and could have brought the two nations together in some sort of long-term Catholic alliance. But she didn’t produce an heir either. Then she died in 1558, having not succeeded in restoring Catholicism to England and knowing that her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth would take over. It’s kind of amazing that Elizabeth was able to survive for so long and as such a powerful monarch, perhaps the most important in English history. Of course all the powerful men wanted to marry her and take control. She knew that and wasn’t having it. She decided she would remain single and see the throne pass to another Protestant upon her death, which was a long time off and of course became King James VI of Scotland, soon to be James I of England.

One reason Elizabeth was able to pull off a long and peaceful and stabilizing rule is that she was a moderate on religion. She didn’t seek to dominate everyone like her father, she didn’t seek to turn back to the clock to Catholicism like her sister, and she had no interest in the rising Puritan movement coming out of Scotland. She sought stability and achieved it. Yes, she was head of the church, but was not overly active in pushing forward ideology in what became the Anglican church. Of course, the Catholics loathed all of this. Pope Pius V declared her an illegitimate heir to the throne in 1570, excommunicating her as if she cared, and telling English Catholics to rise up against her. Some did, but her advisors were good at putting out these threats before they got too serious.

Elizabeth also did a good job of avoiding war. England was a weak and divided nation. She knew that. Despite the toxic masculinity of many of her advisors who wanted to prove themselves in war, she knew this would be disastrous. So she tried to avoid it, or at least commit her nation as little as possible. Generally that meant that when England did get involved on the continent, it didn’t go that well for them, but without the major losses that would have threatened the nation’s integrity. She kept English troops off the continent between the loss of Le Havre in 1563 and her aid to the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands against the Spanish in 1585. That’s a long time for this era. The reason for this change was a lot of bad things for the English on the continent–the deaths of allies and Spanish advances that threatened the Channel. And of course Spain wanted revenge for the Reformation and thus had every intention of taking back the heretical island for the Pope.

Meanwhile, where the English were making progress in foreign affairs was through outright piracy, led by Francis Drake’s successful raids on the gold and silver ships of the Spanish crown. I love visiting Caribbean ports and seeing Drake portrayed as a monster, as he is in both Cartagena and Santo Domingo, at least. When Drake successfully raided Spanish ships at Cadiz, a raid on ships that planned to invade England, King Philip II of Spain went all in. The odds were with the Spanish Armada, but bad weather and fast, small English ships helped Elizabeth beat the odds. This is one of the most important moments in English history. No one has ever seriously threatened an invasion again. Even Hitler wasn’t that crazy, though he wanted to.

All of this made Elizabeth’s last years something of a glorious time in England. There were a ton of social problems to be sure–heavy taxation to pay for it all and failed harvests meant that conditions for the poor were pretty bad. But who cared about those people anyway? She also cracked down more on Catholics, seeing what her relative laxity had almost cost her. But still, England was safe. She moved toward the creation of monopolies as England started to expand into an empire itself. There was the failed attempt in what is today North Carolina in 1587, but that laid the groundwork for the successful colonization of North America shortly after her death.

Elizabeth’s health was never actually very good. She survived a scarring case of smallpox in 1562 and that caused her to lose most of her hair. She also ate so many sweets that her teeth rotted away and made her speech difficult to understand. She was so scared of dentists that she let the teeth rot rather than have them pulled. All of this happened at the same time that a cult of her beauty rose up, something that she evidently believed in, even if no one else actually did. Ah, royalty. But hey, Donald Trump is a true avatar of health!

Elizabeth never would name a successor, so it was all done behind the scenes near the end of her life, with her advisor Robert Cecil working with James VI to make it happen. He told James to suck up to Elizabeth. He did and so she knew he would be the next king and she approved of that, as much as she approved of anything. She was only 69 when she died in 1603 and might well have lived longer, but she entered into a very deep depression as many of her trusted friends had died in the two years before that. She may have just given up the will to live, plus the preexisting health problems. 69 was pretty old for the early 17th century anyway.

It’s interesting that the nation seems to have decided to try and bring peace to a difficult era by burying the two queens together. Elizabeth and Mary are buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England. There’s really so much more to say about these queens, but this post is more than long enough, so say what you want in comments.

There aren’t monarchs in America of course, so I can’t do my usual “if you want me to visit this or that person, you can donate to cover the required expenses here” bit. But I will say that while I of course did not use grave money to visit the UK, it does cost money for the longest historical series in the history of the internet to continue and I do appreciate the rare times when someone helps that happen. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.