Elizabeth I (1558-1603 AD)
A Queen with the Heart of a King   The first Queen Elizabeth , whose name has become a synonym for the era which she dominated (1558-1603), was born in 1533 to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Called “Gloriana” by Edmund Spenser in “The Faerie Queene”, Elizabeth’s deft political skills and strong personal character were directly responsible for putting England (at the time of her accession in 1558 a weak, divided backwater far outside the mainstream of European power and cultural development) on the road to becoming a true world economic and political power and restoring the country’s lost sense of national pride. Although she entertained many marriage proposals and flirted incessantly (her closest brush with marriage came with Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester), she never married or had children.

Elizabeth inherited a tattered realm: dissension between Catholics and Protestants tore at the very foundation of society; the royal treasury had been bled dry by Mary and her advisors, Mary’s loss of Calais left England with no continental possessions for the first time since the arrival of the Normans in 1066 and many (mainly Catholics) doubted Elizabeth’s claim to the throne. Continental affairs added to her problems - France had a strong foothold in Scotland, and Spain, the strongest European nation at the time, posed a threat to the security of the realm. Elizabeth proved most calm and calculating (even though she had a horrendous temper), employing capable and distinguished men to carrying out royal prerogative.

Her first order of business was to eliminate religious unrest. Elizabeth lacked the fanaticism of her siblings (Edward VI favoured Protestant radicalism, Mary I, conservative Catholicism), which enabled her to devise a compromise that, basically, reinstated Henrician reforms. She was, however, compelled to take a stronger pro-Protestant stance when events demanded it, for two reasons: the machinations of Mary Queen of Scots and persecution of continental Protestants by the two strongholds of Orthodox Catholicism, Spain and France.

The situation with Mary Queen of Scots was most vexing to Elizabeth. Mary, in Elizabeth’s custody beginning in 1568 (for her own protection from radical Protestants and disgruntled Scots), gained the loyalty of Catholic factions and instituted several-failed assassination/overthrow plots against Elizabeth. After irrefutable evidence of Mary’s involvement in the plots came to light, Elizabeth sadly succumbed to the pressure from her advisors and had the Scottish princess executed in 1587.

The persecution of continental Protestants forced Elizabeth into war, a situation which she desperately tried to avoid. She sent an army to aid French Huguenots (Calvinists who had settled in France) after a 1572 massacre wherein over three thousand Huguenots lost their lives. She sent further assistance to Protestant factions on the continent and in Scotland following the emergence of radical Catholic groups and assisted Belgium in their bid to gain independence from Spain.

The situation came to head in 1588 after Elizabeth rejected a marriage proposal from Philip II of Spain. The indignant Spanish King, incensed by English piracy and forays in New World exploration, sent his much-feared Armada to raid England, inadvertently providing Elizabeth with an opportunity to put on public display those qualities of heart that one might not expect to find in those days, in a small, frail woman. She travelled to Tilbury, Essex, to address her troops as they awaited the coming battle with the feared Spanish naval forces. She told them, “. . . therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm . . .” As they say, the rest is history. The English won the naval battle handily, aided by some fortuitous inclement English Channel weather, and emerged as the world’s strongest naval power, setting the stage for later English imperial designs.

Elizabeth was a master of political science. She inherited her father’s supremacist view of the monarchy, but showed great wisdom by refusing to directly antagonize Parliament. She acquired undying devotion from her advisement council, who were constantly perplexed by her habit of waiting to the last minute to make decisions (this was not a deficiency in her makeup, but a tactic that she used to advantage). She used the various factions (instead of being used by them), playing one off another until the exhausted combatants came to her for resolution of their grievances. Few English monarchs enjoyed such political power, while still maintaining the devotion of the whole of English society.
Elizabeth’s reign was one of the more constructive periods in English history: literature bloomed through the works of Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare; Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh were instrumental in expanding English influence in the New World; Elizabeth’s religious compromise laid many fears to rest and de-fused a potential powder keg; fashion and education came to the fore because of Elizabeth’s penchant for knowledge, courtly behavior and extravagant dress.

Good Queen Bess, as she came to called, maintained a regal air until the day she died; a quote, from a letter by Paul Hentzen, reveals the aging queen’s regal nature: “Next came the Queen in the sixty-fifth year of her age, as we were told, very majestic; her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled; her eyes small yet black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow… she had in her ear two pearls, with very rich drops… her air was stately; her manner of speaking mild and obliging.” This regal figure surely had her faults, but she excelled at rising to challenges and emerging victorious.

Elizabeth, “Gloriana,” the last of the Tudors, died without leaving an heir at seventy years of age after a reign that had exceeded all realistic expectations for it and qualifies her to be considered in the top rank of British monarchs.

