The Elizabethan age: religion, exploration and rivalry
History · Key Stage 3 · The School
A settlement, not a solution
Elizabeth took a country split by years of religious change. Her father Henry VIII had broken with Rome. Her half-brother Edward VI pushed the church further towards Protestant beliefs. Her half-sister Mary I brought back Catholic worship and burned around 280 Protestants for their faith. The 1559 Religious Settlement made England Protestant again. But it kept some Catholic-feeling ritual too — a middle way meant to suit as many people as it could. It held together well enough. But it pleased nobody fully. Catholics who skipped church services were fined. In 1570 the Pope said killing Elizabeth was not a sin. Catholic plots against her life followed soon after.
War with Spain
Philip II of Spain was the most powerful Catholic king in Europe. He had once been married to Mary I. Relations turned sour for several reasons: religion, English help for Dutch Protestant rebels, and English raiders such as Francis Drake attacking Spanish treasure ships. Elizabeth quietly profited from this piracy while publicly denying she allowed it. In 1587 Elizabeth had her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots executed. That removed the Catholic claimant Spanish plots had wanted on the throne. Philip launched the Spanish Armada in 1588 — around 130 ships carrying an invasion force. Storms and English fireships broke the fleet apart in the Channel. It was wrecked trying to sail home round Scotland and Ireland. Fewer than half the ships made it back.
Exploration, and its other side
English sailors used the same ships for both war and exploration. Drake sailed all the way round the world between 1577 and 1580, and came home very rich. Walter Raleigh paid for a colony at Roanoke, in what is now North Carolina, in the 1580s. It was England's first try at settling America. It failed, and its colonists vanished with no confirmed reason why. These voyages are remembered as adventure. They were also the start of English settlement abroad. Through men like John Hawkins, they were also England's early part in the slave trade covered elsewhere in this unit. Both things are true of the same ships.
The old story goes like this: small, fast English ships beat a slow, clumsy Spanish fleet, and God sent a "Protestant wind" to scatter it. Elizabeth's own medal read "God blew and they were scattered". The fuller picture, from both Spanish and English logs, looks different. The English fleet was not much smaller at all. English guns did only modest damage. It was a fireship attack that broke the Armada's tight formation. Then severe storms wrecked it on the long voyage home round the north of Britain. Both English skill and bad weather mattered. Crediting only one of the two is the same mistake this subject keeps warning against.