What Elizabethan England Can Teach Us About Reversing American Decline

Murray’s “Belmont”—”an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston” and the antipode of Fishtown—reflects the left version of decline. This may seem paradoxical, for Belmont is home to America’s winners of recent decades; when Democrats criticized Trump’s convention address as “dark” and “dystopian,” it was to Belmonters that they spoke. President Obama believes that the “idea that America is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn’t really jibe with the experience of most people.”

But the bicoastal elites who have benefited from a globalized, information economy do in fact believe that, even if they are not, the rest of America is in decline, falling into Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.” The reptilian brain of Belmont is on daily display at, among other websites, the Huffington Post, where columnists routinely lampoon the United States as a kind of Fishtown writ large. “It’s the world’s ripest banana republic. Welcome home,” Huffington Post—and Washington Post—contributor Peter Mandel recently wrote. “On the Republic’s bottom rungs, people exist on quick-fried snacks and look for work in restaurants where these are cooked.” Returning to Los Angeles from Australia, Maria Rodale wrote, “I felt betrayed and disgusted, and that was even before I got to the LA airport” (she’d been Down Under three whole weeks) “and saw our country’s slow, dirty, and unfriendly first-impression entryway.” She continued:

Belmonters and Fishtowners alike believe American is in decline, but unlike Fishtowners, Belmonters in their enclaves have walled off the unpleasantness.

There are other commonalities. Both groups see decline as a result of external and uncontrollable—nearly inevitable—forces, with “globalization” being first among these; Fishtowners feel crushed by them, Belmonters feel their prosperity is a reward for their ability to adapt to them. In some measure, these attitudes reflect the fact that both groups have come to measure their lives in material terms. The two candidates in this regard embody the zeitgeist: Trump believes his successes in business entitle him to political power; Hillary that her political clout entitles her to riches. Both are likewise content with identity-group politics: Hillary with the feminist-unions-black-Latino-gay congeries of interests that comprise the “Obama coalition,” Trump with fomenting the emerging “white-nationalist-alt-right” consciousness that has arisen in opposition. And, as the September 7 “Commander-In-Chief Forum” revealed, both Clinton and Trump evince deep ambiguity about the purposes and efficacy of American power in the world; the most contentious but ultimately minuscule divide between the two was over who would do the least to secure U.S. interests in the Middle East and who had been first to sour on the Iraq invasion.

In sum, our political conversation is being reduced to a debate about what kind of “Little England” is best for the United States to emulate: a nationalist and nativist version that would wall out the rest of the world or a Davos Man version whose walls keep out the homegrown riff-raff. Trump and Clinton each seeks to win the White House by energizing an identity-group base rather than by engaging the citizenry as a whole; neither seeks to speak to both Fishtown and Belmont in search of a common good. The battle is thus being waged by inflating opponents’ “negatives”—of which there are plenty to work with. An America in decline is like “a bone thrown between two dogs,” with Trump and Clinton tearing at scraps.

The bone-for-dogs line, by the way, came from a letter to William Cecil, Baron Burghley, Queen Elizabeth I’s principal adviser for most of her 45 years on the throne. It was speaking primarily of England’s international position—the two dogs were France, England’s traditional enemy, and Habsburg Spain, under Philip II making a “bid for mastery” of Europe and intent upon countering the Protestant Reformation and restoring Catholic primacy throughout Christendom. In ways not dissimilar from 21st-century Declinist America, 16th-century England had reached a low ebb, a fallen imperial power riven by domestic dissent and disorder, driven from its toehold in Europe, governed by an arthritic elite, and unsure which threat from abroad was most menacing.

But what is also salient about the later Elizabethan era is that it was a time of renewal, of decline reversed. It may have something to tell us not only about ourselves, for it was the primordial soup from which emerged English-speaking America, but also something about what it takes to escape a downward national spiral.

The Elizabethan Nadir

In 1558, Elizabeth Tudor inherited the English crown from her half-sister Mary, whose turbulent five years on the throne left her known to history as “Bloody Mary.” Mary’s efforts to return England to the Catholic faith had been both tireless and merciless, but all that she had achieved in her short reign was domestic division; leading Protestants recanted their faith, fled to Holland, or risked being burned at the stake. Mary’s marriage to Philip II of Spain had subsumed England’s strategic interests to those of Spain, sparking war with France. One of Elizabeth’s first acts as queen was to sign the treaty terminating the war, which deprived England of Calais, its last outpost on the European mainland.

