The Great Queen: parts 1 and 2
Four centuries after the death of Elizabeth I, does her reign have anything to teach us about the present?
Glorianas: life under Elizabeth I was nasty, brutish and short; but are we living less sustainably in the time of Elizabeth II than we were then? Photo: ALAMY
By Ian Mortimer
3:29PM BST 30 Mar 2012
Which queen of England came to the throne at the age of 25, and lived longer than any previous English monarch? A clue: she assumed the titles "Supreme Governor of the Church of England" and "Defender of the Faith" but despite this, and even though the great majority of her subjects remained loyal to her, her reign saw many people express the most profound religious doubts, and a minority took up arms against her in the name of religion.
As queen she travelled widely and, in her name, the national flag was planted in remote corners of the globe. She witnessed a revolution in popular music, and saw architectural innovation in buildings that soared higher than before and made use of huge expanses of glass. In London, housing pressures were extreme, with many immigrants coming from the Continent.
Under her governments, politicians grappled with the concept of an independent Scotland, there was a resurgence of the Welsh language, and English troops were sent to Ireland. The nation also fought a series of short overseas conflicts, which included (in the 31st year of her reign), sending a great war fleet against a Spanish-speaking state, for the sake of increased influence in the Atlantic…
As you probably realise, the foregoing is carefully worded to apply equally to the reigns of both Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. Those old enough can probably remember the comparisons with Elizabeth I at the accession of the present queen, as people looked forward to a new political, cultural and economic golden age. And in some ways that optimism was justified.
The first Queen Elizabeth conducted her progresses around the country and had lands claimed for her in the New World: she had Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake. The present Queen Elizabeth has travelled the globe; her reign saw the successful conquest of Everest and Sir Ranulph Fiennes's achievements. Elizabeth I's reign saw the tremendous outpouring of popular music in the 1590s, as English composers sought to outdo each other with the production of a stream of madrigals and airs; in the Sixties, Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richards took the places of John Dowland, Thomas Morley, John Wilby and Thomas Weelkes. The English Armada (launched the year after the Spanish one) and the Task Force sent to the Falklands both occurred in the 31st year of their respective sovereigns' reigns. Both were concerned with preserving English influence in the Atlantic, the former (unsuccessfully) in the Azores, the latter in the Falklands.
Scott centenary: Cold comforts in Scott's winter palace
Britain's original information revolution
Yearning for history
Kensington Palace's revamped state apartments
The year Anthony Seldon wishes he'd seen: 1928
Anthony Horowitz's dinner party from history
To a certain extent this is just historical trainspotting, looking for coincidences across time and noting them down. But there are more profound things to be learnt from a comparison of the two reigns. Take population expansion, for example: this was no less important a matter for 16th-century commentators than it is today: even though the population of England was only about four million – about 8 per cent of its present-day total.
Many writers bewailed the increased number of people in every town in the 1590s. Building new houses on the "green belt" was a touchy subject even then, when the "green belt" started at Drury Lane. Good Queen Bess herself prohibited further extensions of the suburbs. As a result, the huge numbers that flocked into the city caused buildings to become higher – five, six or even seven storeys – and standards of living within them declined.
Both reigns saw unprecedented technological and scientific development. In the 16th century science was called "natural philosophy" and, before Elizabeth's accession in 1558, it was a relatively slow-changing body of knowledge. The appearance of a new comet in 1572 and the spread of Copernican ideas caused natural philosophers such as Dr John Dee and Thomas Digges to make advances in mathematics and astronomy. An Englishman, Thomas Harriot, depicted the surface of the moon – as viewed through a telescope – before Galileo. And it was an Englishman, William Gilbert, the father of the study of magnetism, who made experiments with an unseen force that he named "electricitas" and established that the Earth is itself a magnet and outer space is a vacuum.
The interesting thing is that the shift from natural philosophy to modern science is not the triumph of rationalism over darkness and superstition. As natural philosophy made advances under Elizabeth I, so too did religion and the study of the occult.
Today, science and religion are poles apart, but in the 16th century many scientific experiments were made for religious reasons – men wanted to learn more of the secrets of God's world. Scientific discoveries were a by-product of religious enthusiasm: the great herbals of the late 16th century are just one result.
