The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I

238 Pages·2011·2.6 MB·English

by  Charles Beem (eds.)

QUEENSHIP AND POWER
Series Editors: Carole Levin and Charles Beem
This series brings together monographs and edited volumes from scholars specializing
in gender analysis, women’s studies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, con-
stitutional, and diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the strat-
egies that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as female regents—pursued in
order to wield political power within the structures of male-dominant societies. In addi-
tion to works describing European queenship, it also includes books on queenship as it
appeared in other parts of the world, such as East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Islamic
civilization.
Editorial Board
Linda Darling, University of Arizona (Ottoman Empire)
Theresa Earenfight, Seattle University (Spain)
Dorothy Ko, Barnard College (China)
Nancy Kollman, Stanford University (Russia)
John Thornton, Boston University (Africa and the Atlantic World)
John Watkins (France and Italy)
Published by Palgrave Macmillan
The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History
By Charles Beem
Elizabeth of York
By Arlene Naylor Okerlund
Learned Queen: The Imperial Image of Elizabeth I
By Linda Shenk
High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations
Edited by Carole Levin, Debra Barrett-Graves and Jo Eldridge Carney
The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe
By Sharon L. Jansen
The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I
By Anna Riehl
Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch
By Ilona Bell
Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth
By Anna Whitelock and Alice Hunt
The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen
By Catherine Loomis
Queenship and Voice in Medieval Northern Europe
By William Layher
The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I
Edited by Charles Beem
The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-
Century Europe
By Erin A. Sadlack
Three Medieval Queens (forthcoming)
By Lisa Benz St. John
Renaissance Queens of France (forthcoming)
By Glenn Richardson
T F R
HE OREIGN ELATIONS OF
E
LIZABETH I
Edited by
Charles Beem
THE FOREIGN RELATIONS OF ELIZABETH I
Copyright © Charles Beem, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11214-8
All rights reserved.
Chapter 7 is a revised version of “Queen Elizabeth I through Moroccan Eyes”
by Nabil Matar, originally published in the Journal of Early Modern History
12:1 (2008), pp. 55–76 (22), reprinted with the kind permission of Brill
Academic Publishers.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-29427-5 ISBN 978-0-230-11855-3 (eBook)
DOi 10.1057/9780230118553
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The foreign relations of Elizabeth I / edited by Charles Beem.
p. cm.—(Queenship and power)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Great Britain—Foreign relations—1558–1603. 2. Elizabeth I, Queen
of England, 1533–1603. 3. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Europe.
4. Europe—Foreign relations—Great Britain. 5. Islamic countries—Foreign
relations—Great Britain. 6. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Islamic
countries. I. Beem, Charles. II. Title. III. Series.
DA356.F67 2011
327.420099031—dc22 2010041066
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2011
C
ONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Notes on Contributors xiii
Part I Britain
1 Why Elizabeth Never Left England 3
Charles Beem and Carole Levin
2 Princess Cecilia’s Visitation to England, 1565–1566 27
Nathan Martin
3 The “Song on Queen Elizabeth”: Coins, Clocks, and the
Stuff of Political Satire in Dublin, 1560 45
B. R. Siegfried
Part II Europe
4 Q ueen Elizabeth’s Reaction to the St. Bartholomew’s
Day Massacre 77
Nate Probasco
5 T he Tsar and the Queen: “You Speak a Language that
I Understand Not” 101
Anna Riehl Bertolet
6 Elizabeth among the Pirates: Gender and the Politics of
Piracy in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West,
Part 1 125
Claire Jowitt
Part III Islam
7 Elizabeth through Moroccan Eyes 145
Nabil Matar
vi Contents
8 Elizabeth I and Persian Exchanges 169
Bernadette Andrea
9 Elizabeth and India 201
Nandini Das
Select Bibliography 221
Index 229
P
REFACE
The origin of this project lay in a desire to publish a hand-
ful of intriguing papers presented at the annual meet-
ing of the Elizabeth I Society in Kansas City, Missouri,
in March 2008. In the big picture of Elizabethan foreign relations,
the provocative and idiosyncratic essays that formed the core of this
volume had little to do with each other except that they all opened
portals into areas not usually contemplated or discussed within the
conventional parameters of what may be termed “Elizabethan Foreign
Relations.” Because of this, the editors of the “Queenship and Power”
book series agreed that these papers should be revised in order to
form the nucleus for a collection of studies on this generalized topic.
That said, this book makes no claim to be, in any sense, a compre-
