Doubtful and dangerous

The question of succession in late Elizabethan England

Susan Doran, Paulina Kewes, Susan Doran, Paulina Kewes

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784993597
• eBook ISBN: 9781847799302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Examines the pivotal influence of the succession question on the politics, religion and culture of the post-Armada years of Queen Elizabeth's reign

Part I

Contexts and approaches

Chapter 1

Introduction: a historiographical perspective

Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes

Although the succession controversy during the earlier part of Elizabeth’s reign has long captured the interest of historians and literary scholars, the period following Mary Stuart’s execution has suffered from relative obscurity. Our main aim in this book is to remedy this situation by examining the dominant part played by the succession issue during the ‘long’ 1590s from several closely related perspectives. Individual essays explore the changing perceptions of the rules of monarchical succession, the impact of confessional divisions, the international and ‘archipelagic’ dimensions, the role of key political actors (Elizabeth, James VI, Essex, Robert Cecil, Richard Bancroft), and the reverberations of the succession debate in pamphlet literature, imaginative writing, sermons, and other printed and manuscript ephemera. The interdisciplinary scope of the volume should, we hope, make it of particular interest to students of both early modern British and Irish history and literature.

Our title, ‘doubtful and dangerous’, hints at why we consider that this later period requires closer attention, coming as it does from the Catholic polemical tract Newes from Spayne and Holland (1593). The purpose of its author, the Jesuit Robert Persons, was to exploit the fears and suspicions about who should be Queen Elizabeth’s heir in order to destabilize the Protestant regime and improve the chances of international support for a Catholic claimant.¹ Persons would pursue this aim vigorously in his more ambitious and provocative pamphlet, A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Inglande (1594/5). At around the same time, the Puritan MP Peter Wentworth used a near-identical expression, emphasizing ‘the doubtfulnesse and ambiguitie of the title it self’, in his tract designed to persuade the Queen to let parliament come up with a settlement.² Persons and Wentworth were not just making rhetorical points, but reflecting wider contemporary opinion. On both sides of the confessional frontier the succession was being viewed as vexed and divisive after the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots’ execution in February 1587, just as it had been before.

Why should this be? Granted, before Mary’s beheading Protestants had lived in terror of a Catholic restoration were she to take the throne, and grew ever more exasperated when Elizabeth refused to name a successor, to exclude Mary or to put her on trial for allegedly plotting in England. But with the Scottish Queen out of the picture, we might surely expect that their anxieties about England’s future would be over. After all, her son James VI of Scotland, who had inherited the Stuart dynastic claim, was a Protestant. He was also male, an experienced ruler, and a pensioner of the English Queen. Yet, as this book argues, uncertainties and worries about the succession did not disappear with Mary’s removal, and the outcome was far from predictable. Many late Elizabethans, not just a few committed Catholics, did not see the Scottish King as the incontrovertible heir or rally to his cause.³

First of all, James was not the only potential claimant; on the contrary, he had a disturbingly large number of rivals. By the mid-1590s, Persons named some sixteen possible heirs to Elizabeth.⁴ In 1601, the civil lawyer Thomas Wilson identified twelve competitors who ‘gape for’ the death of the Queen: ‘Thus you see’, he declared, ‘this crown is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose head it will fall is by many doubted’.⁵ Alongside James, the main contenders were Edward and Thomas Seymour, the sons of Katherine Grey of the Suffolk line; Arbella, the English Stuart from a cadet line; and the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain whose claim dated back to her fourteenth-century Lancastrian ancestor. Other plausible candidates were Ferdinando Stanley, briefly fifth Earl of Derby, from the cadet Suffolk line (until his sudden death in 1594) and Henry Hastings, third Earl of Huntingdon (who died childless in 1595), lineally descended from Edward III on both his mother’s and his father’s side (see genealogical charts 1 and 2). Bringing up the rear were the Duke of Parma and the Earl of Westmorland.

All these rival claims were problematic. Katherine Grey’s sons and Huntingdon had the advantage of being English and Protestant, but the former were officially bastards and the latter was not descended from Henry VII. The elder Seymour, Edward Lord Beauchamp, had moreover married beneath him in the early 1580s. Born in 1575, Arbella Stuart was an inexperienced and unmarried young woman; Derby and Westmorland were Catholics; and the Infanta Isabella, also Catholic, had the further disadvantages of being female and a foreigner. Nonetheless, James’s own position remained insecure. William Cecil Lord Burghley was rumoured to back Arbella’s claim or that of Lord Beauchamp. Equally unsettling, as Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, argues in Chapter 13, there existed a real possibility that, with or without the pope’s blessing, Spain or France or English Catholic exiles in cahoots with their co-religionists at home might back an alternative candidate: in 1593, for example, a Catholic plot was hatched in Flanders to assassinate Elizabeth and raise Derby to the throne; and throughout the 1590s English spies warned of conspiracies to seize Arbella and marry her to a foreign Catholic prince. At the same time (as will be seen in Paulina Kewes’s Chapter 3), many godly Protestants in England were suspicious about the depth of James’s commitment to ‘true religion’, given his troubled relationship with the Kirk and apparent willingness to tolerate Catholics in Scotland. Some Englishmen also voiced unease about the prospect of a foreign king, especially one from a nation that was the traditional enemy of England (see Susan Doran’s Chapter 11). Finally, James faced legal impediments to his title (as discussed by Doran and Kewes in Chapter 2) that could be exploited by those who opposed his succession on other grounds. As a result of all these factors, the Elizabethan fin de siècle witnessed growing alarm that an internal power struggle would ensue upon the Queen’s death which would attract foreign intervention, as had the recent war of succession in France about which a steady stream of news flowed from English presses.⁶ Protestants were obsessively scared of the intrusion of Spain;⁷ and during the later 1590s Catholics suspected that James would seek military support from the Protestant royal kin of his wife Anne of Denmark. Once again, we can see symmetry in the anxieties and conspiracy theories of the two rival confessions.

