Threats from abroad and threats at home

Slowly, through a series of minor crises, acts of piracy, sporadic peace negotiations, diplomatic initiatives and failures over a period of fifteen years from 1571, England and Spain moved closer to an ultimate confrontation. If Philip II's desire to eliminate Europe's strongest Protestant haven was his main driving force, the permanent irritation at England's penetration and harassment of his Spanish-Portuguese empire cannot have been far behind. Francis Drake, the most successful of the buccaneer-merchant-explorers, completed his circumnavigation of the globe between 1577 and 1580 and in an act of deliberate provocation to Spain, the queen knighted him in 1581 on the deck of his ship, the Golden Hind. London merchants' money had subsidised his voyage and it triumphantly symbolised the opening of the world to English enterprise. The killing of the Dutch leader, William the Silent, by Spanish agents in 1584, sharpened the anxiety of the English government. In May 1585, the Spanish seized all English shipping in the harbours of Spain and Portugal, and the Earl of Leicester was sent to Holland with an army to support the insurgent Dutch against their Spanish rulers. This military expedition was an ignominious failure and Leicester was recalled, though he did not lose the queen's favour. In 1587 a naval expedition under Drake destroyed the Spanish fleet at Cadiz.

Madrid's invasion plans, already well advanced, had to be put back for a year. In February 1587, in the wake of a further assassination plot against the queen, organised by Anthony Babington, a Derbyshire landowner, Mary of Scotland was beheaded. Only a muted protest came from north of the border, but the act made war with Spain inevitable, which is perhaps why Elizabeth both wished and un-wished it in a way that has always been discreditable to her own reputation.

The last years of elizabeth

England was saved from Spanish conquest, and the struggle in the Netherlands continued, with English subsidies sent to support the Dutch rebels and the French Protestants, and small-scale military expeditions. These were sometimes repaid in kind, as when the Spanish attacked and destroyed Penzance. Warfare broke out in Ireland.

The Puritan strain of parliament reflected a strong trend in the country at large. Stimulated by the long warfare with Spain and France, which promoted an anti-Catholic spirit, encouraged by the establishment of a Calvinist church in Scotland, the English church found in many of its clergy and adherents a powerful trend to accentuate its own differences to Catholicism. Elizabeth was opposed to the Puritan trend both on religious grounds and because it represented a growing threat to her governorship of the church. The queen's management left much to be desired. Many parishes had no priest; the queen left bishoprics vacant while their revenues went to the crown; and though the Church of England contained both saintly and spiritual men, like Richard Hooker, whose writings On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity did much to spell out the philosophical basis of Anglicanism, it was administered in a thoroughly materialistic spirit by officials and clergy whose prime aim was to make money from it and resist any change which imperilled their wealth and prospects. Any attempts through parliament to change things were vetoed by the queen.