As the relationship between religion and science shows, although the similarities between the two reigns are interesting, it is the differences that carry the most meaning. The real changes are to be found not in cosmetic things, but in the very substance of society: for example, health, equality and sustainability.
Plague killed a quarter of the population of London in 1563, and at various other times it wiped out 10 to 25 per cent of the population of most towns and cities. There was no cure. Influenza was almost as bad: it killed 5 per cent of the nation in about 18 months in 1557-9 (that is proportionally more than were killed by the influenza outbreak of 1918-19 and the First World War put together).
Life expectation at birth was between 35 and 40 (today it is twice as long). The median age of the whole population was about 21; today it is 39. People had far less experience to guide them in making decisions; they were accordingly more hot-headed and violent, and death was never far away from your door. Most parents could expect to see half their children die.
Equality is something of a catch-all term. The right to vote is important, but more important is having enough to eat. That did not exist in the early part of Elizabeth's reign. Married women did not have the right to own property, or the right to carry on a trade independently, or the right not to be beaten or raped by their husbands, or the right to make a will. With such wonderful portraits of the first Elizabeth all around us, we forget how deeply prejudiced society was against women.
It was equally prejudiced against the poor, the young, the sick and the old. The differences between the "haves" and the "have nots" today are largely financial; in the Elizabethan period the differences were more physical. Today even the poorest 5 per cent almost all have access to shelter, warmth, clean water, food for their children and a lavatory. In stark contrast, in the 1590s, people regularly starved to death in the streets. It was against the law to offer homeless people shelter if they were not from the same parish. First they were forced out of the parish; then, unable to work, they fell into stealing to get enough money to eat. When caught, they were normally tried and hanged. Only at the end of the reign did the Poor Law start to remedy this situation.
The idea that one man or woman is worth as much as any other barely existed in 16th-century society. As a result, extreme cruelty could be officially sanctioned. Torturing people in the name of the state was very much an Elizabethan pastime. Criminals were routinely killed by hanging or, in the case of treasonable women, burning at the stake. Male traitors had their guts cut out and burnt in front of their eyes prior to being killed. People refusing to plead in court were crushed to death.
Men were expected to beat their children and servants, and masters their apprentices, to teach them discipline. The humiliation of moral offenders, such as adulterers, was common and widely approved of. Women and children who forgot their manners could expect to be flogged; slanderers could expect to have their ears sliced off in the pillory; women could be ducked on a ducking stool for simply being a scold.
Most people would agree that a society that is unsustainable is precarious, if not doomed. This brings us to the third fundamental difference between the two reigns. While each individual life was precarious under Elizabeth I, under Elizabeth II it is the whole of society that is vulnerable. In the first Elizabethan period, there was a firewood shortage; and there was a land shortage in towns as the population grew; but almost all the resources that an individual consumed were naturally replaceable.
In Elizabeth I's England, food was by and large produced where it was consumed. Today very few parishes can provide sufficient food to sustain their parishioners. Where I live in Devon, in a rural parish of 7,000 acres, the only arable field is for cattle fodder. Nothing is farmed here but sheep and bullocks. And one could say the same for the production of building materials and leather products, brewing, tailoring, vehicle manufacture – all those things that a community used to supply. Specialisation has left us wholly dependent on one fossil fuel, petrol, to sustain our entire existence.
While most people think of change as technological, a far greater difference lurks in the fact that, for the first time in the history of the world, we have allowed our communities to become helpless.
The things that have remained with us from the first Elizabeth's reign will probably be with us for many centuries to come, in some form or other. The differences are quite another matter. Maintaining the advantages we enjoy over our Tudor forebears in a sustainable way is surely the greatest challenge of our age.
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England, by Ian Mortimer (Bodley Head, £20) is available from Telegraph Books for £18 plus £1.25 p&p. Please call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
The beauty of abandoned buildings
Swiss military bunkers
The Royal Family's war years
Waterloo Commemorations
Gallipoli memorial service on ANZAC day
Cave paintings recreated
The UK's biggest purpose built air raid shelter