Hello everybody and welcome to the History of England episode 289 Elizabeth Regina.

Now after the last couple of episodes I felt there was an unfinished business. I'd gone for a rather crude

dramatic approach by jumping ahead from Mary's death to Elizabeth's pre-coronation procession

on the facile and even reprehensible grounds that it's fun. And even the historiography I'd

presented was only partially baked since I would like now to give you some advanced warning

of the major themes in Elizabeth's reign and some different interpretations folks have

had on them. So you can then keep a notebook by your side to decide which of the arguments

you think makes most sense. If it makes it any better try to think of the previous episodes

as a massive party where everyone left at 4 o'clock in the morning and this episode

is the morning after with all the plates and balloons and streamers to be taken down and

all the jelly and ice cream to be dug out of the carpet. By the end everything will

be neatly packed away, I promise. Let us first complete the story of the story as it were

the historiography. Elizabeth's reign has a few themes which run like threads throughout

it so that it has deal with a few of them. Then we might start with the angle that

it's become most popular recently the impact on Elizabeth's reign of gender. That has

returned briefly to 1066 and all that just for a moment if you all forgive me, where there

is a revealing gender confusion in the Elizabethan essay question 2. In what ways was Elizabeth

a bad man but a good queen? The whole question of how gender affected politics and Elizabeth's

life is of course one of the most fascinating and enduring of the reign. First, there's

a question of how being a woman affected contemporary views of Elizabeth's right to rule

and her popularity. This is a conversation which is almost impossible to start with that

bringing up John Knox. John Knox obviously kicked off the reign on a conciliatory note

...