The Foreign Policy of Elizabeth I

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.