Marriage dating customs elizabethan era

The Victorian era and the early 20th century idealised the Elizabethan era.

The Encyclopædia Britannica maintains that "[T]he long reign of Elizabeth I, 1558–1603, was England's Golden Age...

The Elizabethan age contrasts sharply with the previous and following reigns.

It was a brief period of internal peace between the English Reformation and the religious battles between Protestants and Catholics and then the political battles between parliament and the monarchy that engulfed the remainder of the seventeenth century.

The Protestant/Catholic divide was settled, for a time, by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, and parliament was not yet strong enough to challenge royal absolutism.

England was also well-off compared to the other nations of Europe.

The Elizabethan Age was also an age of plots and conspiracies, frequently political in nature, and often involving the highest levels of Elizabethan society.'Merry England', in love with life, expressed itself in music and literature, in architecture and in adventurous seafaring".Elizabethan England was not particularly successful in a military sense during the period, but it avoided major defeats and built up a powerful navy.High officials in Madrid, Paris and Rome sought to kill Elizabeth, a Protestant, and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic.That would be a prelude to the religious recovery of England for Catholicism. In 1584, the Throckmorton Plot was discovered, after Francis Throckmorton confessed his involvement in a plot to overthrow the Queen and restore the Catholic Church in England.

It was an age of exploration and expansion abroad, while back at home, the Protestant Reformation became more acceptable to the people, most certainly after the Spanish Armada was repelled.