Dönem: Erken Modern

Decline of Spain

Venedikli elçi diyor ki “Spain cannot exist unless relieved by others, nor can the rest of the world exist without the money of Spain.” İspanya krallığı amerika kolonilerinden gelen altın ve gümüşle parasal olarak zenginleşiyor. Ama üretim yok, bu yüzden zenginleşen soylu ispanyollar lüks ihtiyaçlarını ingiliz, hollanda ve fransız üreticilerinden karşılıyor. İspanya parası dışarıya kaçıyor. Para ispanya iç ekonomisinde dönmüyor, düşmanlarını zengin ediyor. Toprakları da aşırı verimli değil, artisanları çok yok. “Riches of the Americas provided Spain with purchasing power but ultimately they stimulated the development of Holland, England, France and other European countries.”

Crusade ve hristiyanlık inancıyla akdenizde Osmanlıya karşı, kuzeyde Low Countries’de protestanlara karşı olan mücadelede askeri harcamalar aşırı arttı. Bu harcamaların ekonomik olarak geri kazanımı olmadı.

“Moreover, this artificial prosperity had induced many to abandon the land; schools had multiplied, but they had served mostly to produce a half-educated intellectual proletariat who scorned productive industry and manual labor and found positions in the clergy and in the bloated state bureaucracy, both of which served above all to disguise unemployment. Spain in the seventeenth century was heavily in debt and lacked entrepreneurs and artisans but had an overabundance of bureaucrats, lawyers, priests, beggars and bandits. And the country sank into a dispirited decline.”

Clothing ve Social Class

Early modern authorities saw it as their duty to stabilize society and therefore often played a cat-and-mouse game with people who aspired to a higher social status, or at least to the material culture and outward symbols of such a status. Since clothing was the most visible marker of social rank, the most obvious attempts to transcend social status involved fabrics, colors, and jewelry that were supposed to be exclusive to a higher social class. In an attempt to stabilize society and make the social hierarchy visible at all times, early modern authorities enacted sumptuary laws, clothing ordinances, and other measures of social disciplining. The fact that such rules and regulations were frequently ignored shows that early modern society was in flux and that people tried to show off beyond their social status, sometimes even more than they could afford.

Elizabeth Aslında Queen Mary of Scots’u Öldürmek İstemiyor

On 1 February 1587, after weeks of unrelenting pressure, she took up her pen and signed the order. Cecil immediately had the document sealed and despatched to Fotheringhay Castle, where Mary was beheaded a week later. It was over. But Elizabeth resisted still. She wept and raged, and for days refused to eat or sleep. Cecil, her ‘Spirit’, was banished from her presence for months.

Darnley Öldürülüyor ve Queen Mary of Scots, İngiltereye Kaçıyor

in February 1567 a gunpowder blast ripped through the Edinburgh house in which Darnley was staying. Darnley himself was found dead in a garden forty feet away, his corpse intact and unmarked by the explosion. Two months later, with Mary’s reputation already stained by whispers suggesting she might have been involved in her husband’s assassination, she was abducted by the chief suspect in the murder, the Protestant lord James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Three weeks after that, Mary and Bothwell were married. With this incendiary union, Mary’s reign entered a death-spiral. Bothwell’s enemies armed against him. In June they captured Mary, while her husband fled into exile. A month later, having just miscarried Bothwell’s baby, Mary was forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son. And then in 1568, after a botched attempt to retake her throne, she escaped south, across the border to England.

But it was not easy to solve a problem like Mary. And the ramifications of the Scottish queen’s presence in England became infinitely more dangerous on 25 February 1570, when Pope Pius V chose to speak from St Peter’s chair in support of the failed northern rising. The papal bull Regnans in Excelsis formally pronounced a sentence of excommunication against Elizabeth, declaring ‘the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime’ to be a usurper, depriving her of her title to the throne, and ordering her subjects to renounce their allegiance.32 It remained to be seen whether Elizabeth’s pursuit of security through watchful inaction could survive this declaration of religious war.

Queen Mary of Scots, Dudley Yerine Darnley ile Evleniyor

When Dudley received his earldom, the Scots ambassador had made diplomatic noises about his qualities as a man and a royal servant, but Elizabeth, in response, had been sceptical. ‘You like better of yonder long lad’, she said, pointing to the young Henry, Lord Darnley, who was attending on the new earl.29 As so often, the queen’s caustic quip was even sharper than it seemed. Darnley – a tall, pretty eighteen-year-old – was the son of Margaret Douglas, daughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret by her second, non-royal marriage. He was therefore first cousin to Mary of Scotland, with a claim to the English throne to parallel hers. And in 1565 it was Darnley, not Dudley, whom Mary decided to marry.

