Read Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Online
Authors: David Starkey
With the lightest of touches Elizabeth had nudged her father’s will into oblivion. This left as her most obvious heir her cousin Mary, the granddaughter of Henry’s eldest sister Margaret. Mary was queen consort of France and queen of Scots in her own right. She was also a Catholic.
In August 1561, after the death of her husband, the French king, Mary, having spent most of her young life on the other side of the Channel, returned to Scotland as queen. Brought up among the splendours of the French court, Mary was far more interested in her claim to the English throne than her paltry Scottish inheritance, and in September she sent her personal emissary, Sir William Maitland, to negotiate directly with Elizabeth. His mission was to secure formal recognition of Mary’s status as Elizabeth’s heir.
Elizabeth was all graciousness in her private, face-to-face interviews with Maitland. She acknowledged that Mary was of the blood royal of England, was her cousin and her nearest living kinswoman, and that she loved her dearly. And she also, under Maitland’s subtle prodding, went further. She knew, she said, no one with a better claim to be her successor than Mary, nor any that she preferred to her. She even swore that she would do nothing to impede Mary’s claim. But the final step declaring Mary her heir, Elizabeth told a crestfallen Maitland plainly, she would never, ever take. But Elizabeth had already gone far too far for Cecil. He had lived through the reign of one Mary and her attempt to re-Catholicize England, and he was determined never to suffer another one.
Matters came to a head in the parliament of 1566, which attempted to force Elizabeth to name a successor, and by implication to exclude the claim of Mary Queen of Scots. Furious, Elizabeth summoned thirty members of each House to her palace in Whitehall, where she delivered an extraordinary speech.
Elizabeth was at her fiery, brilliant best. She would never name an heir, she said, because he or she would become ‘second person’. And Elizabeth, better than anyone else, knew the danger of that position, since, as Mary’s legally appointed heir, she had been ‘second person’ herself. As such, her own life had been in constant danger and she had been the focus of plots and treason. At this point Elizabeth became sharply personal. Many of the MPs, she said, turning to the Commons delegation, had been among the plotters, and only her own honour prevented her from naming names. Similarly, turning now to the Lords, she proclaimed that many of the bishops, under Jane Grey, had preached treasonably that she, Elizabeth, was a bastard. ‘Well, I wish not for the death of any man,’ she said, not altogether convincingly. No head can have felt too secure on its shoulders by the time the queen had finished.
The issue of the succession would bedevil Elizabeth’s entire reign. Parliament was terrified that they would be faced with an interregnum on the queen’s death. As history made clear, a throne with no known heir guaranteed civil war and bloodshed when the monarch died. What would become of the monarchy? Would the absence of a known heir turn England into an elective monarchy? Would the religion of the country have to change once more depending on who emerged as the successor? But Elizabeth knew equally well that the ‘second person’, however convenient for Parliament and the country, would be her worst enemy. If Mary was named as successor, her accession was a knife blow away – a tempting prospect for a foreign power or a Catholic.
But however much it was ignored or passed over as too dangerous to discuss openly, the problem of the succession wouldn’t go away, and it was brought into sharp focus when a rebellion brought about by disgust at her scandalous personal life forced Mary to flee Scotland in May 1568 and seek Elizabeth’s protection in England. The presence of Mary Queen of Scots in England would force Elizabeth into the very actions that she had tried so hard to avoid.
IV
Mary Queen of Scots’ flight to England was a disaster for Elizabeth. In Scotland, Mary, despite her Catholicism, had been lukewarm about religion. She had lived with a Protestant government, and she had even taken a Protestant as her third husband. But in England it was a different story. Here Mary played up her Catholicism, and Catholics in turn identified with her.
