Members of the civic-minded Elizabethan Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1541 and 1565; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1650.1 Their parents were members of either the idealist Reformation Generation or the reactive Picaresque Generation, who tended to nurture in an ever-more protective way, as a result of the Reformation Awakening social ferment in the decades preceding their birth.
The Elizabethan Generation (of the Hero archtype in the Reformation Saeculum, or Cycle) benefited as children from an explosive growth in academies intended to mold them into perfect paragons of civic achievement and teamwork. Coming of age with the great wars against Spain, they soldiered with dazzling valor and courtly show. During their Gloriana midlife, they regulated commerce, explored overseas empires, built stately country houses, pursued new science, and wrote poetry that celebrated an orderly universe. Historian Anthony Esler explains that "ambitious projects of breath-taking scope and grandeur" distinguished these "overreachers" from the "burned-out generation" before them. In old age, many lived to see their hearty and expansive Merrie England repudiated by prickly conscienced sons and daughters.2
The Elizabethan Generation came of age overcoming the dangerous Armada Crisis (1580-1588), a stressful conflict between England and Spain, at that time the world's most powerful nation, the grim monster of Europe arrogantly throwing its weight around. In 1580, England allied itself with the Dutch rebels, who were fighting for their independence from Spanish Habsburg CounterReformation hegemony. Relations between England and Spain increasingly soured--especially since English privateer vessels captured Spanish treasure ships and bombarded Spanish colonial ports, and Queen Elizabeth rewarded rather than punished the pirates. King Philip II of Spain readied a mighty "Armada" invasion fleet to conquer England, install there the dread Inquisition, and return the English heretics to Catholicism.
In 1588 brave members of the Elizabethan Generation, men between the ages of 23 and 46, loyal to their beloved elder Queen, serving dutifully under the command of their elders from the previous Picaresque Generation--especially the buccaneers Francis Drake and John Hawkins--defeated the unwieldy Armada and saved their country from invasion.
The heroic cadre of triumphant veterans of this campaign, with England now secure and confident as a naval power to be taken seriously, launched an era of expansive, optimistic hubris known as the Elizabethan Renaissance or the Age of Shakespeare. The younger courtiers, poets, merchants, scientists, and explorers of this generation celebrated being human (and being English): "What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!"3
The heroic triumphant spirit of this generation was also well expressed by its member Sir Philip Sydney, who wrote the following romantic lines in his late twenties:
Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtained the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent from that sweet enemy, France,
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
Town-folks my strength; a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use does rise;
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides do I take
My blood from them who did excel in this,
Think nature me a man-at-arms did make.
How far they shoot awry! The true cause is,
Stella looked on, and from her heavenly face
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.4
The children of the Elizabethans, nurtured in a relaxed way, were the adaptive Sentimental Generation and the idealistic Righteous Generation. As busy and worldly burghers, the Elizabethans, preoccupied with their secular achievement, felt that they were endowing their youngsters with an orderly and self-confident England. They were dismayed and profoundly disappointed by the spiritual radicals of the Righteous Generation, however. They could not understand, and could hardly recognize as their offspring, these apparently bewitched Puritans who were spurning their fathers in contempt; they wondered "whose child he is . . . for willingly his faith allows no father."5 In old age, the Elizabethans felt under siege by these self-righteous idealists.
Birthyears for the Elizabethan Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
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Notes:
1. The information on this page has been adapted with permission from William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991). [Back to your place on this page.]
2. William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (New York: Broadway Books [Bantam-Doubleday-Dell], 1997), p. 129, citing Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (1966). [Back to your place on this page.]
3. William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 2 Scene 2 (1600). [Back to your place on this page.]
4. From Sonnets from Astrophel and Stella (1582). [Back to your place on this page.]
5. Strauss and Howe (1991), p. 125, citing Joseph Hall, "A Puritane," in Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608); the character Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (ca. 1601); "Zeal-of-the-Land Busy" in Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1614); David Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling (1980), pp. 3-4; and Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (1989). [Back to your place on this page.]
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