Elizabeth I’s Reign

Elizabeth I’s Reign appears as the starting point of a historical complaint about the movement of people and money toward London. Walter Shandy invokes it to give his preference for a country birth a public and political justification, extending a family dispute into an argument about the health of the nation.

Historical Reference

Walter says that political writers, from the beginning of Elizabeth I’s Reign down to his own time, had repeatedly lamented the strong current of people and money toward the metropolis. He presents the concern as a continuing one, not as an episode confined to Elizabeth’s period: her reign marks the beginning of a long-running diagnosis of London’s growing pull.

Walter’s Political Analogy

Walter’s favored image is not a current but a bodily disorder. He likens the nation to a body whose blood and spirits are driven toward the head faster than they can return; the resulting failure of circulation, he argues, threatens death in both the body natural and the body national. This comparison lets him cast population and wealth concentrating in London as more than a matter of preference or convenience: in his account, it risks damage to the political whole.

He distinguishes this imagined danger from threats he considers less pressing. He is not chiefly afraid that French policy or invasion will deprive the country of its liberties, nor does he place his main emphasis on a constitutional “consumption” caused by corruption. Instead, he fears a sudden “state-apoplexy,” a catastrophe produced by the imbalance he associates with the metropolis. His alarm turns an old political complaint into an argument for national stability.

Connection to the Family Dispute

The historical reference supports Walter’s opposition to his wife’s preference to give birth in London. Their marriage settlement allows Elizabeth Mollineux, under specified circumstances, to travel there for a confinement, with trustees to receive £120 toward a coach, horses, and associated expenses. A further clause penalizes a false appeal to the arrangement by forfeiting only the next turn. Walter’s arguments about the metropolis give this private covenant a public frame, even as the dispute remains a contest between his wishes and his wife’s right to choose her own midwife and place of delivery.

Elizabeth I’s Reign therefore functions less as a period whose events are narrated than as the historical beginning of Walter’s cited political tradition. Its significance lies in how he borrows that tradition: the alleged long-term drift toward London becomes evidence for his own household policy, while the novel’s legal and domestic circumstances expose the distance between his expansive national theory and the immediate question of where his wife will give birth.