A second greeting for the new queen was the publication of John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, arguing that rule by females contravened the Bible; Knox was no fringe figure but at the forefront of the Presbyterian “kirk” in Scotland. Elizabeth could not marry for either love or statecraft: to marry an Englishman would have caused domestic discord; to marry a European prince, be he Protestant or Catholic, would embroil England in the wars of the Counter-Reformation. On the other hand, ruling as a “Virgin Queen” meant she would have no direct heir, risking a replay of the Wars of the Roses to determine the English succession.

In the late 1550s and 1560s, Elizabeth’s writ did not extend much beyond the south of England and was very much at issue in the north of England, the homeland of the most powerful feudal barons and a hotbed of the “Old Religion.” North of the border—and the border region between England and Scotland was constantly terrorized by raiding “reivers”—Scotland was divided, as well. The southern lowlands had become stoutly Protestant and Presbyterian, while the Highlands remained staunchly independent and Catholic. Moreover, the “Queen of Scots,” Mary, had a claim to the English throne and had been the queen consort during the brief reign of her boy-husband, Francis II of France; she was from the powerful Guise family, the head of the militantly Catholic party in Paris. Mary had a genius for intrigue, constantly scheming with English Catholics, Scottish nobles, emissaries of the pope, and French diplomats—few could resist her charms—to supplant Elizabeth, to the point where, finally, in 1587 Mary was executed for treason.

Elizabeth also was queen of Ireland, although the power of the government in Dublin extended only through the surrounding Pale. Much of the island was ruled feudally by the “Old English,” Catholic nobles who were the descend-ants of the Anglo-Norman conquerors of the 12th century, while the more remote provinces of Ulster and much of Munster were still subject to Gaelic Irish clan leaders. If the Scots were prone to subversion through their “Auld Alliance” with the French, the Irish—especially the Ulstermen—gravitated toward Spain.

Things were in worse shape outside Britain. The lowlands of Atlantic Europe had long been a strategic concern for English rulers: These were the jumping-off points for invasions, and the loss of Calais deprived Elizabeth of a “sally-port” for projecting power and influence there. Fortunately France, the traditional foe, was embroiled in her own religious conflicts. But the tides of those wars ebbed and flowed, and there was always a danger that a victory by the Guise faction would lead to a pan-Catholic alliance with Habsburg Spain. This was Lord Burghley’s strategic nightmare. Spain had become not just an aspiring European hegemon and, as the driving force of Counter-Reformation, an ideological foe, but also a northwestern European menace in its efforts to suppress a vigorous—and energetically Protestant—Dutch rebellion. Finally, having smugly refused to sponsor Christopher Columbus’s voyages, England found itself many decades behind the Iberians (in 1580 Philip II also came to the Portuguese throne) in exploiting the opportunities of riches in “the Indies,” both east and west. It was these colonial riches that were fueling Philip’s bid for European mastery.

Elizabeth not only inherited a deflated empire but an empty purse and a debilitated state. The greatness of her father’s court and military had been purchased by the confiscation of church property, a method of finance that could not be repeated. Some of Henry VIII’s defense investments, such as coastal fortifications and an ocean-going navy, had residual benefits. But English militias had neither the capacity or capability to go toe-to-toe with Philip’s tercios, the most professional and best-equipped troops in Europe. In sum: England in 1558 was poor; it was bitterly divided domestically, both politically and religiously; it was unable to control its “near abroad,” not just in Europe but in Britain itself; internationally it had become a lesser power, buffeted by the storms of both Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In every way, a bone for dogs.

The Elizabethan Renaissance

On March 30, 1603, Hugh O’Neill, the charismatic earl of Tyrone in Ulster, arrived at Mellifont Abbey north of Dublin, to formally surrender his forces and renounce his nine years’ rebellion against English rule in Ireland. The English commander, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, kept Tyrone on his knees for over an hour, whence he declared “his humble submission” far “eclipsed” his past “vainglory.” The earl returned the next day to renew his petition and to sign a written vow of loyalty and request for clemency. But Elizabeth could not hear Tyrone’s plea; she had fallen into a “settled and unmovable melancholy,” passing away in her sleep in the early hours of March 24. The England she departed had changed in almost every respect. As Pope Sixtus V had snorted, Elizabeth was “only a woman, mistress of only half an island,” but “she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the [Holy Roman] Empire, by all.” To her people, she was “Gloriana.”

