A fatal complication ensued when Mary turned her sights on the greater crown of England, believing it her rightful inheritance and a prize worth pursuing. Elizabeth’s fundamental insecurity in her own legitimacy, where the whole of Catholic Europe was ranged against her, the ‘bastard child of a whore’, increased the tension and emotional volatility of the issue. The complex rivalry, the feinting and parrying of their personal relationship, sprang from the challenge Mary had made for Elizabeth’s throne and the unassailable legitimacy of her claim. The powerful passions this relationship engendered in each was a result of their strikingly different natures. The fact they never met allowed their rivalry to inflate in each queen’s imagination, their qualities elaborated upon by ambassadors and courtiers intent on their own ambitions.
In a tradition instituted by William the Conqueror, the Champion of England on coronation day would ride up through Westminster Hall and challenge anyone who disputed the right of succession. In front of the newly crowned queen and her peers, the clatter of hooves announced the arrival of the queen’s champion. Sir Edward Dymoke, the latest member of the family who for centuries had enacted this role, rode into the hall in full armour, and flung down his gauntlet, challenging anyone who questioned Elizabeth’s right to the English throne. An uneasy silence fell on the assembly. No voice was raised on this day. But Elizabeth and Mary knew that the question had already been asked, that the contest was engaged, and in a more public arena, with wider repercussions for everyone.
A rivalry had been instituted that ‘could not be extinguished but by Death’.65
*La Pléiade was a group of seven French writers, led by Pierre de Ronsard and including Joachim du Bellay, Jean Dorat and Remy Belleau, who aimed to elevate the French language to the level of classical Greek and Latin as a medium for literary expression. They were named after the constellation and are considered the first representatives of French Renaissance poetry.
*The Hamiltons became nearest family to the throne when Lord Hamilton married James II’s daughter, Princess Mary, in c. 1474. Their grandson James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran, born about 1516, engineered his position as regent and heir presumptive on the death of James V. But Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, was also descended from Princess Mary and so believed he too had a claim to be heir presumptive, possibly even more indubitably legitimate than Arran who was born of a marriage which had followed a divorce. The Hamilton – Lennox rivalry was one of the dynamic power struggles of the reign of Mary Queen of Scots.
*William Camden (1551–1623) was an antiquary and historian, one time headmaster of Westminster School where Ben Jonson was his pupil and claimed that he owed him ‘all that I am in arts, all that I know’. In 1615 Camden published his ground-breaking and authoritative Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum Regnante Elizabetha which marked a new departure in the writing of history with its use of state papers and lively, often first-hand, description, combined with academic detachment and lack of bias.
*Sir John Hayward (?1564–1627) a historian who was imprisoned by Elizabeth for offending her with his dedication to the Earl of Essex in his history of Henry IV (1599), suggesting Essex was likewise capable of usurping the crown. Hayward subsequently wrote a lively account of the early part of Elizabeth’s reign.
*The French queen, Catherine de Medici, was yet to assume full regency and exercise her considerable authority and guile in the religious wars which convulsed France.
*Schifanoya, resident in London at the time, was the author of some descriptive and lively dispatches to the Spanish court in Brussels.
*Possibly Charles Howard, a handsome courtier born in 1536 who became Lord Chamberlain and Lord Admiral and eventually was rewarded with the earldom of Nottingham in 1597.
CHAPTER TWO The Disappointment of Kings
The primogenity and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows!
Troilus and Cressida, act 1, scene 3
IF THE RIVALRY BETWEEN these two queens would only be resolved through death, the individual significance of their births had a certain symmetry too. Both entered the world as bitter disappointments to their fathers, and the birth of each princess was a contributory factor in the untimely death of a parent. It was all a matter of sex. Both fathers were kings without legitimate male heirs. Had Elizabeth not been a girl but the longed-for, expected prince it is most unlikely that her mother would ever have been executed. It is even possible that Henry’s popular reputation might have rested more on his Reformation, encouraged by his independent-minded reformist Queen Anne, than on his grotesque failures as a husband and father.
In the case of Mary Queen of Scots, her birth in 1542 was followed almost immediately by her father’s death. Already sick and humiliated, James V, on hearing his heir was a girl, literally turned his face to the wall like a wounded animal, and waited to die. His valedictory words showed him defeated as much by fate as by life: looking back two centuries to Marjorie Bruce, founder of the Stewart dynasty, he reputedly said to the messenger bringing the news of Mary’s birth: ‘It cam’ wi’ a lass, it will gang wi’ a lass.’1 In fact, James was as poor a prophet as he was survivor. He died aged only thirty and without seeing his daughter and heir. The Stuart* dynasty, however, managed to teeter on for a further century, despite revolution and republicanism, although Scotland’s absolute independence did not survive the reign of his daughter Mary.
Nine years separated these two princesses, born in neighbouring kingdoms in an outlying island of Europe. England and Scotland were small and relatively unimportant, impoverished lands, mostly under threat from the many times larger and richer Continental powers of France and Spain, and spasmodically at war with them, and with each other. The newly established and insecure Tudor dynasty was in urgent need of a male heir; the Stewarts, although an ancient race of kings, were ill-fated, desperate for a monarch who could survive to middle age and produce a strong male heir. The last five Scottish kings had been children at their accession, most of them still in the cradle. (Mary Queen of Scots and her son, James VI, were also to succeed to the Scottish throne as infants.)
The Stewarts were plagued by their history of monarchs dying violently and dying young (James I and James III were murdered and James II, a murderer himself, was blown up while watching his own cannon being fired) and they were undermined by the subsequent power of factious regents and murderous clan rivalry. When they eventually succeeded at the start of the seventeenth century to the English throne and moved south, their life expectancy improved. The dynasty’s star, however, continued as mismanaged and bloody as ever it was in earlier centuries, with both Mary and her grandson, Charles I, tried and beheaded for treason.
Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533 to a father who was already forty-one and who had longed for a healthy son during the twenty-three years of his marriage to the unimpeachable Catherine of Aragon. In despair at producing only one surviving child, Mary, born in 1516 (his other three sons and two daughters were either stillborn or died soon after birth), Henry began to wonder if somehow his lack of male heirs was not a personal punishment by God. He