The Dark Side Of Elizabethan England

The Elizabethan era is often painted as a golden age. yet, says James Sharpe, for thousands of people life was anything but golden, blighted by violence, vagrancy and crushing hunger

- James Sharpe

Spectre at the feast An allegory depicting Elizabeth I in her later years, with the figure of death looking over her shoulder – just as, in a very real sense, the threat of starvation loomed over her subjects after a series of terrible harvests

Interest in Elizabeth I and her reign (1558–1603) seems limitless, and invariably suffused with admiration an attitude epitomised in The Times of 24 March 2003, on the quatercentenary of the queen’s death:

“Tolerance found a patron and religion its balance, seas were navigated and an empire embarked upon and a small nation defended itself against larger enemies and found a voice and a purpose… Something in her reign taught us what our country is, and why it matters. And as her reign came to craft a sense of national identity that had not been found before, so she came to embody our best selves: courageous, independent, eccentric, amusing, capricious and reasonable, when reason was all. The greatest prince this country has produced was a prince in skirts.”

In an ICM poll for Microsoft Encarta at the same time, 55 per cent of respondents thought Elizabeth had introduced new foods, notably curry, into Britain, while one in 10 credited her with bringing corgis to our shores.

More soberly, in 2002 Elizabeth was one of just two women (the other, Princess Diana) in BBC Two’s list of ‘10 Greatest Britons’. Books, films, newspaper articles and plays have all played their part in polishing the Virgin Queen’s reputation. There have been many biographies (around one a year from 1927 to 1957); countless novels; and Edward German’s 1902 operetta Merrie England, whose very title tells us what Elizabethan England was apparently like. More recently the Michael Hirst/Shekhar Kapur Elizabeth movies concluded that, under Elizabeth, England became the most prosperous and powerful nation in Europe.