Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (6 page)

IV

Which brings us, in conclusion, to the “joke” that James played on Elizabeth. In this context, what message could James possibly have been trying to convey when he consigned Mary and Elizabeth to the same burial space, under a commemorative plaque that insisted on their identity? Again, I think the answer lies in his attempt to legitimate his kingship.

When James came to the English throne, he found himself in a difficult position. We can appreciate how profoundly the Elizabethan regime’s anti-Marian campaign compromised his claim to succeed Elizabeth. It culminated in his mother’s public execution in 1587, by which point she was depicted (as in the pages of Spenser’s 
Faerie Queene
) as the Scottish born “Duessa”: born-again Whore of Babylon and the pope’s minion. As late as a month before Elizabeth’s death, in February 1603, the Venetian ambassador reported that two powerful objections were raised against James’s right to inherit—and these were only the official ones: “first, that he was not born in the kingdom and is therefore ineligible for the crown; and the second, that his mother...was declared a rebel by Parliament, and incapable of succession, and this incapacitates her son.”
⁴⁶
In his kingship James thus had to assert the Stuart claim to the kingdom of England, but without appearing as the bloodthirsty son of England’s ancient enemies, come to wreak revenge for his mother’s murder and establish the yoke of Antichrist.

This background helps us better understand James’s carefully calibrated attention to the memories of all three of his predecessor queens in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey. Memorializing “England’s Eliza” undoubtedly gladdened the hearts of many English men, as it did Sir Robert Cecil’s. It also reinforced James’s status as in effect Elizabeth’s adoptive son and, in that role, another stalwart protector of international Protestantism. So well established was their fictional parental bond by the end of Elizabeth’s reign that James could appeal to it to defend himself against allegations that he had conspired with the Spaniards to force his entry to the throne in anticipation of the queen’s death. In 1601, in secret correspondence with one of Elizabeth’s privy councilors, he wrote that

God...hath by lineal descent clad me with an undoubted right to your [i.e., the English] crown...Yea, what a foolish part were that in me,...to hazard my honour, state and person, in entering that kingdom by violence as an usurper which God by lawful right hath provided for me, to the which I am called as a lawful heir, as the son of the present queen...
⁴⁷

But, once James came into his inheritance, he no longer needed to claim as the “son” of Elizabeth, with all that that implied about elective monarchy, although it remained a useful tool.
⁴⁸
Instead he could position himself as the sole true inheritor in a line of kings. That line, inaugurated by Henry VII, derailed in the reign of his son, once Henry VIII’s relentless quest for a male heir ruptured dynastic continuity. God’s judgment on Henry’s attempt revealed itself in the resulting issue: two bastard daughters and a child king. Only with James’s accession was the breach healed, and the natural order restored. Even before his accession, in 1599, in the pages of 
Basilikon Doron
, James had begun the recalibration of monarchical identifiers that he was to set in stone in Westminster Abbey. “Consider the difference of success that God granted in the marriages of the king my grandfather and me your own father,” he admonished his son Henry, in terms that subtly damned Henry VIII: “The reward of his incontinency...[was] the sudden death at one time of two pleasant young princes, and a daughter only born to succeed to him;...leaving a double curse behind him to the land, both a woman of sex, and a new born babe of age to reign over them.”
⁴⁹

James’s commemorative plans were demonstrably shaped by his commitment to establishing a version of English history that presented the recent past as a cul-de-sac. As Julia Walker has realized (and as was manifestly apparent to the Westminster Abbey visitor whose response I quoted in the beginning of this chapter), the greater grandeur of Mary Stuart’s tomb and its position in the ranks of fertile mothers of kings valorized James’s pedigree over Elizabeth’s, while joining the two Tudor sisters in one tomb had the effect of reinforcing their infertility.
⁵⁰
But it also, once more, brought to the fore the stigma of illegitimacy that clung to them both.
⁵¹
It contributed to the dangerous but politically necessary work of dismantling the Aylmerian analysis of English reformation history, in order to stake James’s own claims to absolute kingship.

In his very rich article Peter Sherlock has discovered the best evidence for this interpretation in the inscription on Mary Stuart’s tomb. After describing Mary, unexceptionally, as the “queen of Scots and queen dowager of France,” it then goes on to proclaim her to be “sole heir” (
haeredis unicae
) of Henry VII. This assertion, Sherlock concludes, “virtually denied Elizabeth’s legitimacy,” personal and political. According to the inscription, Mary was “sure and undoubted heiress to the crown of England while she lived, and mother of James, the most mighty sovereign of Great Britain”—and James (there was no need to add) inherited that right from her at the very moment of her death, it did not need to add. Sherlock provides the punch line for my piece in a footnote. The assertion that Mary Stuart was Henry VII’s “sole heir,” with its implication of Elizabeth’s—and Mary Tudor’s—illegitimacy, appears to have been added at James’s direction. It was not present in Northampton’s draft versions of the epitaph, which identified James’s claims in more narrowly legalistic terms—as “nearest heir by the law of succession to the English crown.”
⁵²

