After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James. Leanda Lisle de

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      Elizabeth had inherited the throne in 1558, following the death of her Catholic half-sister, Mary I. As a woman the twenty-five-year-old queen fitted awkwardly into the chivalric legend of the Tudors being the heirs to Arthur but Elizabeth proved adept at reshaping it. From the day of her coronation, where she greeted the crowds with ‘cries, tender words, and all other signs which argue a wonderful earnest love of most obedient servants’, Elizabeth worked to build an image that was at once feminine and supremely majestic. She became the mother of her people, the wife married to her kingdom, the unobtainable love object of the knights and nobles; a Virgin to rival the Queen of Heaven to whom medieval England had once been dedicated, the summation of the dynasty’s mythology.

      Even in 1558, however, courtiers were considering the vital question of who would succeed her. The last three reigns had seen violent swings in religious policy, from Henry VIII’s Reformation, to the radical Protestantism of Edward VI, to the Catholicism of Mary. No one had believed Elizabeth would be able to bring stability to a kingdom still bitterly divided by religion unless she produced an heir to guarantee the future of her Protestant supporters: men such as Elizabeth’s closest adviser, William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley, who had sat on Edward VI’s Privy Council, but lost his post when Mary I succeeded him. A petition urging Elizabeth to marry was drawn up by the House of Commons on the first day of her first parliament. Her reply was that she preferred to remain unmarried. Whether she intended this to be her last word on the subject is questionable, but, in the event, the dangers of making a bad or divisive choice would always outweigh any advantages of love and companionship. Fear and jealousy arose in one quarter or another whenever a potential bridegroom looked to be a likely candidate for her hand. Harington, however, could not see that Elizabeth’s decision might be a consequence of their own prejudice that a woman was invariably ruled by her husband. Instead he shared the widespread view that her disinclination to marry was the result of some personal failing.

      Harington claimed that Elizabeth had a psychological horror of the state of marriage and ‘in body some indisposition to the act of marriage’, but he admitted that she had made the world think that she might marry until she was fifty years old and ‘she has ever made show of affection, and still does to some men which in court we term favourites’.²⁴ These flirtations or dissimulations took some of the pressure off her to produce an actual spouse, but in the absence of one she was continually pushed to name a successor. It was only with hindsight Harington realised that Elizabeth had given her definitive answer, that she would never name an heir, in August of 1561, the year when she was confronted by the claims of her Suffolk heir, the Protestant Lady Catherine Grey, and her Catholic Stuart rival, Mary, Queen of Scots.

      On 10 August Elizabeth had learnt that the twenty-year-old Catherine was heavily pregnant and that the father was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Now in his sixties, he was then young, dark and handsome; more significantly he was also a descendant of Edward III and the heir of Edward VI’s uncle, the Protector Somerset, who had ruled England during Edward’s early minority. A marriage between such a couple would be a very suitable royal match – too suitable from Elizabeth’s perspective since any son of such a union would have become her de facto heir and a possible rival. It was to Elizabeth’s horror then, that Catherine confessed they had wed in a secret ceremony in December 1560. Angry and fearful Elizabeth had her sent to the Tower and Hertford joined her soon after.

      While Elizabeth was considering what to do next, an envoy arrived at court from the likely beneficiary of this fiasco, her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1561 James’s mother was a charming, willowy, eighteen-year old, who at five foot eleven towered over most of her contemporaries. She had been raised the adored daughter of the French court destined to be Queen of France and at sixteen that destiny was fulfilled when she married Francis II. Francis, however, had died the previous December and that August she had returned to the violent country of her birth. Scotland had undergone its own Reformation the previous year, making Mary the Catholic Queen of a Protestant country. It was a possible template for her future as Queen of England and Mary’s emissary, William Maitland of Lethington, hoped that Elizabeth’s anger with Catherine Grey would encourage her to name Mary her heir. Instead Elizabeth announced that she would never name her successor.

      ‘I was married to this kingdom, whereof always I carry this ring for a pledge’, she informed Maitland, pointing to her coronation ring, ‘and howsoever things go I shall be queen of England so long as I live, when I am dead let them succeed who have the best right.’²⁵ Maitland had stayed at court hoping to change Elizabeth’s mind, but in the days that followed she had only expanded on her motives for refusing to name an heir. ‘I know the inconstancy of the people,’ she told Maitland, ‘how they loathe always the present government; and have their eyes continually set upon the next successor; and naturally there are more that look, as it is said, to the rising than to the setting sun.’ She recalled how malcontents had looked to her when Mary I was on the throne and concluded such men might now feel differently towards her. A prince, she warned, could not even trust ‘the children who are to succeed them’.²⁶ She would certainly not trust those of Catherine Grey or Mary, Queen of Scots.

On 21 September 1561, Catherine gave birth in the Tower to a son, Edward, Lord Beauchamp, heir to the throne under the will of Henry VIII and under English law. Elizabeth was, however, already working towards the destruction of his claim. Catherine and Hertford were closely questioned about their marriage. It emerged that the only witness to the ceremony and the only person who knew the name of the priest, had subsequently died. There was, therefore, only the couple’s word that they had been married and that was hardly likely to be enough. Their son was declared illegitimate by a church commission later that autumn.^*

      Over the next four decades Elizabeth’s own former illegitimacy kept alive the hope that Beauchamp’s might also be reversed, and William Cecil would remain an advocate of Beauchamp’s claim until his death. But Elizabeth’s actions had undoubtedly damaged the Suffolk cause and its immediate effect was to strengthen that of Mary, Queen of Scots. Elizabeth’s brush with smallpox in 1562 reminded the Protestant elite that their wealth and power were entirely dependent on her life and the Commons once again drew up a petition begging Elizabeth to marry. It drew attention to the dangers of civil war and foreign invasion if England were to be disputed among rival claimants of different religions after her death; France – where Huguenots and Catholics were fighting a savage civil war – illustrated just how grim that fate would be. Elizabeth assured them that there was time for her to marry, but in 1565, it was the Queen of Scots who made a dynastic marriage and with the English crown in mind.

      Mary Stuart’s husband, the twenty-year-old Henry Darnley, was descended from Margaret Tudor through her second marriage to Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. He was, therefore, second only to Mary herself in the line of succession. His English birth was a significant bonus as it went some way to answering objections about Mary’s foreign birth. Harington used it to counter fears that James VI would give official posts and royal land to Scots, arguing: ‘It is without all question that he which is … by both his parents descended of English blood will in England become English and a favourer chiefly of Englishmen’ – a popular argument amongst James’s supporters. Whatever the dynastic advantages of the marriage, however, it would prove fatal for Mary. Darnley was a handsome youth: six foot one, fair-haired, ‘beardless and lady faced’, but he was also insufferably arrogant and the strain of playing second fiddle to his wife soon proved too much for him. He began to drink heavily and conducted several affairs. Mary, anxious not to give him any real power, refused to grant him the crown matrimonial and instead invested her trust in her personal secretary, the Italian musician David Riccio.

      In March 1566, when Mary was six СКАЧАТЬ