Management and control

One factor in population growth was immigration. In the Netherlands, the eighty-year-long struggle to free the Dutch provinces from Spanish rule had begun in 1566. In France there was fierce conflict between the Protestants, known as Huguenots, and Catholics. Refugees from these troubles began to make their way into England, and in most cases they brought skills and trades which added to the country's resources, and depleted those of their countries of origin.

Elizabethan England was thus a far from peaceful, prosperous and united country. Internal stresses and external pressures were a permanent aspect of life for the queen and her government. Such a country required a far more intensive pattern of legislation and control than ever before, and a greater prescriptiveness was noticeable in the actions of government. A new law required people to eat fish twice a week. This was not on dietary grounds but to support a growing fishing industry which in turn provided a stream of experienced seamen for the Royal Navy and for merchant shipping. Reaching out to the Newfoundland Banks, the fishing industry also provided a link with the toehold settlements in the north of the New World. In 1563 the Statute of Labourers set out the pattern of work and reward for artisans and craftsmen, enforcing seven-year apprenticeships and giving special advantages to skilled crafts. Wages were to be fixed on a local basis by the justices of the peace, with the Council ready to step in if there was serious complaint. A new Poor Law in 1563 established a uniform parish rate to provide funds for paupers.

Council brought its decisions as proposals to parliament, and parliament usually passed them as laws, in the queen's name. But the Council's activities went further. Political insecurity, and the need to exercise wide control, meant that it employed an extensive network of spies and informants. Catholics had never accepted Elizabeth's rule as legitimate and who found the Act of Supremacy intolerable.

Mary, queen of scots

In 1568 Mary, the deposed Queen of Scots, fled from defeat by her country's Calvinist government to seek safety in England. The Scottish queen was a Catholic, who had been compelled to abdicate in favour of her baby son, James VI. By her descent from Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII and wife of James IV of Scotland, she was Elizabeth's closest living relative. Her French relations had already proclaimed her as Queen of England when Mary 1 died. Mary was nine years younger than Elizabeth, who at thirty-five was nearing the end of her child-bearing potential. The spectre of another Catholic Queen Mary caused great alarm to Elizabeth's Council. The two women never met, and for nineteen years Mary was kept in confinement, nominally on the grounds of implication in the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley. In 1569 the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland attempted a pro-Catholic rebellion which was speedily put down, but it was the first of a number of plots which eventually would cost Mary her life. In 1570 the Pope proclaimed Elizabeth a heretic and formally deposed her. It was more than a futile gesture, as it enabled her opponents to plan legally, in their terms, for her assassination. The official reaction to this open threat to the queen was the encouragement of the anti-papal, anti-Catholic feeling that would come to run deep in the English population. In 1584-85, an Act of Parliament made any Englishman ordained priest by papal authority after 1559 to be automatically guilty of treason. A hundred and forty-six priests were executed between 1584 and 1603.