Free All the Queen's Men by Peter Brimacombe Page A

experiences and observations during the time her half-sister Mary was on the throne. Subsequently, it was the Pope and Catholic Spain which became antagonistic towards her , rather than the other way round.
    Elizabeth was equally wary of the rising tide of Puritanism that was threatening to engulf Europe and becoming such a strident voice within her own Parliament. The anti-feminist utterances of the Scottish Presbyterian John Knox were to rouse her to a particular fury. Although Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women , was essentially directed at Mary, Queen of Scots, the fact that this book had been published in the year that Elizabeth came to the throne meant that she always regarded Knox’s diatribe as a personal attack on herself.
    More fundamentally, it was the Queen’s pragmatic nature, coupled with a deep-rooted conservatism that guided her thinking on religious issues in as far as they affected her kingdom. On the one hand, her personal inclination to adopt a largely secular view on religious matters induced a revulsion towards what she saw as the slavish dogma of Roman Catholicism. On the other hand, her instinctive desire to maintain the status quo on almost everything led her to regard with acute alarm the radical concepts that had first been unleashed in continental Europe by Martin Luther and Jean Calvin.
    As her reign progressed, philosophical considerations were overtaken by practicalities as Catholic Spain developed into England’s greatest enemy and provided the biggest threat to her national security. The dividing lines between religion and politics became confused and blurred – indeed, both Philip of Spain and Elizabeth’s own Principal Secretary, the abrasive Sir Francis Walsingham, regarded the approaching conflict between their respective nations not so much as a titanic military encounter between two major powers but as a new crusade between the forces of goodness and light and those of eternal darkness as ideological adversaries manoeuvred endlessly for the moral high ground.
    In many respects, the late 1570s and 1580s represented Elizabeth’s finest years, particularly the euphoric period after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The image of Elizabeth at the height of her reign is brilliantly captured in the magnificent icon-like portraits of her painted during this glorious period, pictures such as George Gower’s Armada Portrait, the Ermine Portrait by William Segar and Marcus Gheeraert’s sumptuous Rainbow Portrait which Sir Robert Cecil had commissioned and has remained in the possession of the Cecil family ever since. Today it hangs at Hatfield House, Robert Cecil’s former home. These works, together with Nicholas Hilliard’s outstanding miniature painted around 1595, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, all convey a universal glorification of the Queen, full of shimmering imagery, allegorical detail and all-powerful majestic splendour.
    Though Elizabeth was essentially the last of the great English medieval monarchs, the last of the nation’s rulers able to control the kingdom by sheer force of personality and unchallenged authority, she never had to put that authority on the line. Her success came essentially through adopting middle-of-the-road policies on all the important issues and avoiding extremism or confrontation with her loyal subjects at all costs. Conservative and cautious she may well have been, sometimes to a maddening degree, yet patience, persistence and supreme fortitude in the hour of maximum danger inevitably paid off, as under her guidance England progressively moved from being a medieval kingdom into a modern state. At the same time, pride in the nation and a sense of patriotism became a collective feature of her citizens, particularly in the glory years that followed the defeat of the Spanish Armada in the summer of 1588. This was a major event during Elizabeth’s reign, where