The Last Decade of Elizabeth I

When the Spanish ambassador to England reported to his master in December 1558 about Queen Elizabeth and her newly established government, he lamented that ‘the kingdom is entirely in the hands of young folks, heretics and traitors’. By the 1590s, the situation had changed radically. Although the Spanish still believed that Elizabeth’s Protestant regime comprised heretics and traitors, England was no longer in the hands of ‘young folks’. Indeed, in the eyes of men and women who were born in the 1560s and ’70s, Elizabeth’s government now felt more like a gerontocracy, run almost entirely by grey-beards and presided over by an aged queen whose continuing hold on life and power seemed both remarkable and disconcerting.