After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James

The Reformation changed England forever. The simple fact that the country was no longer part of the supra-national Roman Church encouraged a stronger sense of separateness from the Continent and enabled Henry to develop a full-blooded nationalism to which his dynasty was central. Elizabeth, the child of this revolution, was not, however, her father’s heir for long. Anne Boleyn was executed before she was three years old and Elizabeth, already a bastard in the eyes of the Catholic Church, was declared illegitimate by her father in order that any children of the marriage to his new love, Jane Seymour, should take precedence over her, as she had once done over her sister, Mary. When Jane Seymour had her son, Edward, in 1537, it seemed to Henry that the question of the succession was answered. As Henry had no further children by the three wives that succeeded Jane Seymour he eventually restored Elizabeth and Mary in line to the succession after Edward, in default of Edward’s issue or any further children by his last wife, Catherine Parr. His decision was confirmed in the Act of Succession in 1544 – the year before Elizabeth had made her father the gift of the prayer book that the German Duke saw on her desk.

The Act of Succession allowed the King to alter the succession by testament, that is, in his will. This was significant for Henry’s will wrote into law who Elizabeth’s heirs should be if all his children died without issue. Henry had sought Elizabeth’s heirs amongst the descendants of his sisters, Margaret of Scotland and Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. Margaret, the eldest, had married James IV of Scotland, who was killed fighting the English at Flodden in 1513. Their son, James V, died after losing a later battle against the English and left his infant daughter, Mary Stuart, as Queen of Scots. She should have been Elizabeth’s heir under the laws of primogeniture, but Henry’s will disinherited the Stuart line in favour of that of the Suffolks in vengeance for the Stuart enmity to England and the Scots’ refusal to marry their Queen to his son.

Harington’s tract explained that the Scots had feared that if Mary Stuart married Prince Edward their country would have become a mere province of England. In the winter of 1602/3 the English had similar concerns that if James VI of Scotland inherited the throne their country might be subsumed into a new kingdom called ‘Britain’. Machiavelli had argued that changing a country’s name was a badge of conquest and Harington warned James that ‘some in England fear the like now’. The name Britain had an unpleasantly Celtic ring and people believed that the creation of a new united kingdom could nullify English Common Law.

Many believed that James was also precluded from the succession by the medieval law excluding heirs born outside ‘the allegiance of the realm’.23 Edward VI had drawn attention to this law in drawing up his will in 1553, which had also excluded the Stuart line. Harington’s tract attempted to counter it by arguing that Scotland was not really a foreign country at all, since all Englishmen considered it ‘subject to England in the way of homage’. But it was a view with which James himself was unlikely to concur.*

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 months pregnant, the jealous Darnley and a group of nobles came for her secretary. They walked into the tiny room off the Queen’s bedchamber where she was having supper with the Countess of Argyll and Riccio, demanding he leave the room. The terrified man grabbed Mary’s skirts, but with a pistol pointing at Mary’s pregnant belly, he was dragged away screaming to be stabbed to death. James had survived the trauma to his mother to be born at Edinburgh Castle on 19 June 1566, between nine and ten in the morning. A caul was stretched over James’s face in what has traditionally been seen as a sign of good fortune. The first sign of it came later that morning when his father recognised his legitimacy with the seal of a kiss, but a rapid series of events had followed that endangered his life and then that of his mother.

When James was nine months old Darnley’s house was destroyed by gunpowder and his body was found strangled in grounds nearby. Three months later Mary married his suspected murderer, the Earl of Bothwell. The scandal triggered a revolt led by her Protestant Lords, including Bothwell’s former ally in the murder of Darnley, James Douglas, Earl of Morton. It ended with her thirteen-month-old son put on her throne in her place, to be raised a Protestant. Mary fled to England in May 1568. Elizabeth had warned that a prince could not even trust the children who were to succeed them, but she could hardly rejoice at being proved right. Catherine Grey had died only four months earlier. Her younger sister, known as ‘crookback Mary’, was in custody after secretly marrying Thomas Keyes, the Sergeant Porter.* But Elizabeth was now confronted with a far greater threat than that posed by the Grey sisters, for here was a queen regnant and no mere subject.

