The question of the succession was further complicated by Mary Queen of Scots, who had been a threat to the stability of the Elizabethan regime from the very start, when she quartered the arms of England with those of Scotland and France in what was an implicit claim if not to the throne then at least to the succession. For the rest of her tragic life, the English crown was the supreme object of her desire, and her aspirations were among the crucial influences on Elizabethan politics and on Elizabeth’s personal life. Time and again, however, events conspired to frustrate her legitimate hopes and less worthy ambitions. English victory in Scotland in 1560 ensured the success of the Reformation there, and fatally weakened the position of her Scottish allies and French relatives. Yet that was not too much of a problem as long as she was married to the king of France, for ultimately the might of France would have been thrown into the balance to avenge the English insult to French honour. But the death of her husband, the unmanly Francis II, was a more telling blow. Not only was her own power drastically reduced, but so was the influence of her Guise cousins in French politics. Suddenly, Scotland was all that was left to a woman who had dreamed of bequeathing no less than four kingdoms: England, France, Scotland and Ireland. With nothing to be gained from remaining in France, she returned in 1561 to what was almost a foreign country, herself more French than Scottish in tastes and manners. Here, her policy was simple: to angle for recognition of her claim to the English succession. For her at least, in Dr Johnson’s famous words, there was no nobler prospect than the high road that leads to England.
What Mary most sought from Elizabeth was some explicit acknowledgement as heir presumptive. However, she was tacitly excluded from the English succession under the terms of the 1544 Act of Succession, which was still in force. Not that this counted for much. The same exclusion obviously extended to her son, James, and it did not stop him from taking the English throne in 1603. There can be no doubt that, in purely hereditary and customary terms, her claim to the throne was the strongest: she was descended from Henry Vlll’s elder sister, Margaret. And had the matter ever come to a head, she might well have been able to vindicate her claim against the statutorily based but hereditarily inferior claims of the Greys, descended from Henry’s younger sister Mary. If the history of the Tudors had shown anything, it had shown that the express wills of princes and parliaments were as nothing beside the force of arms and the consensus of the people about the rights of heirs. But Mary never showed herself a shrewd politician: unlike Elizabeth she wore her heart on her sleeve, and had little of her English cousin’s talents for dissimulation, equivocation and obscurity. She had a certain difficulty also in distinguishing fantasy from reality. Thus she simply refused to believe that Henry VIII’s will and the 1544 statute had excluded her from the succession, and repeatedly demanded to be shown an authenticated copy. Some of Elizabeth’s problems lay here. Only an Act of Parliament could formally have guaranteed the succession of Mary, and the Parliaments which convened under Elizabeth were unlikely to sanction the succession of a Catholic. Moreover, Elizabeth had her own reasons for leaving the question of her successor wrapped in indecent obscurity. She knew from her own experience under Mary Tudor how the person of the heir to the throne became a focus for plots and opposition. Suspicious to the very core of her Tudor being, she had no desire to whet the assassin’s knife with hope.
Mary Stuart’s few years in power were characterised by an ineptitude and miscalculation which not only failed to win her the throne of England but also lost her that of Scotland. Her policy was always inconstant and often impenetrable. Her unpredictable changes of attitude towards her nobility and her idiosyncratic position over religion alienated substantial sections of political opinion in Scotland. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that, as late as 1568, she could still muster enough support to fight a civil war: a tribute not to her own talent, although she seems to have had a remarkable personal charisma which enabled her to win over the most improbable enemies, but to the endemic vendettas of Scottish noble politics, which ensured that whoever was in power would never lack for rivals. More characteristic was her failure to appreciate even this fundamental reality of Scottish politics, which led her to take refuge in England (of all places) after her defeat in that war. The shrewd option was simply to concede the demands of her foes and patiently rebuild her position, as she had done before. Instead, she staked - and lost - everything on a wild throw of the dice, fleeing to England in the hope of securing political and military support from Elizabeth: from Elizabeth, the parsimonious and peace-loving Protestant, and the one person in the world who had everything to gain from Mary’s exclusion from politics. Thus began nearly two decades of residence in England during which her status declined gradually from that of an honoured if slightly troublesome guest through house arrest to an irksome and unpleasant confinement (in the hands of a singularly obnoxious Puritan zealot) as public enemy number one, living on sufferance, and finally to her execution amidst public rejoicing.