No memorial to James was erected in Westminster Abbey. But we do not have to go too far to look for one that, built in his own lifetime, commemorated his imperial vision. In 1620 James contributed his collected writings to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The donation was honored by a statue of the king handing one book to Fame, and another to a figure representing the university. Surely the intention was to evoke and supersede the famous image of Henry VIII to be found on the title page of the 1539 Great Bible. In James’s view, his accession to the English throne repaired the effects of Henry VIII’s “incontinency.” It restored order, natural and divine, thereby inaugurating a new Augustan age whose benefits would extend even beyond “Britain.” At last, the promise of Protestant reformation could be fulfilled. The true via media, languishing in confessional strife under the two Tudor queens, could now, under the auspices of “Great Britain’s Solomon,” provide the highway to the reunification of Christendom.
⁵³

Notes

1. Tudor History Questions and Answers,
   http://tudorhistory.org/query
   blog /2005/11/question-from-ille-izabeth-i-mary.html (spelling corrected).
   
2. Julia M. Walker, “Reading the Tombs of Elizabeth I,” 
   ELR
   , 26 (1996): 510–30.
   
3. Phillip Lindley, “‘The singular mediacion and praiers of all the holie companie of Heven’: Sculptural Functions and Forms in Henry VII’s Chapel” in 
   Westminster Abbey: The Lady Chapel of Henry VII,
    ed. Tim Tatton-Brown and Richard Mortimer (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 259–94; 273.
   
4. A. P. Stanley, 
   Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey,
    2 vols. (New York, 1882), Appendix: Account of the Search for the Grave of King James I, 367–403.
   
5. Jennifer Woodward, 
   The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625
    (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), 73.
   
6. Jennifer Woodward, 
   The Theatre of Death
   , ch. 4, 67–86; 85. See also Antonia Fraser, 
   Mary Queen of Scots
    (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), 546–9.
   
7. Letter to the Dean and Chapter of Peterborough Cathedral; Dated August 28, 1612; see Nigel Llewellyn, “The Royal Body: Monuments to the Dead, for the Living” in 
   Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660
   , ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion, 1990), 218–40; 227–8.
   
8. Alice Strickland, 
   Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses Connected with the Regal Succession of Great Britain,
    8 vols
   .
    (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1851), II: 445.
   
9. For Darnley’s status see William S. Daniel, 
   History of the Abbey and Palace of Holyrood
    (Edinburgh: D. Anderson, 1852), 67.
   
10. See John Watkins, 
    Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty
     (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. ch. I, “James I and the Fictions of Elizabeth’s Motherhood,” 14–35.
    
11. Walker, “Reading the Tombs,” 524.
    
12. Privy Purse Expenses of the Princess Mary, Daughter of King Henry the Eighth, Afterwards Queen Mary,
     ed. F. Madden (London: William Pickering, 1831), clxxxvii.
    
13. John Strype, 
    Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion, and Other Various Occurrences in the Church of England, During Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign,
     4 vols. in 7 parts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1824) v.I.i: 400.
    
14. Peter Sherlock, “The Monuments of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart: King James and the Manipulation of Memory,” 
    Journal of British Studies
     46 (2007): 263–89; 274.
    
15. Two proclamations forbidding tomb desecration were issued, in 1560 and 1571. See David Howarth, 
    Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649
     (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 154.
    
16. John Strype, 
    Ecclesiastical Memorials Relating Chiefly to Religion and the Reformation of It
    , 3 vols. (London, 1721), III, 597, quoted in Jennifer Woodward, 
    Theatre of Death
    , 57. See also David E. Stannard, 
    The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture and Social Change
     (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 101–2.
    
17. “Cornelius Cure,” 
    The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art
     (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Cure’s best known royal commission was the monument to Mary, Queen of Scots.
    
18. PRO, SP 14/13/8, quoted in Sherlock, “The Monuments of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart,” 270.
    
19. John White, “A Sermon Preached at the Funerals of Queen Mary” in John Strype, 
    Ecclesiastical Memorials
     
    Relating Chiefly to Religion and the Reformation of It
    , III.ii, 536–50; 546. The new queen was not pleased by the sermon; White was taken into custody as he stepped down from the pulpit.
    
20. For this, and for Mary’s “hyper-sensitivity” to any hint of her illegitimacy, see E. W. Ives, “Tudor Dynastic Problems Revisited,” 
    Historical Research
     81 (2008): 255–79.
    
21. Anne McLaren, “Political Ideas” in Susan Doran and Norman Jones (eds.)
    The Elizabethan World
     (London: Routledge, 2010).
    