William Cecil dissuaded Elizabeth from helping Mary regain her throne and since Elizabeth could not risk allowing Mary to leave for Europe, where she might have raised support for an invasion force, she was left with no choice but to keep her cousin imprisoned in a succession of great houses in the English Midlands. There she became a focus for Catholic discontent fuelled by envy of Cecil’s power and influence. Mary was barely south of the border before the great Catholic families of the north, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, backed the Duke of Norfolk’s secret bid to marry her and return with her to Scotland. Elizabeth discovered the plan and the earls, fearing execution, led the north in rebellion in November 1569. It was crushed with great savagery and in its wake a still greater disaster fell on English Catholics. Pope Pius V issued a bull excommunicating Elizabeth and releasing her subjects from their obedience to her.*

A divide that had existed since the Reformation began widening once more. The Pope’s bull allowed William Cecil – Lord Burghley from 1571 – to paint Catholics as traitors by virtue of their faith. New laws were immediately introduced to prevent Catholics entering Parliament and they began to be ousted from local power in towns and counties. This appeared to be justified when, late in 1571, Mary and Norfolk were discovered to be involved in a plot to depose Elizabeth with the possible backing of a Spanish invasion. Norfolk was executed for his role and Elizabeth was put under pressure from her Councillors to behead Mary as well. She refused to set a precedent of regicide but the Protestant elite was soon fearful that the Catholic threat was growing ever greater.

In 1574, a new breed of secular priest (the equivalent of today’s diocesan priests) arrived in England as missionaries from the continent. Protestant hopes that Catholicism would die out were dashed and the reaction was ferocious, with the first of many priests to be executed dying in 1577. In June 1580 the Jesuits arrived in England spearheaded by Robert Persons and Edmund Campion. The pair would convert such important figures as the Queen’s champion Robert Dymoke and set up a printing press to disseminate Catholic literature and propaganda. Professional priest hunters were quickly put on their trail and in 1581 Persons was forced to flee back to the continent. Campion, however, was caught. ‘In condemning us,’ he told his judges, ‘you condemn all your ancestors, all the ancient priests, bishops and kings, and all that was once the glory of England.’ He was hung, cut down while still alive, drawn of his bowels, castrated and quartered.

Campion’s terrible death marked the beginning of the harshest yet period of repression. Those Catholics who refused to attend Protestant services – known as recusants (from the Latin recusare, to refuse) – faced ever more ruinous fines, while priests and those who harboured them were executed every year for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign. This did not stamp out Catholicism. Even three generations after the Reformation, Wales and the north of England remained predominantly Catholic. The west of England had a substantial Catholic minority and as much as 20 per cent of the entire nobility and gentry were Catholic. But it did radicalise Catholics and it also gained the sympathies of many young Protestant courtiers. The explosion of opinion and argument that followed the Reformation not only led to wars of religion, but also to the sceptical humanism of the late Renaissance. By 1602 it was illustrated in the works of Shakespeare and Montaigne, and found political expression in Henri IV’s secular state in France and a desire in English court circles for toleration of religion.

Harington, who although a Protestant, had many Catholic friends and relations, would refer to Campion’s death in his Tract with the comment that ‘men’s minds remain rather the less satisfied of the uprightness of the cause; where racks serve for reasons’.27 It was, however, the older generation who remained in power in the 1580s and they remained convinced that the persecution was a matter of personal survival.

In 1584 Burghley and Elizabeth’s then Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, took steps to block Mary’s accession, drafting a so-called ‘Bond of Association’ whose members agreed to murder Mary if Elizabeth’s life was threatened. The wording indicated that if James VI claimed the throne his life would also be forfeit. Burghley had hoped to follow this with a neo-republican law that would bring a Great Council into effect on Elizabeth’s death with the power to choose her successor. Elizabeth put paid to that scheme, but in 1585 she did agree to sign a statute which decreed that anyone who plotted against her – or whose supporters plotted against her – would lose their right to the throne.28 It was often used against James’s claim for in 1586 Mary was at last found in correspondence with a rich young Catholic traitor called Anthony Babington. In essence Babington and his co-conspirators were accused of planning a Catholic uprising backed by an invading army financed by Spain and the Pope. Elizabeth was to be deposed and assassinated. Here at last was the means for Burghley to dispose of Mary and, with the help of Walsingham, he seized it with both hands.

Mary was tried and convicted of her involvement in the Babington plot and in February 1587, at three strokes of the axe, the Protestant James VI became the leading Stuart candidate for the throne. The majority of Catholics conceded that all hope for the restoration of Catholicism had died with Mary, Queen of Scots. But some others – idealists, zealots and leading Jesuits – remained determined to have a Catholic monarch, if necessary by force of arms. And already the numbers of Elizabeth’s possible heirs were increasing.

Mary, Queen of Scots made Philip II of Spain a written promise that she would bequeath him her right to the English succession the year before her execution. In the event she never did so, but her death left him the leading Catholic candidate for the succession. As a descendant of John of Gaunt and Edward III he had English royal blood, as king of the greatest power in Europe he had the might to back his right, and in 1587 he was already building the Armada with which he intended to invade England.