The handling of Mary neatly illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of Elizabeth’s character and policy. From the start Elizabeth respected her cousin as a fellow sovereign. To that very limited extent, then, there was something in Mary’s dream of support. Elizabeth felt too exposed herself to look with equanimity on the dispossession of a neighbouring sovereign by a clique of ambitious noble malcontents. On the other hand, her instinct for political survival prevented her from granting the personal interview on which Mary pinned her hopes. Perhaps Elizabeth feared lest she fall victim to the renowned charm of the Scottish queen. Perhaps she was worried that Mary’s tarnished reputation in matters of sexual relations and political manoeuvres might reflect upon her own (which had, after all, suffered enough from her unconsummated, if not always entirely innocent, affair with Robert Dudley). Mary was suspected of serial adultery and conspiracy to murder. Most probably, Elizabeth feared the political consequences of giving second place at her court (and no lower place could have been accorded to a visiting sovereign) to someone who certainly had a record for plotting and intrigue. Thus Mary was kept firmly and safely at arm’s length.
On the other hand, Elizabeth resisted long and hard the clamouring crescendo for Mary’s execution. This had begun in 1569, for Mary’s arrival had provoked within a year a plot to liberate her and overthrow Elizabeth and her political and religious establishment. The reliably Protestant Parliaments of Elizabeth called for Mary’s execution with monotonous regularity - often at the instigation of the Privy Council. Perhaps Elizabeth’s reluctance to bow to this pressure showed some appreciation of how closely Mary Stuart’s present position resembled her own former position under Mary Tudor back in the 1550s, when Mary was being pressed by a group of her councillors to seal her political achievement with Elizabeth’s blood. Yet perhaps also we can see, between the reluctance to allow Mary to come to court and the refusal to adopt the Machiavellian solution to a very real political problem, Elizabeth’s own political limitations. Between reason and honour Elizabeth was putting Mary into an intolerable situation, virtually driving her into precisely the sort of intrigues that Elizabeth most feared. Faced with the growing certainty of life imprisonment, not only without trial but without even the shadow of justice (as a sovereign, Mary was not even subject to Elizabeth’s jurisdiction), it was only to be expected that Mary would conspire to bring about the only event that could possibly lead to her release - Elizabeth’s death. Finally, Elizabeth was perfectly well aware how it would look if she consigned Mary to the scaffold. The action would inevitably be presented as one of cruelty and tyranny and inhumanity - as of course it was.
Mary’s arrival immediately destabilised the still shaky structure of Elizabethan politics. For that old-fashioned section of the English nobility which wished to settle the doubts over the succession, which resented the political hegemony of William Cecil, and which regretted the divisiveness of the religious situation, Mary Queen of Scots actually looked more like a solution than a problem. As Elizabeth’s reluctance to marry was increasingly apparent, the notion of marrying off Mary to an English nobleman seemed to some people the best of all possible worlds. And England’s premier nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, was happily an eligible middle-aged widower at that precise moment. The match held out the prospect of the succession secured to an English heir (Mary had proved that she could have children), the Elizabethan Church of England guaranteed by the duke (a confirmed if moderate Protestant), and the Catholics reconciled to a Catholic queen (and presumably enjoying a fair degree of toleration). Mary and Norfolk had agreed the marriage by the end of 1568, and spent 1569 working on English aristocrats and foreign ambassadors to try and give their plan unstoppable momentum. But Norfolk and his allies shied away from broaching their plan with Elizabeth, and eventually it was she who, when the rumours became impossible to ignore, broached the subject with him, extorting a confession from him and brusquely commanding him to abandon any idea of going through with the marriage. Elizabeth had no intention of sanctioning Mary Stuart’s claim to the throne, still less of strengthening her political position by allowing her to marry the richest man in her kingdom. Besides which, everyone knew that this marriage would leave Cecil’s political position untenable, and Elizabeth had no intention of dismissing her chief councillor.
World History
