Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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So that was Queen Elizabeth I, Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, on the 14th of January, 1559, two months into her reign, two months after her sister, Bloody Mary, has died, leaving her as the heir. And she is speaking to
crowd who've gathered outside the Tower of London so this is the place where her mother had been imprisoned and had died where she had been imprisoned and had feared for her own life and where she is now staying in the royal apartments waiting for her coronation and Tom
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Chapter 2: How was Elizabeth I finally crowned Queen of England?
And the privy chamber is an important part of any monarch's household. And because Elizabeth is a queen, men can't really be a part of this. So therefore, Kate actually has, you know, she wields quite a degree of influence. She's a significant player too. But the key player, The key player is the man who we basically ended the last episode with. And this is William Cecil.
And she has been appointed Elizabeth's new secretary. But that title kind of barely hints at his significance because in effect, he is prime minister. And Dominic, I think he is a very Sandbrookian character.
You mean that surely as high praise?
I hope you will take it as high praise, because I actually think that in any ranking of the most impressive political operator in British history, so not just English, but British history, I would say he is very much at the top. He's an extraordinary competent. Right. I mean, more than competent. He's brilliant.
Okay. It's very clear to me there's going to be some hideous sting in the tail in this comparison, but I wait to see what that's going to be.
No, not at all. No. It's Cecil in the first days of her reign who essentially guides Elizabeth in the selection of her council. And this council is very streamlined. Essentially, it's kind of halved. Under Mary, it had become very cumbersome. Cecil wants a much more readily controllable body of men By convention, there are several secretaries. Cecil's not having that. He is the only secretary.
He is operating alone. And of course, this is absolutely punishing because it means that he has a lot on his plate. But that, Dominic, is how he likes it. So he chairs the council. He runs the royal secretariat. If there's a pie, he has his finger in it. So to quote Stephen Alford, who's written the definitive biography of Cecil, he was everywhere and everything in Elizabethan government.
No piece of paper, no report, no policy, no event or panic or crisis at home or abroad could escape his attention. And Elizabeth had appointed him partly because he's incredibly able, partly because he's a very committed Protestant, very loyal to her, but also because she knows that he is equal to the challenges of such an exhausting role.
And right from the beginning, so from the first meeting of her council, which was held at Hatfield 10 days after her accession, She's absolutely upfront about what she expects from him. Her kind of prescription that she gives him is very famous.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of Elizabeth I's speech during her coronation?
They come to say, well, what I can do, actually... you know what coincidentally it turns out to be the right thing to do yeah and I think that's exactly how she perceives it maybe there's a degree of self delusion in that you know as in but I think you tend to believe your own agenda don't you and she is brilliant at judging just how far she can push the English people without them breaking.
And indeed Parliament, because she wants Parliament with all the Catholic bishops inside it to vote to repudiate the papal supremacy and restore the royal supremacy. In other words, she wants to leave the Catholic hierarchy in no doubt that this is the will of the English people. Mary, when she had reversed the royal supremacy, had made sure to get rid of the Protestant bishops.
Elizabeth doesn't do that. She doesn't kind of clear Parliament out of the bishops. She wants everybody to be complicit in the decision that Parliament reaches. And so it's a massive risk because it could easily have exploded in her face. And in the event, this kind of revolution is forced through parliament by the absolute skin of its teeth.
And it's chiefly thanks to Cecil's genius for kind of whipping and arm twisting that MPs and then the House of Lords do vote for the religious settlement. And this settlement is sometimes described as kind of centrist, as being a compromise between Catholic and Protestant. But it isn't because by this point, definitely a point has been reached where it's either or.
You either have the papal supremacy or the royal supremacy. And by voting for the royal supremacy, Parliament is voting for a church that is unmistakably Protestant. Elizabeth, unlike her father, does not call herself the supreme head of the Church of England. That's reserved for Christ. But she does call herself the supreme governor.
