Elizabethan lives / Home, work and play
The other Elizabethan England Films, books and television depict the queen and court in their finery – but what of the lives of ‘ordinary’ Elizabethans? Tarnya Cooper reveals what eight objects tell us about the homes, work and play of people both rich and poor
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REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY, HATFIELD HOUSE–NPG
A Fete at Bermondsey by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder (c1569/70). The painting “provides a rare insight into the lives of Elizabethans outside the exclusive confines of the court,” says Tarnya Cooper
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Elizabethan lives / Hardship and hunger
Spectre at the feast An allegory depicting Elizabeth I in her later years, with the figure of death looking over her shoulder – just as, in a very real sense, the threat of starvation loomed over her subjects after a series of terrible harvests
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The dark side of
Elizabethan
life
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The Elizabethan era is often painted as a golden age. Yet, says James Sharpe, for many thousands of people life was far from golden, blighted by violence, vagrancy and crushing hunger
A woodcut shows an idyllic harvesting scene from the 1600s. In the previous century, though, the ‘Merrie England’ of Elizabeth I had been blighted by disastrous crop failures
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The queen and her court / Love triangle
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE MARQUESS OF BATH, LONGLEAT HOUSE, WARMINSTER, WILTSHIRE/GETTY IMAGES
Lettice Knollys was a favourite of Elizabeth I… Then she stole the queen’s sweetheart Nicola Tallis tells the story of a Tudor love triangle
When Lettice Knollys (foreground) married Robert Dudley (above) without telling Elizabeth I (top), sparks flew in the Palace of Whitehall
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BBC History Magazine
BBC History Magazine
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Elizabethans and the world / Islamic allies
The Tudors’ unlikely allies This composite image shows Elizabeth I’s Armada portrait alongside a picture of Abd al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri, ambassador for Morocco – one of the Tudor queen’s trading partners
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Cut off from much of Catholic Europe, Elizabeth I’s regime embarked on a remarkable relationship with the Islamic world, as Jerry Brotton reveals
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n 25 February 1570, a papal bull issued in Rome by Pope Pius V, entitled Regnans in Excelsis (‘Reigning on High’), excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I. The bull condemned “Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England” for “having seized on the kingdom and monstrously usurped the place of supreme head of the church in all England”. It concluded: “We do out of the fullness of our apostolic power declare the aforesaid Elizabeth as being a heretic and a favourer of heretics, and her adherents in the matters aforesaid, to have incurred the sentence of excommunication.” The bull’s consequences are well known. It divided English Catholics over whether or not to rebel against Elizabeth, while strengthening patriotic support for the queen and pushing her towards more aggressive Protestant policies at home and abroad. Pius’s decision tacitly supported a series of attempts to assassinate Elizabeth, and ultimately led to the sailing of the Armada in 1588. But it also had another, less well-known but equally significant outcome: it allowed the Tudors to establish a series of commercial and military alliances with the Islamic world on a scale never seen before in England.
A common enemy
common enemy of both Islam and Protestantism: Catholicism. The reasons for this surprising and generally overlooked alliance go back to the rise of Islam since the time of the crusades, and the more unforeseen consequences of the 16th-century Reformation. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 proved to be just one particularly dramatic moment in the apparently irresistible global rise of Islamic power in the face of a weak and divided Christianity. The papacy preached that the Muslim faith was nothing more than a garbled mixture of paganism and apostasy, though such claims were difficult to square with the power of a theocracy that, at the time Luther was calling for reform within the Christian church, ruled north Africa, the Arabian peninsula, Greece, the Holy Land (including Jerusalem), central Asia, most of the Indian subcontinent and large swathes of eastern Europe, and had even reached China. This should not disguise the conflicts and tensions inherent in (to use a rather unsatisfactory term) ‘the Islamic world’. The Sunni Ottoman empire clashed with the neighbouring Persian Shia empire, and had defeated the powerful Egyptian Mamluk sultanate in 1517 to become undisputed defenders of Islam’s holy cities and pilgrimage routes. In north-west Africa, the Saadian dynasty (of Arab descent) played fast and loose with their theological distance and independence from the Ottomans. Nevertheless, to most Christian princes the Islamic world looked like a militarily and
Over the next 30 years, Elizabeth would broker deals with the Ottoman, Persian and Saadian (Moroccan) empires that saw hundreds, if not thousands, of Elizabethan men and women travelling across Muslim lands. Some converted to Islam, others merely traded amicably, while Elizabeth’s diplomats travelled back and forth between Whitehall, Marrakech, Constantinople and Qazvin (the Persian empire’s capital), concocting Anglo-Islamic alliances as a bulwark against what at the time was the
Excommunication allowed the Tudors to establish alliances with the Islamic world on a scale never seen before 9
Elizabethans and the world / Catholics Instrument of torture This contemporary engraving shows the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion on the rack. Campion was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in 1581 – one of about 130 priests executed for religious treason in Elizabeth’s reign
Elizabeth’s war with England’s Catholics
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In Elizabethan England, Catholics were branded public enemies, their Masses banned and their priests executed. Jessie Childs reveals what life was like for recusants and ‘church papists’ in a hostile Protestant state
Elizabeth I expected outward obedience from her subjects – and that included their church attendance
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BBC History August 2004