Elizabethan England Mind Map (GCSE)

Catholics did not recognise Henry VIII's marriage to her mother, Anne Boleyn, so they saw Elizabeth as illegitimate.

Many believed a woman could not rule alone. She was expected to marry and produce an heir, and the question of succession hung over her reign.

England had switched between Protestant and Catholic under her father, brother and sister, and the country was deeply divided.

The Crown was in debt, around £300,000, and France, Scotland and Spain were Catholic powers that threatened England.

Her closest advisers, including William Cecil (her chief minister), Robert Dudley and Sir Francis Walsingham (her spymaster).

Called to pass laws and grant taxes. It clashed with Elizabeth over her marriage and the succession, which she saw as her business alone.

Justices of the Peace kept order and enforced laws in each county.

Elizabeth controlled her nobles by giving and withholding favours, titles and jobs. Royal progresses, journeys around the country, showed her to her people.

Made Elizabeth Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a title designed to be less offensive to Catholics than Supreme Head.

Set out how services should be held, using the Book of Common Prayer. People who did not attend church, called recusants, were fined 12 pence (one shilling).

Strict Protestants who wanted to remove remaining Catholic features, such as vestments, from the Church.

The Pope excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570. Missionary priests, including Jesuits such as Edmund Campion (executed 1581), came to keep Catholicism alive in England.

Mary fled Scotland in 1568 and was held captive in England for almost nineteen years.

In 1569, Catholic nobles in the north rebelled, planning to free Mary and restore Catholicism. The revolt was crushed.

• Ridolfi Plot (1571)
• Throckmorton Plot (1583)
• Babington Plot (1586)

Each planned to put Mary on the throne, with Spanish or French help. Walsingham's spies uncovered them.

The Babington Plot proved Mary had approved Elizabeth's murder. She was executed in February 1587, removing the Catholic heir.

Religion, trade, Drake's raids on Spanish ships and colonies, and English help for the Protestant Dutch rebels against Spain, made official by the Treaty of Nonsuch (1585).

In 1587, Drake attacked the Spanish fleet at Cadiz, "singeing the King of Spain's beard" and delaying the Armada by a year.

In 1588 Philip sent a fleet, led by the Duke of Medina Sidonia, to escort an invasion army from the Netherlands. English fireships at Calais broke its formation, and it was beaten at the Battle of Gravelines.

Spanish planning problems, English ships and tactics, the fireships, and storms as the fleet sailed home around Scotland and Ireland, where many ships were wrecked.

A rising population, rising prices, enclosure and bad harvests increased poverty. Vagabonds were feared and punished, for example under the Vagabonds Act of 1572.

AQA only. The 1601 Poor Law made each parish responsible for its poor, paid for by a local tax, the poor rate.

Francis Drake sailed around the world in 1577 to 1580. Walter Raleigh sponsored the attempt to found a colony in Virginia, at Roanoke, in 1585.

AQA only. Theatres such as The Theatre (1576) and the Globe (1599) drew huge crowds to plays by writers like Shakespeare, though Puritans opposed them.

AQA only. In 1601 the Earl of Essex, a former favourite, led a failed rebellion in London and was executed.