No one dared to voice openly the seriousness of Elizabeth’s condition, but Harington did find ‘some less mindful of what they are soon to lose, than of what they may perchance hereafter get’.20 He told his wife he had attended a dinner with the Archbishop and that many of Elizabeth’s own clerics appeared to be ‘well anointed with the oil of gladness’. But the spectacle of Elizabeth’s misery amidst the feasting pricked Harington’s conscience. In his Tract on the Succession he had wasted no opportunities to dwell on the unpopularity of her government and to contrast her failings as an aged Queen with James VI’s youth, vigour and masculinity. Now he could not suppress memories of all the kindness she had shown him, ‘her watchings over my youth, her liking to my free speech and admiration of my little learning … have rooted such love, such dutiful remembrance of her princely virtues, that to turn askant from her condition with tearless eyes, would stain and foul the spring and fount of gratitude’.21
Harington’s eyes, however, tear-filled or not, remained as fixed on the future as those of everyone else, and he was comforted by the realisation that his examination of the succession issue had been completed with exquisite timing.
The question of the succession had dominated the history of the Tudor dynasty and would shape events to come. The first Tudor king, Henry VII, had been a rival claimant to a reigning monarch until his army killed Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The victory came at the end of a long period of civil strife in which Harington’s great-grandfather, James Harington, was allied with the losing side – an error that cost the family much of their land in the north of England. Henry was fearful that such families would rise up against him if a rival candidate to his crown emerged and so he worked hard to achieve a secure succession. He had two sons to ensure the future of his line and he bolstered his claim by creating a mythology that anchored the Tudors in a legendary past.
Henry VII claimed that his ancestor, Owen Tudor, was a direct descendant of Cadwallader, supposedly the last of the British kings. This made the Tudors the heirs of King Arthur and through them, it was said, Arthur would return.22 Henry even named his eldest son Arthur, but the boy died aged fifteen not long after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It was thus his second son, Henry VIII, who inherited the crown, as well as his brother’s bride. Henry and Catherine had a daughter, the future Mary I, but no sons. Henry saw this lack of a male heir as an apocalyptic failure fearing that the inheritance of the throne by a mere queen regnant could plunge England back into civil war. He became convinced that God had punished him for having married his brother’s wife and sought an annulment from the Pope. When the Pope, under pressure from Catherine’s Hapsburg nephew, Charles V, denied it to him, he made himself the head of the Church in England. Justifications for Henry’s new title were found in the various ‘histories’ of Arthur, but his actions had coincided with the revolution in religious opinion in Europe begun by the German monk, Martin Luther. One of Henry’s chief researchers was a keen follower of Luther’s teachings and although Henry had once written against Luther he chose to reward Thomas Cranmer’s service in ‘discovering’ the royal supremacy by making him Archbishop of Canterbury. Centuries of Catholic culture and belief were to be overturned in favour of new Protestant ideas as Henry divorced Catherine, declared Mary illegitimate and married ‘one common stewed whore, Anne Boleyn’, as the Abbot of Whitby called her.
The Reformation changed England forever. The simple fact that the country was no longer part of the supra-national Roman Church encouraged a stronger sense of separateness from the Continent and enabled Henry to develop a full-blooded nationalism to which his dynasty was central. Elizabeth, the child of this revolution, was not, however, her father’s heir for long. Anne Boleyn was executed before she was three years old and Elizabeth, already a bastard in the eyes of the Catholic Church, was declared illegitimate by her father in order that any children of the marriage to his new love, Jane Seymour, should take precedence over her, as she had once done over her sister, Mary. When Jane Seymour had her son, Edward, in 1537, it seemed to Henry that the question of the succession was answered. As Henry had no further children by the three wives that succeeded Jane Seymour he eventually restored Elizabeth and Mary in line to the succession after Edward, in default of Edward’s issue or any further children by his last wife, Catherine Parr. His decision was confirmed in the Act of Succession in 1544 – the year before Elizabeth had made her father the gift of the prayer book that the German Duke saw on her desk.
The Act of Succession allowed the King to alter the succession by testament, that is, in his will. This was significant for Henry’s will wrote into law who Elizabeth’s heirs should be if all his children died without issue. Henry had sought Elizabeth’s heirs amongst the descendants of his sisters, Margaret of Scotland and Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. Margaret, the eldest, had married James IV of Scotland, who was killed fighting the English at Flodden in 1513. Their son, James V, died after losing a later battle against the English and left his infant daughter, Mary Stuart, as Queen of Scots. She should have been Elizabeth’s heir under the laws of primogeniture, but Henry’s will disinherited the Stuart line in favour of that of the Suffolks in vengeance for the Stuart enmity to England and the Scots’ refusal to marry their Queen to his son.
Harington’s tract explained that the Scots had feared that if Mary Stuart married Prince Edward their country would have become a mere province of England. In the winter of 1602/3 the English had similar concerns that if James VI of Scotland inherited the throne their country might be subsumed into a new kingdom called ‘Britain’. Machiavelli had argued that changing a country’s name was a badge of conquest and Harington warned James that ‘some in England fear the like now’. The name Britain had an unpleasantly Celtic ring and people believed that the creation of a new united kingdom could nullify English Common Law.
Many believed that James was also precluded from the succession by the medieval law excluding heirs born outside ‘the allegiance of the realm’.23 Edward VI had drawn attention to this law in drawing up his will in 1553, which had also excluded the Stuart line. Harington’s tract attempted to counter it by arguing that Scotland was not really a foreign country at all, since all Englishmen considered it ‘subject to England in the way of homage’. But it was a view with which James himself was unlikely to concur.*
Elizabeth had inherited the throne in 1558, following the death of her Catholic half-sister, Mary I. As a woman the twenty-five-year-old queen fitted awkwardly into the chivalric legend of the Tudors being the heirs to Arthur but Elizabeth proved adept at reshaping it. From the day of her coronation, where she greeted the crowds with ‘cries, tender words, and all other signs which argue a wonderful earnest love of most obedient servants’, Elizabeth worked to build an image that was at once feminine and supremely majestic. She became the mother of her people, the wife married to her kingdom, the unobtainable love object of the knights and nobles; a Virgin to rival the Queen of Heaven to whom medieval England had once been dedicated, the summation of the dynasty’s mythology.
Even in 1558, however, courtiers were considering the vital question of who would succeed her. The last three reigns had seen violent swings in religious policy, from Henry VIII’s Reformation, to the radical Protestantism of Edward VI, to the Catholicism of Mary. No one had believed Elizabeth would be able to bring stability to a kingdom still bitterly divided by religion unless she produced an heir to guarantee the future of her Protestant supporters: men such as Elizabeth’s closest adviser, William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley, who had sat on Edward VI’s Privy Council, but lost his post when Mary I succeeded him. A petition urging Elizabeth to marry was drawn up by the House of Commons on