22. 28 Henry VIII c. 7, 
    Statutes of the Realm
    , v. 3, 1509–45, 655–62; 656.
    
23. See, for example, Edward VI’s deathbed speech explaining his decision to divert the succession in Robert Wingfield of Brantham, “The 
    Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham
    ,” ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch, 
    Camden Miscellany,
     28 (Camden Society, 4th series, 29, 1984), 181–301; 247.
    
24. Anne McLaren, “Monogamy, Polygamy and the True State: James I’s Rhetoric of Empire,” 
    History of Political Thought
    , 25 (2004): 446–80; 453–4.
    
25. CSPSp,
     V: 11, 263, 310.
    
26. CSPSp,
     V: 292, 395.
    
27. See Corinna Streckfuss, “‘Spes maxima nostra:’ European Propaganda and the Spanish Match,” in this volume.
    
28. Mark Nicholls, 
    A History of the Modern British Isles, 1529–1603: The Two Kingdoms
     (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 145.
    
29. For an excellent treatment of Anglo-French relations and Mary of Guise’s regency, see Pamela E. Ritchie, 
    Mary of Guise in Scotland, 1548–1560: A Political Career
     (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002).
    
30. CSPVen
    , VII: 327–31, Michiel Suriano, “Report concerning King Philip of Spain,” 330–31.
    
31. Patrick Collinson, “Puritans, Men of Business and Elizabethan Parliaments,” 
    Parliamentary History
     7 (1988): 187–211.
    
32. Christopher Goodman, 
    How superior powers oght to be obeyd of their subiects and wherin they may lawfully by Gods Worde be disobeyed and resisted. Wherin also is declared the cause of all this present miserie in England, and the onely way to remedy the same
     (Geneva, 1558), 98–100, 53–4.
    
33. Goodman, 
    How superior powers oght to be obeyed
    , 54.
    
34. CSPScot,
     II: 112.
    
35. William Cecil’s description, in a memorandum written in August 1559, “A Short Discussion of the Weighty Matter of Scotland,” in 
    The State Papers and Letters of Sir Ralph Sadler,
     ed. Arthur Clifford, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1809), I: 377–83; 380.
    
36. Anne McLaren, “The Q
    uest for a King
    : Gender, Marriage and Succession in Elizabethan England,” 
    Journal of British Studies
     41 (2002): 259–90.
    
37. John Aylmer, 
    An harborovve for faithfull and trevve subiectes agaynst the late blowne blaste, concerninge the gouernme[n]t of vvemen. wherin be confuted all such reasons as a straunger of late made in that behalfe, with a breife exhortation to obedience
     (“Strasbourg” [false imprint for London], 1558) fol. L3.v–r.
    
38. James Emerson Phillips, 
    Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature
     (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964).
    
39. Aylmer, 
    An harborovve,
     fol. O2.v–r.
    
40. Aylmer, 
    An harborovve,
     fol. B2.v–r.
    
41. Aylmer, 
    An harborovve,
     fol. F2v–r.
    
42. Aylmer, 
    An harborovve,
     fol. R.r–R2.r.
    
43. Michael A. R. Graves, 
    Thomas Norton: The Parliament Man
     (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), ix.
    
44. All quotations in the following two paragraphs are from Thomas Norton’s unpaginated tract, 
    To the Quenes Majesties poore deceyued subiectes of the north country, drawen into rebellion by the Earls of Northumberland and Westmerland
    (London, 1569).
    
45. Graham Hough, 
    The First Commentary on “The Faerie Queene”
     (privately printed, 1964), 8.
    
46. CSPVen
    , IX: 1592–1603, 531–48; 540. James’s fears that he would be denied the English crown on one or the other ground were long-standing. See D. H. Willson, 
    King James VI and I
     (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958), 139–41.
    
47. Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and Others in England, During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth,
     ed. John Bruce (London: Camden Society, 1861), 61–2.
    
48. For the resulting ambiguities, see D. R. Woolf, “Two Elizabeths? James I and the Late Queen’s Famous Memory,” 
    Canadian Journal of History
     20 (1985) 167–9.
    
49. James I, 
    Basilikon Doron or His Majesties Instrvctions to His Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince
     (Edinburgh, 1599), 
    Political Works of James I
    , ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 3–52; 35.
    
50. Walker, “Reading the Tombs,” 516, 524.
    
51. Allegations that Elizabeth was a bastard attained a new political salience in James’s reign, when they were used to depict her (and 
    not
     “Mary”) as a tyrant. See, for example, the exchange between the Catholic controversialist Robert Persons (
    The judgment of a Catholicke Englishman
     [London, 1608] and William Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln (
    An answer to a Catholike Englishman
     [London, 1609]).
    
52. Sherlock, “The Monuments of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart,” 280.
    
53. See W. B. Patterson, 
    King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom
    (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).