On account of these circumstances, James believed he needed Elizabeth’s explicit endorsement of his title, preferably confirmed by parliament, to be sure of the crown. However, although the Queen evidently favoured his candidacy, she refused to recognize him formally as the heir apparent. Her reasons were political. Because she distrusted both the Scottish King and her own subjects, the succession could be employed as bait to keep James in line whenever his policies within Scotland appeared to be moving against English interests, whilst dynastic uncertainty, she hoped, would keep her subjects loyal and prevent them turning towards the rising sun. Nevertheless, Elizabeth carried out some practical measures to aid James’s eventual take-over and weaken the position of his leading competitors. She ensured that the illegitimacy of Katherine Grey’s sons was not revoked and had their father, the Earl of Hertford, briefly imprisoned in 1595 when he planned to challenge the ruling of a royal commission of enquiry that he had not legally married their mother. Arbella Stuart was left isolated in Derbyshire, unable to build up a following. Moreover, Elizabeth repeatedly told James that his mother’s treason would not affect his title to the English throne. These reassurances, though, were insufficient to satisfy the King, and his ongoing efforts to advance his title meant that the succession remained very much a live issue.

All the more surprising, therefore, that a problem of such immediacy during the last sixteen years of the reign was accorded a disproportionately small amount of scholarly attention, at least until quite recently, by comparison with the extensive coverage of the preceding three decades (which, as we’ll see, also demands reconsideration).

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE PRE-1587 SUCCESSION

Almost half a century ago, Mortimer Levine took up the topic in his pioneering study of the 1560s succession tracts, a work that is now seriously dated, not least because of its limited range of sources and mistaken conclusion that the problem was effectively resolved by 1571.⁸ Since Levine, the significance of the succession has been acknowledged in wider surveys of Elizabethan history, politics, and literature, while many articles and some monographs have addressed specific aspects of the issue.

There is insufficient space here to mention all these secondary works, but a number are especially noteworthy. Marie Axton’s book of 1977 alerted us to the influence of the medieval theory of the ‘king’s two bodies’ on succession polemic and traced how contemporary drama engaged with the prospect of Elizabeth’s death without either a child of her own or a proper settlement of the succession. Susan Doran’s 1996 interdisciplinary study of Elizabeth’s courtships inevitably tackled the succession as part of its analysis of dynastic and confessional politics.⁹ Still more momentous were two of Patrick Collinson’s essays that introduced the concepts of ‘the Elizabethan exclusion crisis’ and ‘monarchical republic’ into our historical lexicon. By coining the first term, Collinson emphasized ‘the sustained concern of much of the “political nation” … to forestall the accession to the English throne of Mary Queen of Scots’.¹⁰ This he saw as the predominant feature of Elizabethan politics until Mary’s execution. By the second, Collinson meant extensive participation of Englishmen in local government and, more relevant for our purposes, a mindset of the governing elites which, he believed, was formed largely through fears that the Queen might die without a known heir. Dreading a power vacuum and, worse yet, the enthronement of a papist, suggested Collinson, royal councillors had to conceive of a political future without a monarch and, in consequence, devised unprecedented schemes, such as a conciliar interregnum, to prevent the worst happening.¹¹ Stephen Alford built on Collinson’s insights in his account of the political creed and activities of Sir William Cecil – whom Collinson identified as the key architect of the ‘monarchical republic’ – by analysing Cecil’s 1563 interregnum scheme designed to stave off the threat from the popish Mary, and drawing attention to the British dimension of the 1560s succession crisis.¹² More controversially, Anne McLaren injected a strongly gendered perspective into the topic with her attempt to show that the ‘crisis … conflated issues of monarchical authority, gender and confessional conviction’.¹³ And, most recently, Peter Lake has deconstructed the rhetorical strategies of Protestant and Catholic polemicists from the 1560s through the 1580s, whose writings directly or indirectly impinged on the succession; and R. Malcolm Smuts has drawn attention to the government’s recurrent resort to repression and organized violence against Catholics so as to prevent mobilization on behalf of a Catholic heir.¹⁴

This diverse body of work, however, tells only part of the story. None of the above studies brings together the different strands of the succession question, and none except Axton’s spans the entire period from Elizabeth’s accession until the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. In Chapter 2 of this book, therefore, we revisit the earlier Elizabethan succession issue, not only to set the scene for the later debates but also to offer a fresh and more rounded interpretation. We uniquely discuss various and interconnected facets of the problem: how it related to domestic, archipelagic and continental politics; how anxieties and solutions were presented in both parliament and public argument; and how that cross-confessional polemic deployed a wide range of forms and genres. Furthermore, we identify and examine the different phases of the succession crisis from the Queen’s accession until the Spanish Armada, an approach that both allows readers to recognize continuities and changes over an extended time-frame and rejects the historiographical division of the reign into two. As far as the succession is concerned, there was no ‘second reign of Elizabeth I’ as identified by John Guy.¹⁵ Rather, the problem mutated and evolved from 1558 till 1603, responding to shifts in political circumstances in Britain and on the Continent. Finally, in our revised narrative, we contest some other widely accepted interpretations, for example the perception of Cecil’s radicalism in his abortive constitutional experiment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and conventions
• Genealogical charts
• Part I—Contexts and approaches
• Part II—Religion and politics
• Part III—The court
• Part IV—Imaginative writings and the wider public world
• Part V—Britain and beyond
• Select bibliography
• Index