But to remain unmarried also flouted the hierarchical order of life which kept the nation safe, the universe in harmony. If Elizabeth continued to ignore the immutable laws of interconnectedness and the due place of everything, including herself and her rights and responsibilities as a monarch, then she risked the catastrophe of chaos. In the first years of her reign, her bishops of Canterbury, London and Ely expressed a similar fear ‘that this continued sterility in your Highness’ person to be a token of God’s displeasure towards us’.12 In this decision Elizabeth confounded every shade of opinion. She stood alone and unsupported. How could she not sometimes have faltered?
As the year drew to its wintry close, the opportunity Elizabeth had barely hoped for all her life was hers at last. By the beginning of November it became clear that her sister Mary was mortally ill. The swelling in her belly which she had prayed so desperately was a growing child was most probably ovarian or uterine cancer. As Mary slipped in and out of consciousness the courtiers who had danced attendance at her door melted away. They joined the hasty ride from London towards Hatfield, ready to ally themselves to the new source of power and patronage. All her life Elizabeth was to remember her unease at this precipitate turning from the dying monarch to court the coming one.
And she was the coming queen. She was Henry’s legal heir, after the deaths of Edward and Mary, as declared by the succession statute of 1544. There was, however, the small matter of an earlier statute when her father had declared her and Mary ‘preclosed, excluded, and barred to the claim’.13 This remained unrepealed, although Mary had taken steps to legitimize herself. Elizabeth chose to rely on the 1544 statute for her legitimacy, but the insecurity she felt when faced with the claim of her cousin Mary Stuart remained. She was however the popular choice, the only choice as far as the people were concerned. The dying Mary had even given her blessing, urged on by Philip of Spain, who feared Protestantism less than the imperial ambitions of France. She had sent two members of her council to Elizabeth to let her know ‘it was her intention to bequeath to her the royal crown, together with all the dignity that she was then in possession of by right of inheritance’. Elizabeth’s reply illustrated partly why the long-suffering Mary found her younger sister so exasperating to deal with: ‘I am very sorry to hear of the Queen’s illness; but there is no reason why I should thank her for her intention to give me the crown of this kingdom. For she has neither the power of bestowing it upon me, nor can I lawfully be deprived of it, since it is my peculiar and hereditary right.’14
So it was that on the 17 November 1558, a Thursday, Elizabeth learned the waiting was over and her father’s crown was finally hers. She sank to her knees, apparently momentarily overcome, breathing deeply with emotion. But with the breadth of her learning and her cool self-possession she was not long lost for words: ‘A domino factum est illud, et est mirabile in oculis meis!’ was her first utterance as queen. Quoting part of Psalm 118 she had declared, ‘This is the doing of the Lord and it is marvellous in my eyes.’15
Fortuitously Parliament happened to be sitting that day, and when the Lords were brought the news of Mary’s death, in measured tones ‘with joint consent of the whole assembly’ they declared ‘the Lady Elizabeth might forthwith be proclaimed Queen’.16 This was broadcast by the herald-at-arms at the front door of the Palace of Westminster, at the cross in Cheapside and at other prominent places in the city. Weary of bloodshed, fearful of foreign wars, weakened by bad harvests and disease, the people welcomed the new queen. But there was foreboding too as to what the future would bring. Another female monarch, after the last disastrous experiment, seemed to be too risky when England was in need of inspired and powerful leadership. There was a profound cultural and religious acceptance that it was unnatural, indeed impossible, for women to be successfully in command. But the prospect of marriage for Elizabeth also brought the real fear, acted out in Mary’s reign, of alliance with a dominant foreign power. It was not surprising there were mixed emotions beyond the general feeling of relief. Sir John Hayward,* an early historian, wrote: ‘Generally, the rich were fearful, the wise careful, the honestly-disposed doubtful, the discontented and the desperate, and all such whose desires were both immoderate and evil, joyful, as wishing trouble, the gate of spoil.’17
And trouble was what everyone expected. The transition from old monarch to new was inherently uncertain. Diplomatically too, it upset the status quo between nations. The death of a stalwart Catholic during a period of fomenting religious debate changed the tensions between the ancient neighbours and rivals, France, Spain, Scotland and England.
The fiery Scottish Protestant John Knox was also to remember 1558 as a year of particular significance. His tract The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was published, with unfortunate timing, just as Elizabeth came to the throne. By monstrous regiment he meant unnatural government and his blast was directed against the women rulers in Europe at the time of his writing whom he saw as implacable enemies of the reformed religion: Mary I of England and the Scottish regent Mary of Guise.* Unfortunately, the new Queen of England who could have been his most powerful ally was instead greatly offended. She did not find it amusing to be hectored in his main argument: ‘to promote a Woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any Realm is repugnant to Nature; contrary to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally, it is the subversion of all good Order, of all equity and justice’.18
An intemperate and gifted preacher, Knox was barred from returning from Geneva to England to resume his preaching career. He wrote to Elizabeth trying to ingratiate himself into her favour but even that letter turned into a rant on this most sensitive of subjects, and he never recanted his anti-woman stand, accepting the consequences of his inflexible principles: ‘My First Blast has blown from me all my friends in England.’19 Instead he returned to Scotland in 1559, the most powerful and vociferous opponent of Catholic and French influence, and the mouthpiece of Scottish Calvinist conscience. He remains to this day a brooding, implacable and self-righteous symbol of the Scottish Reformation.
Knox’s view of the natural and divine order of things, with woman subservient to man, was a commonly accepted one. His stance was uncompromising and his language colourful, but he was not saying anything new. The lower orders knew of woman’s inferiority through the traditions of their lives and the discrepancy between the sexes in simple brute force. The educated aristocracy was imbued with the necessity for this human hierarchy from their readings of classical authors, like Plato and Aristotle, and the thundering metaphors of the Bible. Did not God say to Eve, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’?20 In fact the mortality rate of women in childbirth made it clear that they were the more expendable half of the species, that God and nature put a lower value on womankind.
The male was the norm and the female a deviation, the mysterious, less adequate ‘other’. For Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart these were accepted philosophical, theological, legal and medical truths that permeated the way the world was interpreted and relationships between people understood. Everything these young women read and were taught informed them of their intellectual and moral limitations and the narrowness of their vision. Classical and biblical texts were ever-present in the Renaissance mind; the myths a ready source of reference. The scientific humanism of Aristotle was highly influential. He had no doubt of the right order of things: ‘Man is active, full of movement, creative