In her time, she had become (albeit somewhat reluctantly) the leader of a global “Protestant interest” that had checked Philip’s hegemonic ambitions, kept a Dutch Republic alive, and defended the “liberties”—that is to say, the balance of power—of Europe. In 1604 Spain would make peace with England and five years later sue the Dutch for a truce. English domestic politics had stabilized and her chosen successor, James Stuart of Scotland—the child of Mary, Queen of Scots—was welcomed as the legitimate heir to the Tudor crown. Elizabeth had, by clever and determined leadership, “settled” and “by law established” an Anglican church that preserved an episcopal hierarchy yet accommodated a “bottom-up,” pluralistic, and Calvinist spirit, fostered through great universities that equally infused English life with a burst of the humanism of the Renaissance, a spirit that had faded from continental Europe. Politically, her government had tamed baronial power and initiated state reforms; she had chosen and nurtured statesmen like Burghley, who came from the “middling” classes of the gentry and earned their places by merit and loyalty. The English military had been improved beyond measure; not only had English naval forces—both the small “Royal Navy” and the larger body of private warships—begun to rule the waves, but the land forces had been professionalized and learned the art of fighting in coalition with continental allies.

The queen had also proved to be an astonishingly gifted politician. She and her ministers had managed their Parliaments with great skill and, in good measure by mastering the arts of propaganda, led a larger and broader “political nation” that cheered on Elizabeth’s expanding imperial project—and supported it through increasing taxation.

The rest of Britain, too, had been stabilized. There was a friendly regime in Edinburgh, and the French had lost influence in Scotland. The Scottish kirk and the Anglican church, despite disagreements over governance and structure, shared Calvinist doctrine. Mountjoy had driven the Spanish out of Ireland, hunted Tyrone’s forces into extinction, and coopted the nobles to his cause. Zealous “New English” Protestant colonists, such as the poet Edmund Spenser, built “plantations” in what had been exclusively Gaelic counties. Further, through alliance with the Dutch and sponsorship of the Bourbon Henri IV in France, Elizabeth had made England again an arbiter of the European great-power balance. That the once-Huguenot Henri had found “Paris worth a mass” and converted did little damage to the larger geopolitical Protestant interest; he and his successors remained resolutely anti-Spanish. And finally, English adventurers had pushed out across the oceans, beginning to compete in a fully global way, including the planting of an initial colony in mid-Atlantic America. Sir Francis Drake’s 1577-1580 circumnavigation was more than a voyage of exploration or even plunder—it was a statement of strategic intent.

In sum, in the span of her 45 years of rule, Elizabeth had reversed the course of English decline. The term “Great Britain” was in wide circulation, if not yet in legal form. While the term “Elizabethan Renaissance” was an invention of late Victorian scholars—and thus not very popular nowadays—it does capture the sense of vitality that permeated English life, culture, and politics in the second half of the 16th century.

Elements of Elizabethan Renewal

And it is fair to say that Renaissance ideas had a profound influence on England’s renewal, even if these ideas were filtered through an English and northwest European sensibility and driven by the energy of the Reformation. The resulting amalgam imbued Elizabethans with a powerful sense of purpose; both domestically and internationally, it was their task to civilize the uncivilized and to realize God’s providential design for humanity. This was a kind of “Calvinist consensus” that did much to provide ideological cohesion for what was a diverse and already composite kingdom, and an inherently inclusive model of empire, one based in increasing proportion on shared ideas rather than shared blood; participatory Protestantism begat participatory politics.

At times the queen feared the “republicanism” and anti-hierarchical tendencies of her most devout subjects; beyond her natural strategic caution she also worried that too close a connection with the Dutch—who several times offered her their crown—would undermine the order of English society. The vocal, proto-Puritan leaders in Parliament were a persistent pain, especially on the subjects of her marriage and the succession. Nevertheless, while always preserving her divine monarchical rights in principle, she understood the people as the enduring source of her power, and she never missed an opportunity to show her love. Begged by Parliament to take a husband and secure the regime, she replied: “Now that the Public Care of governing the Kingdom is laid upon me, to draw upon me also the Cares of marriage may seem a point of inconsiderate Folly. Yea, to satisfy you, I have already joined myself in marriage to an Husband, namely, the Kingdom of England.” She embraced a growing and engaged political nation.

This is to say that the Elizabethan revival was unthinkable without Elizabeth. She is an elusive and mercurial figure but by any standard a political genius. She was also a formidable intellect and an energetic student, especially of languages and of governing. She tamed the great dukes and earls, the local warlords who had for so long been the bane of English kings, finally bringing them under central control; she promoted the careers of competent administrators such as Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham, who ran her intelligence networks with ruthless effectiveness; she also managed to make a mature politician out of her once-foppish favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. While her court was far from a centralized government in the modern sense, she did make continuous reforms and empowered her subordinates and, on occasion, even her military commanders.