Darnley, it turned out, was weak, immature and spoilt, a narcissistic drunk whose vainglorious ambitions made him both a destabilizing force and an easy mark amid the religious and political faction-fighting of the Scots court.

İngiltere Desteğiyle İskoçya Protestanlaşıyor

In Mary’s absence, however, Scotland had changed a great deal. Her mother was now dead. Over the course of 1559–60, a powerful coalition of Scots nobles had moved to reject both Catholicism and the French alliance, driving out the French garrisons stationed in the kingdom and establishing a new Protestant regime – all with help from England, masterminded by Cecil despite Elizabeth’s initial reluctance to commit to the risks and the costs of military intervention.

Robert Dudley ve Elizabeth I İlişkisi

Robert Dudley had known Elizabeth since they were children. Like her, he had only narrowly survived the political turmoil of Mary’s reign that had killed his father, the Duke of Northumberland, and his brother, Jane Grey’s husband Guildford.

The office to which Elizabeth appointed him in November 1558 made him the only man publicly permitted to touch the queen, when he helped her mount and dismount her horse. his wife Amy lived in the country, while Dudley was constantly in attendance on the queen. On 8 September Amy Dudley was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs at her country home. Her neck was broken. There was no way of telling whether she had fallen, or deliberately sought to harm herself, or if she had been pushed; But among the causes of Elizabeth’s sorrow and tribulation, both personal and political, was the fact that her father had married her mother for love and lust, and then killed her. The connection between sex and violent death was inscribed deep in her history, and here, in Amy Dudley’s end, was another variation on the theme. Instead, she offered Dudley up as a husband for another queen. Remarkably, in a world where female rule remained a startling anomaly, Scotland as well as England now had a female sovereign. So far, the life of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots,

Robert Dudley, muhtemelen Elizabeth ile evlenmek için karısını öldürttü. Bu gelişme Elizabeth’i korkuttu çünkü babası Henry VIII de Elizabeth’in anası Anne Boleyn’e kötü davranmıştı. Çocukluk travması tetiklenmiş olabilir.

İspanya’nın Olası Protestan İngiltere’ye Karşı Stratejisi

And if thirty-nine-year-old Mary were not, after all, to bear a child, then Elizabeth took on a vital new importance for the queen’s husband. Philip wanted a Catholic England; but, even more than that, he wanted England kept out of the arms of France, with whom his father’s Habsburg Empire was at war. The next Catholic heir to his wife’s throne was the young Mary, Queen of Scots, currently living at the French court as the intended bride of the dauphin. If support for the bastard heretic Elizabeth as England’s next queen was what it took to prevent the kingdom being subsumed into a new French empire, then that was a price Philip was willing to pay.

Mary Queen of Scots, Fransız kralıyla evli. İspanyol Philip’in eşi Mary yaşlandı ve veliaht doğuramayacak. Varisi ise Protestan Elizabeth. İskoç Mary Katolik olmasına rağmen Fransa ile ilişkisi var diye İspanyol Philip Fransa’nın güçlenmesini önlemek için Elizabeth’in başa geçmesine razı oldu. Devlet yönetimi artık din işlerinden daha önemli.

Henry VIII’in Sıradan İnsanlara Mevki Vermesi

Of Henry’s strengths, the most notable were his ability to lead and inspire men, and his willingness to promote servants of low birth such as Wolsey and Cromwell to the highest positions because their talents deserved it. Of his character deficiencies, the greatest were his insatiable greed and invasive demands of allegiance. But for all his self-contradictions, Henry VIII was still the most remarkable ruler ever to sit on the English throne.

Fransa Kralının Esir Düşmesi ve İngiltere-HRE

in February that year, news arrived of Charles’s triumph at the Battle of Pavia: Francis had been captured and his army wiped out. The body of Richard de la Pole, the Yorkist exile who had fought at Pavia for Francis, was found where he had fallen – news that gave Henry double cause for jubilation. On hearing that Francis had been taken prisoner, Henry rejoiced all the more and sought to revive the Great Enterprise without delay. ‘Now is the time,’ he enthused to visiting diplomats, ‘for the emperor and myself to devise the means of getting full satisfaction from France. Not an hour is to be lost.’ But Charles’s victory was complete: he ordered Francis to be taken in chains to Madrid and refused to listen further to Henry. Anxious to stop fighting, for he too was now running low on cash, Charles even ditched his engagement to Mary Tudor, marrying instead his cousin Isabella, the Infanta of Portugal. An indignant Henry countered that not only did he expect to be restored to the role of arbitrator of Christendom he had briefly played after the Treaty of Universal Peace, but that he expected Charles to send the captured Francis to England. Alternatively, Henry wanted Charles to meet him in Paris and watch him being crowned King of France.