Elizabeth I (1533–1603) was Queen of England, Queen of France (in name only), and Queen of Ireland from 1558 until her death. Sometimes referred to as The Virgin Queen, as she never married. Elizabeth I was the fifth and final monarch of the Tudor dynasty (Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and her half-sister Mary I). She reigned during a period marked by increases in English power and influence worldwide and great religious turmoil within England.
Elizabeth's reign is referred to as the Elizabethan era or the Golden Age of Elizabeth. Playwrights William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson all flourished during this era; Francis Drake became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe; Francis Bacon laid out his philosophical and political views; and English colonisation of North America took place under Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Elizabeth was a short-tempered and sometimes indecisive ruler. This last quality, viewed with impatience by her counsellors, often saved her from political and marital misalliances. Like her father Henry VIII, she was a writer and poet. She granted Royal Charters to several famous organizations, including Trinity College, Dublin in 1592 and the British East India Company (1600).
Virginia, an English colony in North America and afterwards a member of the United States, was named after Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen".


The Elizabethan Era is the period of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and is often considered to be a golden age in English history. It was the height of the English Renaissance, and saw the flowering of English literature and poetry. This was also the time during which Elizabethan theatre grew and William Shakespeare, among others, composed plays that broke away from England's past style of plays. It was an age of expansion and exploration abroad, while at home the Protestant Reformation was established and successfully defended against the Catholic powers of the Continent.

The Elizabethan Age is viewed so highly because of the contrasts with the periods before and after. It was a brief period of largely internal peace (during the reign of Henry VIII there were the changes brought about by the English Reformation and after Elizabeth came the battles between Protestants and Catholics, as well as between parliament and the monarchy that would push the country into Civil War in the 1640s). The Protestant/Catholic divide was settled, for a time, by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement and parliament was still not strong enough to challenge royal absolutism.  England was also well-off compared to the other nations of Europe.

The Italian Renaissance had come to an end under the weight of foreign domination of the peninsula. France was embroiled in its own religious battles that would only be settled in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes. In part because of this, but also because the English had been expelled from their last outposts on the continent, the centuries long conflict between France and England was suspended during the Elizabethan era.
The one great rival was Spain, with which England conflicted both in Europe and the Americas in skirmishes that exploded into the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585-1604. An attempt by Philip II of Spain to invade England with the Spanish Armada in 1588 was famously defeated, but the tide of war turned against England with a disastrously unsuccessful attack upon Spain in 1589 the Drake-Norris Expedition. Thereafter Spain provided support for Irish Catholics in a draining guerilla war against England and Spanish naval and land forces inflicted a series of defeats upon English forces, which badly damaged both the English Exchequer and economy that until then had been so carefully restored under Elizabeth's prudent guidance. English colonization and trade would be frustrated until the signing of the Treaty of London the year following Elizabeth's death.
England during this period had a centralized, well organized, and effective government, largely a result of the reforms of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Economically the country began to benefit greatly from the new era of Atlantic trade. The Elizabethan era also saw England begin to play a leading role in the slave trade. Despite the heights achieved during the era, less than 40 years after the death of Elizabeth the country was to descend into the English Civil War.

Modern historians and biographers in post-imperial Europe have tended to take a far more dispassionate view of the Tudor period. Elizabethan England was not particularly successful in a military sense during the period. The economic well being of the country has also been called into question.

Take into account the following facts, for instance:

§  Population boom: the population doubled during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I (1520: 2 million, 1600: 4 million)

§  Rising unemployment and inflation ® Rents and food prices rise (due to several bad harvests) ® villagers are forced to leave and seek work in towns

Reasons for poverty:

1. The dissolution of the monasteries in the 1540s brought an end to organised poor relief...!

2. The breakdown of the Catholic Church also brought a decline in values and moral expectations

3.  Land enclousures: common village farming lands were "privatised" by the local landlords and turned into much more profitable sheep farms (textile industry boom) ® most end up beggars completely hopeless ® they turn to crime as the only real option for most of these unfortunate people to survive

§  The government retaliated by outlawing begging and imposing severe punishments for theft to push back the quickly rising crime rate.  Begging was only tolerated within the parish that a poor person belonged to and only for the so called helpless poor (children, old people, and the disabled)

§  At last, in the 1590s the government introduces the Poor Laws: each parish is made responsible for its own poor. They raised a new tax to pay for poor houses/workhouses (indoor relief) or to finance a minimum dole (outdoor relief) given to the most needy people on a regular bases. 

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The text was composed by using the relevant materials of...

1.  Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia under GNU Free Documentation Licence.

2.  http://www.tudorplace.com.ar/Documents/poors.htm