Abstract
Three months after the accession of Elizabeth Tudor, a memorandum on the relationship between England and its close neighbours was addressed to her secretaries of state by the elder statesman Lord Paget. He had served her father, brother and sister in high office but was now ailing and in retirement, unable to travel to Court without danger to his health. Perhaps he had been asked to put the fruits of his experience on paper. Paget had no doubt that there was a ‘natural enmity’ between England and France, and that this dictated more than ever ‘the necessity of friendship with the House of Burgundy’, which ruled over the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands. Two underlying assumptions he did not specifically mention: first, that between them the French and the Netherlanders controlled the north-west European littoral, from which an invasion of England might most easily be launched; and, second, that English foreign trade was most intimately bound up with the commodity traffic centred on the thriving commercial metropolis of Antwerp. It was here that most English textile products, comprising the bulk of the kingdom’s exports, passed from the hands of members of the Company of Merchants Adventurers to those of their foreign buyers. From the export tax on English woollen cloths the Queen derived most of her assured revenue, so that on the security of the cloth trade there hung not merely a measure of social stability but the financial strength of the English Crown and the international prestige this engendered. There is no reason to doubt that these two premises were crystal clear in the mind of the new queen and her chief councillors.
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Bibliography
The basic sources of information about the foreign policy of Elizabeth I are the letters she and her ministers and envoys exchanged with their counterparts in foreign countries and also with each other. Many have perished, but what survives is of vast bulk. Much of it is comprised by the State Papers at the PRO; but there are important portions at the BL Department of Manuscripts, and at Hatfield House, Herts. Other archive centres in England and abroad also hold many documents of interest.
Selections from these original documents have been printed by a succession of editors since the seventeenth century, the most recent contribution being E. I. Kouri, ‘Elizabethan England and Europe: Forty Unprinted Letters from Elizabeth I to Protestant Powers’, BIHR. Special Supplement 12 (1982). During the last century and more, a methodical and pertinacious attempt has been made to calendar, list and index the State Papers Foreign for the reign of Elizabeth I at the PRO, and thus render them more readily serviceable for historians. The first volume, covering the years 1559–60, was published in 1863; the most recent, for 1591–2, in 1980. For the last ten years of the reign the State Papers Foreign remain uncalendared and unindexed, which helps to explain the comparative neglect of this decade by historians.
The study of Elizabethan policy from the documents was promoted by J. A. Froude in his History of England 153–88. 12 vols (1856–70) VII–XII.
His diligence, honesty and literary skill, though not his judgement, have always attracted respect. The final years of the reign have been described in E. P. Cheyney, A History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth. 2 vols (1914). There are surveys of foreign policy in R. B. Wernham, Before the Armada. The Growth of English Foreign Policy 1485–1588 (1966), and After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588–1595 (Oxford, 1984), with which should be coupled his The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy (Berkeley, Calif, 1980) and his essay ‘Elizabethan War Aims and Strategy’, in Elizabethan Government and Society. Essays presented to Sir John Neale. eds S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield and C. H. Williams (1961) 340–68.
Of the scores of specialised studies drawing on the original documents to elucidate one aspect or another of Elizabeth’s foreign policy, only a tiny fraction may here be mentioned. The biographies by Conyers Read are storehouses of information: Mr Secretary Walsingham and the policy of Queen Elizabeth. 3 vols (Oxford, 1925); Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (1955); Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (1960). L. Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (Oxford, 1956), covers otherwise untrodden ground. For the administrative background, there is material in A. G. R. Smith, ‘The Secretariats of the Cecils, circa 1580–1612’, EHR. LXXXIII (1968) 481–504.
Factions at Court have been investigated by W. T. MacCaffrey in The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime (1969) and Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy (Princeton, NJ, 1981). Studies of relations with individual countries include E. I. Kouri, England and the Attempts to Form a Protestant Alliance in the Late 1560s: A Case Study in European Diplomacy (Helsinki, 1981), for Germany; N. M. Sutherland, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Conspiracy of Amboise, March 1560’, EHR. LXXXI (1966) 474–89
and The Massacre of St Bartholomew and the European Conflict, 1559–1572 (1973); H. A. Lloyd, The Rouen Campaign 1590–1592 (Oxford, 1973); C. Wilson, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands (London, 1970). The contribution of the Merchants Adventurers and the City of London to the foreign policy of the Queen has been little explored: for the early years of the reign there is G. D. Ramsay, The City of London in International Politics (Manchester, 1975), while for the middle and later period it is necessary to consult R. Ehrenberg, Hamburg und England im Zeitalter der Königin Elisabeth (Jena, 1896), and L. Beutin, Hanse und Reich im handelspolitischen Endkampf gegen England (Berlin, 1929). Finally two influential articles deserve mention: C. Read, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Seizure of the Duke of Alva’s Pay-ships’, Journal of Modern History. V (1933) 443–64; and
R. B. Wernham, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Portugal Expedition of 1589’, EHR. LXVI (1951) 3–26, 194–218.
It should be borne in mind that the scholars whose works are listed above are far from unanimity in their interpretation of motives and events. More than most topics of its age, the foreign policy of Elizabeth I is likely to remain a subject for debate.
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© 1984 G. D. Ramsay
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Ramsay, G.D. (1984). The Foreign Policy of Elizabeth I. In: Haigh, C. (eds) The Reign of Elizabeth I. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17704-2_7
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