The queen and her confidants also mastered what today might be called the art of the long-term view. This is not to say that her tactics were consistent—indeed, she sometimes lived up to the complaints made about the changeability of her sex—but that, in both domestic and international affairs, she maintained a strategic design. It is perhaps anachronistic but enlightening to imagine the Elizabethans thinking in terms of a “regime” rather than a “dynasty”; what they created was designed to survive a succession of line as well as individual ruler—and despite the best efforts of the Stuart family, it worked fairly well.

Elizabethans also were open to reforms of political economy, even though these, too, posed risks to the established aristocratic order. Already, the English economy was tied to the woolens trade and the markets of Europe. And much of the growth in the political nation reflected the wealth and influence of London financiers and the merchant class more generally. Lacking the fertility of France or the bullion of Spain, Englishmen tended to adopt economic principles like those of the Dutch, and wealth based on maritime trade demanded not only naval power but also a favorable balance of power along the western European littoral.

In many ways, the habits of the Elizabethan political mind were on plainest display as they approached the challenges of planting colonies in America. From the start, the Elizabethans imagined that the new world would be a place for “new Englands”—societies fundamentally like theirs and linked into an “Atlantic world,” where oceans were highways of exchange, not isolating moats. Thus the propaganda of colonialism was where Elizabethans expressed their ideas of utopia. In 1584, Richard Hackluyt, a prolific collector of works of exploration and occasionally one of Walsingham’s intelligence agents, produced a memorandum for Elizabeth in support of Sir Walter Raleigh’s project for a “Virginia” colony. In Hackluyt’s telling, strategic, military, and economic good sense combined with a transcendent moral purpose:

A few final words should be said about the means by which Elizabethan England transformed itself from a bone for dogs into a top-dog position: It was an exercise in the cultivation of hard power, and a hard lesson for the queen personally. Not only did military forces and -fighting seem like wasteful endeavors to an impoverished and parsimonious queen, they required her to take a back seat to men, and the most ambitious ones at that—men who, like her later favorite, the Earl of Essex, might attempt a coup. Her initial instincts were to try to increase England’s influence through diplomacy or dynastic connections, the 16th-century equivalents of “smart power.” But, matched against Spain’s treasure and armies, these failed to achieve the desired effect; Philip pursued his desire to dominate and re-Catholicize Europe relentlessly. Elizabeth then resorted to halfway measures, what in modern argot would be described as -“public-private partnerships” but then were known as “letters of marque” or, less elegantly, piracy.

But the tension between national strategy and the profit motive—including the queen’s share of the doings—limited the strategic efficacy even as it limited the cost. By the mid-1580s, with Philip building his Gran Armada and his generals laying waste to the Dutch, Elizabeth was forced to spend her “chested treasure,” the funds she had been husbanding for a decade, and appeal to Parliament for additional monies to pay for a “militarized” foreign policy. For the rest of her life, English forces regularly fought on multiple, simultaneous fronts: in Flanders, France, Ireland (the most expensive campaigns of all), the English Channel, the Mediterranean, the open Atlantic, and the Caribbean. She proved herself as a queen at war.

Political aspirations

That neither the Elizabethans nor their inheritors could realize their utopias (as Shakespeare’s The Tempest sardonically dramatized) was less important to their renewal than the fact that such ideas mattered, that they gave a purpose to the exercise of power. While it is impossible to show causation or to quantify the effect of Elizabethans’ political aspirations, it is likewise difficult to imagine how they might have halted their decline—let alone reversed it—absent such aspirations.

At the core of their political purposes was a faith in a transcendent and divine reality. God was watching and might intervene in human affairs; certainly he was judging. While human acts were no guarantee of salvation, it was supremely important to search for signs of God’s providence and fulfill God’s design. God’s design encompassed all humanity, even those not yet civilized, not yet Christian, not yet Protestant. The outcome may have been predestined by God, but it was not for man to say that some of his fellows were so deplorable as to be irredeemable. Nor was man to isolate himself from others, but rather to engage with and evangelize them to the truth.

To be sure, what gave the Elizabethans vitality and confidence often inured them to their own brutality; if they were occasionally misty-eyed about the transcendent purposes of their quest for power, they were entirely dry-eyed in the exercise of power. But as Spenser, a colonist of Ireland as well as a genius English poet, wrote, such “necessity” was inevitable given the fallen nature of man:

So if decline is reversible and not inevitable, neither is the road out of decline an easy one. For the Elizabethans, it was a long, punishing journey that had only been begun in the queen’s 45-year reign. Their aspirations mixed regularly with their anxieties.

But if there is any enduring lesson in the Elizabethan experience, it may be this: Only with aspirations can the anxieties be mastered, let alone excused or justified. National decline is, first and foremost, a symptom of lost purpose rather than lost power.

Thomas Donnelly is co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.