hensive study of Elizabethan foreign relations, and the reader may
refer to the works listed in the select bibliography for more compre-
hensive discussions of various facets of Elizabethan foreign relations.
Instead, collectively, the studies included in this volume are intended
to broaden our understanding of the relations between Elizabeth and
Ireland, various European nations and rulers, pirates and privateers,
and the dynamic Islamic world of the sixteenth century, in which
Elizabeth, as an unmarried and long-lived regnant queen who never
left her kingdom, was arguably the most globally famous personage
of that century.
In some ways, the book title suggests a modern sensibility for a
subject that may not have been all that easily recognizable to the
Elizabethans. The Tudors never really had something they could
cogently label foreign policy—there was no recognized foreign min-
ister, while virtually anyone could be deputized to serve as an over-
seas liaison for the monarch in politics, religion, and commerce. As
a second rate European power, England’s sixteenth-century foreign
entanglements were far more defensive and reactive than offensive—
the major exception to this general rule were the essentially vanity
wars that Henry VIII fought in France. For the rest of the Tudors,
viii Preface
an expansive and aggressive foreign policy was beyond the kingdom’s
resources; only when she was convinced that military action was ab-
solutely necessary did Elizabeth consent to formal military opera-
tions in Scotland, France, The Netherlands, on the high seas, and
later in Ireland.
This volume brings together a collection of chapters that examine
a number of different facets of Elizabethan foreign affairs to further
illuminate how Elizabeth I of England perceived her relationships to
the world around her, how she interacted with this world, and how
the world perceived her. In this book, the contributors describe how
Elizabeth and/or her government interacted with a variety of person-
ages, pressures, and opportunities to shape a kaleidoscope of policies
that add up to something, for lack of a better term, called “foreign
relations.” Collectively, these studies reveal a queen and her kingdom
much more connected and integrated into a much wider world than
usually detected and discussed in the voluminous scholarly works
pertaining to the queen and her reign.
The chapters included in this volume have been sequenced to
follow concentric circles of relations radiating out of England and
the British isles to Europe, the Islamic world of North Africa, and
western Asia, and India. Charles Beem and Carole Levin investigate
a question not usually contemplated in works on Elizabeth and her
foreign policy, namely why she never physically journeyed beyond
her realm of England. This chapter also discusses how Elizabeth
exploited her position internationally as an entirely domestic queen.
As such, foreigners who wished to meet her had to travel to England
to do so. In the following chapter, Nathan Martin provides a unique
microhistory of inter-European relations as he describes the com-
plications surrounding the 1565 English visit of princess Cecilia of
Sweden, the brother of one of Elizabeth’s erstwhile would-be hus-
bands, king Eric of Sweden, underscoring Elizabeth’s international
renown in the early years of her reign. B. R. Siegfried concludes the
section on Britain with her study of how Elizabeth sought to aug-
ment her authority in her Irish kingdom by issuing a new coinage
stamped with her image, and by erecting three public clocks in the
city of Dublin, events framed in verse, titled, “The Song on Queen
Elizabeth.”
The second section of the book details foreign relations with var-
ious parts of Europe. Nate Probasco revisits the St. Bartholomew’s
Day Massacre of 1572 in France to offer an explanation of Elizabeth’s
compartmentalized yet pragmatic response, while Anna Riehl
Preface ix
Bertolet contributes a dramatically original and occasionally amus-
ing discussion of Elizabeth’s and Russian Tsar Ivan the IV’s “failure
to communicate.” This portion of the book concludes with literary
scholar Claire Jowitt’s incisive analysis of Thomas Heywood’s play
Fair Maid of the West to draw the theoretical connections between
Elizabeth and the successful prosecution of piracy.
The final section of the book is also the most startlingly original,
with groundbreaking discussions of Elizabethan relations with the
civilizations of Islam and India. Nabil Matar contributes a powerful
essay describing the only account of Elizabeth as perceived by the
Morocco of Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur, while Bernadette Andrea
offers an account of how Elizabeth learned to communicate with the
imperial courts of the sophisticated and cosmopolitan Islamic rivals,
Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Persia. Concluding the book is Nandini
Das’s essay concerning the efforts of Elizabeth’s government, English
merchants, and Richard Hakluyt to begin the process of creating a
commercial relationship with Mughal India, an event that presaged
the emergence of the seventeenth-century British Empire.