And accepting Elizabeth as the supreme governor of the Church of England is now established as the absolute litmus test for loyalty. Everyone in government, everyone in the council, everyone in the church, everyone in parliament has to swear it. And because the Catholic bishops can't do that, Effectively, they are committing a kind of mass letter of resignation. They leave en masse.
So that clears Catholics out of the upper echelons of the church. At the same time, a second act is passed imposing uniformity, which basically is prescribing doctrine. So this gets rid of lots of kind of Catholic aspects of religion, say prayers for the dead, veneration of saints, pilgrimage, rosaries, images in churches, all that kind of thing.
And it also affirms the primacy of scripture, which is very Protestant. There's an evangelical prayer book, kind of based on a prayer book that had been written by Cranmer, Elizabeth's godfather. And there's a liturgy in English. And this may sound to people who have no interest in religion, who couldn't care less about the Church of England, as something that's kind of peripheral and irrelevant.
It absolutely is not. Because by establishing this, Elizabeth is establishing the fundamentally Protestant character of England as a polity. And this, of course, will have a massive influence, not just on English and British politics, but on global politics. Because from this moment stems the fundamentally Protestant character, for instance, of the United States of America.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Elizabeth I face in her early reign?
And they're questions on which Elizabeth and Cecil have very different points of view. And Cecil finds to his fury that Elizabeth is almost impossible to pin down on them.
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In the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin. So that was Elizabeth I, and she was answering a House of Commons petition in early 1559. And the MPs had taken a break from arguing about religious fancy dress to press an issue on which all of them could agree, which is basically they said, come on,
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Chapter 5: How did Elizabeth I navigate her religious policies amidst political pressures?
And this is a treaty that is signed by himself in person. He's written up to the Scottish capital, but also by Scottish and French representatives. And because it's signed in Edinburgh, it's called the Treaty of Edinburgh. And basically it gives Cecil everything he had dreamed of getting. So the French agree to withdraw from Scotland. They are gone.
But even more crucially, the French recognize Elizabeth as queen. And so that then essentially kind of kneecaps any prospect of Mary Queen of Scots having French support for her claim to the English throne against Elizabeth.
And then a month after the Treaty of Edinburgh, there's another amazing triumph for Cecil because the Scottish Parliament meets and effectively disestablishes the Catholic Church, repudiates the papal supremacy, enshrines Protestantism as a state religion in Scotland. And this dream that Cecil has had of a Protestant island, of England and Scotland united in a kind of
the commonality of true religion seems almost to have been achieved. And these are two absolutely decisive victories, and they serve to keep Mary kind of in her box. Because with the French recognition of her claim to the English throne gone, what is she getting out of the French alliance?
And the seal is set on her effective impotence as a player in French politics at the end of 1560, when her husband dies of an exploding ear. People who listen to our episode on Mary Queen of Scots may remember that pus starts shooting out of his ear and his nostrils, and it's all very horrible. So she is now no longer queen in France. The game is up there.
And so in August, 1561, she returns to Scotland. And there she finds that her kingdom is firmly in the grip of a Protestant establishment. This is Cecil's other great victory. He's helped to establish godly religion in the heart of Mary Queen of Scots' kingdom. And Mary Queen of Scots, when she arrives in Edinburgh, does not do a Mary Tudor. She does not attempt to roll this back.
She does not attempt to reinstitute Catholicism. And so Scotland remains Protestant despite having a Catholic queen. And this enables it to constitute a crucial building block in Cecil's strategy for keeping Elizabethan Protestantism in England secure.
So this unitary Protestant identity that Scotland and England now share enables a diplomatic alliance between these two old rivals, England and Scotland.
antichrist basically is being kept at bay and at the same time cecil's mistress is more secure on her throne so it's brilliant win win win that's great because that's everything we want because it basically paves the way for the creation of the kingdom of gate britain eventually more than a century later but also uh we love keeping the antichrist at bay so that's that's great news however
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