One of the strangest parts of the history of the British Empire involves that commercial venture generally known as the East India Company, though its original name when founded by royal charter on the very last day of 1600 was the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies.

As its name suggests, the company was the enterprise of London businessmen who banded together to make money importing spices from South Asia. For centuries the valuable spice trade with the East Indies (as they were long known) relied on land routes across Asia and the Middle East, but by the sixteenth century, the superior navigational technology and skills of the Portuguese for the first time permitted Europeans to cut out intermediaries and hence make themselves far greater profits.

The Spanish and Portuguese had a monopoly of the East Indies spice trade until the destruction of the Spanish Aramada in 1588, which permitted the British and Dutch to seek their share of this wealthy import business.

The company with the long name first entered the spice trade in the form of an old-fashioned or early capitalist venture, essentially conducting each voyage as a separate business venture with its own subsribers or stock-holders. This approach lasted for a dozen years, and then in 1612 the company switched to temporary joint stocks and finally to permanent joint stocks in 1657.

Supposedly a monopoly, the company evenentually faced competition from another group of English investors and merchants, and the two merged in 1708 as the United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica,

The company met with opposition from the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the Portuguese. The Dutch virtually excluded company members from the East Indies after the Amboina Massacre in 1623 (an incident in which English, Japanese, and Portuguese traders were executed by Dutch authorities), but the company’s defeat of the Portuguese in India (1612) won them trading concessions from the Mughal Empire.

The company settled down to a trade in cotton and silk piece goods, indigo, and saltpetre, with spices from South India. It extended its activities to the Persian Gulf, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.

The company’s encounters with foreign competitors eventually required it to assemble its own military and administrative departments, thereby becoming an imperial power in its own right, though the British government began to reign it in by the late eighteenth century.

Before Parliament created a government-controlled policy-making body with the Regulating Act of 1773 and the India Act eleven years later, shareholders’ meetings made decisions about Britain’s de facto colonies in the East.

The British government took away the Company’s monopoly in 1813, and after 1834 it worked as the government’s agency until the 1857 India Mutiny when the Colonial Office took full control. The East India Company went out of existence in 1873.

During its heyday, the East India Company not only established trade through Asia and the Middle East but also effectively became of the ruler of territories vastly larger than the United Kingdrom itself. In addition, it also created, rather than conquered, colonies. Singapore, for example, was an island with very few Malay inhabitants in 1819 when Sir Stamford Raffles purchased it for the Company from their ruler, the Sultan of Johor, and created what eventually became one of the world’s greatest trans-shipment ports.

British history can be traced back thousands of years. It has gone through many upheavals and significant changes in its time, and in turn it has produced a magnificent range of people and lifestyles. In some way, I use the term ‘British’ history loosely, as it does involve the individual histories of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but to all intense and purposes, I will regard it British history. On this blog, I do intend to cover lots of different aspects and timelines in British history, but the main content will be of the British Empire. The British Empire was the first genuinely global empire, an empire that ranged, at times, from the American colonies in the West, Australia and New Zealand in the East, Canada and her dominions in the North and huge chunks of Africa in the South, including Egypt and Rhodesia. These huge landmasses, and many other smaller islands and places besides, were to be shaped, controlled, dominated and otherwise brought under the dominion of a nation which, prior to colonial ambitions, was a small and perhaps dull and uninspiring set of countries. That the British Empire significantly kick-started the world into the modern era, and gave the world a unifying language. At its peak, the British Empire was the largest formal empire that the world had ever known. As such, its power and influence stretched all over the globe; shaping it in all manner of ways.  The size of the Empire was such that it was said the sun will never go down on the Empire, meaning that there was always a colony or a dominion somewhere in the world where it was daylight.This site is dedicated to analysing and explaining in easy to understand terms, the history of the British Empire.  For better or worse, the British Empire had a massive impact on the history of the world. It is for this reason that this site tries to bring to life the peoples, cultures, adventures and domination that made the Empire such a powerful institution. It is neither an apology for, nor a nostalgic reminiscence of the institution that so dominated the world for nearly two centuries. Rather, it analyses and describes the vast institution that so influenced the shape of the world that we see today. This site is not a academic site and I am not and academic either. I’m sure there are plenty of mistakes and oversights on my part; for which I apologise in advance! My interest in the subject is purely that of a personal journey of discovery; to give myself a reason to research what I regard as a fascinating subject. I welcome suggestions, arguments, submissions and any personal insights in to this subject matter. The site is in a continuous state of upgrade and expansion. Please forgive me a few dead ends and incompletions as I try to build the site up to some sort of critical mass of content. Please enjoy…

Welcome to my new blog. At the moment I am still playing around with wordpress, just to see what it can do. I have done and introduction, which is on the right, about what this blog is all about. I will hopefully start to put proper postings up soon.