When Elizabeth took her place as Queen of England in 1558 she inherited a nation in disarray. The religious reformation of her father, Henry, had been a fierce and often brutal struggle in which much of the beauty and cultural excellence of the Catholic churches and monasteries was destroyed in a bid to rid the country of superstition and foreign dominance from the Church of Rome. A lot of the good was thrown out with the bad. The reign of her half-brother Edward which followed Henry's was if anything even more extreme in its anti-catholic tendencies, and did every bit as much damage to the cultural heritage of the nation as did the worst ravages of Henry's troops and commissioners. Then the counterreformation began with the reign of Mary - the daughter of Henry's first marriage to Katherine of Aragon. This was a Catholic back-lash that was cruel and dreadful - with hundreds of innocent men women, and even children, being burned at the stake for their Protestant beliefs.
Elizabeth was determined to settle things by establishing a regime that tolerated all religions and beliefs providing they were not counter to political stability. 'We have no wish to open windows into men’s' souls' was her famous quotation at the time.
Her views were by no means universally accepted, however, especially as time went on and as political realities began to set in. England was regarded overseas, and especially in the catholic strongholds of Italy and Spain, as a dangerous heretical nation that should be quelled, if not destroyed. Therefore it was widely thought at the time that stability could only be achieved and maintained if there was one religion for all. William Cecil, Elizabeth's chief Minister is reported as having said that the State: "... could never be in safety where there was a toleration of two religions. For there is no enmity so great as that for religion; and therefore they that differ in the service of their God can never agree in the service of their country."
Elizabeth took Cecil's counsel on board most of the time, and was guided by him greatly. We can reasonably assume these would have been her views also in time, especially as the various plots to overthrow her or even assassination began to be discovered - culminating in the Spanish Armada of 1588.
Elizabeth was, however, an immensely intelligent and forward thinking woman. Even at the heights of the plotting, she remained tolerant of other religions, and even of practicing Catholics - the composer William Byrd, for example, who was allowed to retain his faith and even to compose religious works of a strong catholic persuasion without interference. She was also remarkably tolerant of spiritual and occult practices, particularly where these were conducted by those she trusted - as we see in her life-long friendship with the astrologer and alchemist John Dee. These were thought to be legitimate means towards learning about nature - the science of the times. Astrology was studied by most learned men and women in the 16th Century, and was not in any sense associated with fatalistic or simplistic superstition. The world was seen as a vitally interconnected organism, in which all things resonated with every other. It is an attitude that has been summed up well in our own age by the great psychiatrist Carl Jung when he stated that 'whatever is born of this moment in time has the qualities of this moment in time.' In other words all things share in the present and resonate together. We would call this a mystical approach today, but in Elizabeth's time it was simply the norm.
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