The issue for both Mary and the English Catholics was the succession. Mary was Elizabeth’s obvious heir because she was her closest relation, but Elizabeth steadfastly refused to recognize her as such. The implications for the monarchy were vast. If not Mary, then who would inherit the crown? For if the succession was not determined by unalterable descent of blood, what gave the monarchy its legitimacy and divine right to rule? Mary played on this sensitive issue. By bidding for Catholic support, she was hoping to force Elizabeth’s hand, and, in turn, the prospect of an heir of their own faith gave English Catholics, who had almost lost hope, stomach for the fight once more. The spectre, which Elizabeth had striven so hard to lay to rest, of a ‘second person’ who differed in religion from the monarch was about to rise once more. And its baleful effects were to be quickly felt.
For the next twenty years Elizabeth was to keep Mary prisoner, moving her from one secure castle to another. In all that time the two queens never met. And as Elizabeth had foreseen, the plots soon began. Catholics saw Mary as a means back to power, and used her as a focus for rebellion. Despite her precarious position, Mary was naive enough to allow herself to be implicated in several of these plots. But Elizabeth refused to take action against Mary. Her instinct was to try to defuse the conflict, and above all she did not want Mary to become a martyr.
But Elizabeth’s hopes of avoiding conflict were dashed when her middle way came under attack from both extremes. First to move was Rome with a papal edict or Bull, issued by the pope in 1570. Known by its opening words as
Regnans in Excelsis
, ‘reigning on high’, it sets out the most extreme version of the papal claim to rule ‘all people and all kingdoms’. Then, for her defiance of this claim, it condemns Elizabeth; deposes and excommunicates her, and absolves all her subjects from their oath of allegiance.
The Bull was the Catholic version of the arguments of the Protestant Ponet, and, as with Ponet, its logical outcome was tyrannicide, the assassination or murder of the errant ruler. The pope had, in effect, declared war on Elizabeth by calling for her death. But two could play at that game, and Elizabeth’s council responded in kind.
Violent times breed violent measures and few have been more violent than the Bond of Association. Drawn up by the Privy Council in 1584, the bond is a kind of licensed lynch law. If Elizabeth were to be assassinated in favour of any possible claimant to the throne, then those who took the bond swore to band together to ‘prosecute such person or persons to the death’ and ‘to take the uttermost revenge upon them by any possible means’. Furthermore, the bond would forbid anyone on whose behalf such an assassination took place from succeeding to the English throne. Finally, for any Catholic rebel or foreign power that thought that Mary would automatically succeed if Elizabeth met an untimely end, the bond made clear that the right of nominating an heir belonged to ‘Elizabeth, the Queen’s Majesty that now is, with and by the authority of the Parliament of England’. The Protestant nobility and gentry flocked to subscribe to the bond in their hundreds, as the masses of signed and sealed copies that survive at the Public Record Office show.
Mary wasn’t mentioned by name in the bond but everybody knew she was the target. The bond was subsequently legalized by an Act of Parliament, which also set up a tribunal to determine her guilt or innocence. But Cecil had wanted to go much, much further and establish a Great Council to rule England in the event of an assassination and the inevitable interregnum that would follow. The Great Council would exercise all the royal powers and together with a recalled Parliament would choose the next monarch. This was a radical constitutional innovation. If a council in alliance with Parliament had the authority to choose monarchs, it would also have the authority to set conditions on them and challenge their subsequent actions. This was Ponet translated into a parliamentary statute, and Elizabeth was having none of it.
For Elizabeth saw the bond as being as offensive as
Regnans in Excelsis
, since it too set religion above the crown, and permitted subjects to judge a sovereign and elect a new one. But not even Elizabeth could protect Mary from her own folly or Cecil’s vendetta. In 1586, Mary was lured into giving her explicit endorsement to a plot to assassinate Elizabeth. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of her guilt, Elizabeth was forced to agree to her trial and condemnation. She even signed the death warrant. But she gave instructions that the execution wasn’t to be carried out without her further command. For once, Cecil did not obey his queen.
Instead, a secret meeting of the council was convened in his private rooms at court and, acting on their own authority, and in defiance of the queen’s express command, the councillors dispatched the death warrant to Mary’s prison at Fotheringhay Castle. There, in the Great Hall, Mary was publicly beheaded. She died magnificently, clutching the crucifix and wearing a scarlet petticoat as a martyr to her Catholic faith.
