ABSTRACT
The politics of Elizabethan England was dominated by events which did not happen. With hindsight, the 44 years of Elizabeth’s reign appear to be a time of amazing political stability. The faces remained the same: William Cecil, later Lord Burleigh, was Elizabeth’s right-hand man until his death in 1598. Even thereafter, despite the tumultuous rise and fall of her young favourite the earl of Essex, William’s younger son Robert Cecil ensured that there was more continuity than change. Religious policy scarcely changed throughout the reign. The most pressing question of high politics – the queen’s marriage – was eventually resolved by inaction, when it finally became clear that she would not marry at all. Elizabeth’s foreign policy was not quite so static, but its themes were consistent and can be quickly summarised: she was poor and she knew it; and she had no interest in crusades or martial glory, conceiving of foreign affairs as an old-fashioned dance of rival dynasties rather than an existential clash of irreconcilable religious opposites. She spent most of her reign resisting cries for intervention to defend her fellow Protestants, beleaguered in Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, and when she did succumb, she did so to the most minimal extent possible. Only in the 1580s was she finally sucked in by the Continental wars of religion. It was also in the late 1580s that she was forced – again after two decades of resistance – finally to end the saga of Mary, queen of Scots, which had dominated domestic politics for nearly 30 years.
