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