But the removal of a threat to the monarchy and the Church of England had serious implications. Queen regnant anointed by God though she was, Mary had been publicly executed like any other common criminal. The ‘divinity that doth hedge a King’, which Elizabeth had fought so hard to preserve, had evaporated, never to return.
The execution of Mary was a watershed. Henry and his three children had sought to reshape the religion of England according to their own preferences. But as a fierce, nationalistic Protestantism took root in England, it was becoming clear that a monarch or an heir who fell too far out of step with the religious prejudices of the nation would do so at their peril. The dangerous liaison between monarchy and religion had claimed its first royal victim in Mary Queen of Scots. She would not be the last.
Elizabeth I, James VI & I, Charles I
IN AUGUST 1588,
Europe was convulsed by religious war, and Protestant England faced the world’s foremost Catholic power. With the Spanish Armada in the Channel and a large and fearsomely professional Spanish army in the Low Countries, England was under dire threat.
On 18 August Queen Elizabeth came to review her troops at Tilbury. She wore a breastplate and carried a sword and addressed them in words that have echoed down the centuries: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any Prince of Europe should dare invade the border of my realm.’
But even as the queen spoke, the moment of danger had passed. The English fireships had broken up the Armada’s ‘invincible’ formation off Calais, and coastal storms would do the rest. Nevertheless, despite the defeat of the Spanish Armada, England would not escape the horrors of religious war, and some of those who had heard Elizabeth at Tilbury might live long enough to see another English monarch raise his banner in defiance on English soil. But this time the king’s enemies would not be foreign princes, but his own people.
I
Within a generation the monarchy was to move from a position of strength under the Tudors to abject weakness under the Stuart succession. With the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth’s reputation stood at a zenith at home and abroad. Even Pope Sixtus V, who had helped finance the Armada expedition, expressed his admiration of her and regretted only that they were unable to have children together! Inheriting their combined talents, he said, their offspring would rule the world.
Defending the realm was the most fundamental duty of an English monarch and Elizabeth had acquitted herself admirably. But, by virtue of the Crown Imperial, she had a further responsibility. She also had different opponents and they were at home. As time moved on from the dizzying religious convulsions that had engulfed England since Henry took the momentous step of assuming the Supremacy, it was becoming increasingly clear that the monarchy’s power over religion was a double-edged sword. The problem was not now simply Protestant against Catholic but also Protestant against different kinds of Protestants. As queen, Elizabeth presided over a national Protestant Church and, as Supreme Governor, she made religion in her own image. It was a right that she affirmed came direct from God. Could Elizabeth, mere woman that she was, maintain this lofty claim? And how could she, as Supreme Head of the Church, avoid being drawn into the religious conflict, which threatened to turn quarrels about religion into disputes with the crown?
Elizabeth did her best in establishing a Church of England that was Protestant in its doctrines but Catholic in the appearance of its ceremonies and clerical dress. Elizabeth’s policy was successful in heading off much Catholic opposition, but it had the opposite effect of opening up divisions on the Protestant side between those who wanted the rigorous, stripped-down Protestantism of the Continent and Scotland, and those who followed Elizabeth in her attachment to bishops and ceremonies.
This was not a struggle between government and opposition; rather it was a schism within the highest ranks of the Elizabethan establishment, with Elizabeth’s chief minister and eldest confidant, William Cecil, on one side, and her archbishop of Canterbury, William Whitgift, on the other. The bad feeling between the two men burst into the open in the queen’s own presence, and Elizabeth came down publicly and heavily on Whitgift’s side.
Matters of religion, she insisted, were for her and her bishops alone. Neither the council nor Parliament had any say in the matter. Instead, since her Supremacy over the Church came to her from God alone, she was answerable only to God in how she chose to exercise it. This was Henry VIII’s high view of the Royal Supremacy, and in sticking to it Elizabeth showed herself every inch her father’s daughter.