The essentials of the course are introduced. Elizabeth is introduced by way of a short history of England 1485-1558.

Elizabeth’s first decade and a half. The new queen’s attempts to settle questions of religion, her advisors and attendants. The persistent problems of marriage and the succession.

The fast-burning crisis of the Northern Rebellion and the slow-burning crises of Mary Queen of Scots and the Netherlands.

The triumph of the Armada moment is followed by the political and socio-economic failure of the last decade.

How was Elizabeth’s kingdom governed, and who participated in and gained from the prevailing power structures?

Elizabeth’s position was dogged by grumbling, conspiracy, sedition and outright rebellion. Were these people irrational extremists? Or were there some serious flaws within the Elizabethan regime?

How did courtier and sovereign interact, and what implications did this have for the kingdom as a whole?

Scotland and England were neighbouring kingdoms, with very different trajectories under their respective female rulers, Mary of Scots and Elizabeth of England. How did the Elizabethan regime negotiate its turbulent neighbour and facilitate the succession of a Scottish king following Elizabeth’s death in 1603?

We consider the richness of English art in the Elizabethan period, and investigate what role Elizabeth herself may have played in this flourishing.

Elizabeth faced perhaps her greatest quandary in the Netherlands, which posed the problem of either aiding Protestant rebels against a fellow prince (Philip II of Spain), or abandoning the Netherlands to the Spanish and thereby hand the initiative to England’s greatest foreign menace.

This lecture goes beyond the level of high politics and social elites to enquire into the material and spiritual lives of the ‘ordinary people’ of Elizabeth’s England, from the social structure and diet to belief in magic and astrology.

Why did Elizabethans take to the Atlantic and beyond, almost a hundred years after the pioneering enterprises of the Portuguese and Spanish, and how did they perceive their developing interests in the eastern seaboard of today’s USA?