Elizabeth needed allies in Europe, but at fifty-four she was too old to gain them by offering her hand in a marriage alliance. She had therefore introduced a new candidate for the succession: James’s English-born first cousin, the eleven-year-old Arbella Stuart, who remained a serious rival to his claim. Her father, Charles Stuart, was the younger brother of Mary, Queen of Scots’s husband, Henry Darnley. She was therefore a great-great-granddaughter of Margaret Tudor. Her mother was the daughter of a courtier called William Cavendish whose formidable wife, known to posterity as Bess of Hardwick, remained her guardian.

Bess had been a friend of Catherine Grey and she had used the example of Catherine’s marriage to plan that of her daughter Elizabeth with Charles Stuart. They too were married in secret, but Bess made sure that this union had plenty of witnesses. It never paid out the prize of a male heir, but Arbella was legitimate, royal and English born. When Arbella was orphaned at the age of six in 1581, Bess – who was then married to the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury – took her in and gave her a Protestant education suitable for a future ruler. Elizabeth, in addition to seeing her as a pawn in European politics, saw her rather as a useful counterpoint to James’s ambitions and she was the focus of considerable curiosity when Elizabeth invited her to court early in the summer of 1586. Elizabeth was then based at Burghley’s palace, Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, where the Earl of Essex had begun to supplant Sir Walter Ralegh as the Queen’s favourite.

Arbella arrived at court accompanied by her Cavendish aunts and uncles, a slim, full-faced girl with dark blonde hair and slightly bulging blue eyes. Elizabeth allowed her the honour of dining in the Presence Chamber and courtiers showered the eleven-year-old with attention. Essex had talked to Arbella loudly of his devotion to the Queen and Burghley invited her to supper. Arbella went accompanied by her youngest uncle, Charles Cavendish, who reported all that passed in a letter to his mother.29 Ralegh, whose fate would later become strangely bound up with Arbella’s, was sitting next to Burghley, the elder statesman with his long grey beard, Ralegh, dark and sleek, ‘long faced and sour-eye lidded’.30 Cavendish was struck by how polite, even ingratiating, Ralegh was with Burghley: the fading favourite needed a powerful ally to match the support that Essex had in his stepfather, Elizabeth’s first and greatest love, the ageing Earl of Leicester.

Burghley ‘spoke greatly in Arbella’s commendation, as that she had the French and the Italian; danced and writ very fair’ and wished ‘she were fifteen years old’. Cavendish then saw him whisper in Ralegh’s ear. Ralegh replied in his distinctive low voice and Devonshire accent ‘it would be a happy thing’.31 The two men appeared to be discussing a possible marriage. The name soon circulating as the most likely groom was that of Rainutio Farnese, son of the Duke of Parma, Philip II’s Lieutenant in the Spanish Netherlands, and, like him, a descendant of John of Gaunt. Elizabeth hoped that personal ambition might dull Parma’s effectiveness in the coming invasion. She also hoped that the promise of marrying Arbella to a Catholic might salve feeling about the death of Mary, Queen of Scots and, with this in mind, she advertised to the French ambassador’s wife that Arbella ‘would one day be as I am’. The ambassador duly reported the conversation home, observing that Arbella ‘would be the lawful inheritress of the crown if James of Scotland were excluded as a foreigner’.32

Childish and spoilt Arbella was delighted ‘that it pleased her Majesty to … pronounce me an eaglet of her own kind’, but she would soon discover that her position depended on the prevailing political climate. When the Armada was defeated in August 1588, Arbella ceased to be seen as useful, though she failed to sense the change in her circumstances and continued to play the role of Elizabeth’s heir. On one notorious occasion she insisted on taking precedence over all the other ladies at court. Elizabeth seized on it as an excuse to order her to return home to Derbyshire.

In December 1591 Burghley began pursuing fresh attempts for a settlement with Spain. Burghley had always been the most enthusiastic advocate for peace and his chief rivals from the war party, Leicester and Walsingham, were now dead (Leicester had died in September 1588 and Walsingham in November 1591). New plans were made for Arbella’s marriage to Farnese and in order to underscore her importance in the line of succession she was invited back to Whitehall for the Christmas celebrations.

Harington recalled that Arbella had matured into an attractive young woman. He often admired her elegance of dress, ‘her virtuous disposition, her choice education, her rare skill in languages, her good judgement and sight in music’.33 Elizabeth, however, began to fear that a party was building behind her and, according to Harington, Essex or his followers had made some ‘glancing speeches’ that suggested she had cause for concern. When the Duke of Parma died the following December, Elizabeth let the marriage plans drop. The friendship with Farnese was now of no use to her and she decided to put the eighteen-year-old Arbella back in her Derbyshire box. She would not be invited back to court during Elizabeth’s lifetime. While Arbella’s name continued to be mentioned in connection with the latest political gossip – a Catholic plot to kidnap her, a new husband who had been found for her – it was only as a bit part in a much bigger story.