Elizabeth’s Unsettling Succession

was elizabeth i, so famously cautious and penny-pinching in her policies, actually the most reckless sovereign in English history? If a fundamental duty of sovereigns is to guarantee the orderly continuance of royal government after their own deaths, Elizabeth neglected that duty She was unique among English sovereigns in failing to take any explicit action to produce or recognize an heir who might ensure the future smooth transition of authority into a new reign. In her early years on the throne, when the realm’s men of power repeatedly came to her and demanded some certainty about the succession, she offered only “an answer answerless.” More pointedly, she vowed never to “spread a winding-sheet before her eyes”: according to her calculation, to name an heir would be virtually to consign herself to the grave, no matter how much longer she survived. In light of the open conflict over the succession in 1553 and her own subsequent experience as heir apparent during the final months of Mary’s reign, such caution about proclaiming an heir is understandable. Yet Elizabeth took this wariness to extreme, arguably dangerous, lengths. Although she allegedly gave a sign on her deathbed that she wished her crown to pass to James VI of Scotland, this signal only came after she had lost the power of speech, and its supposed meaning was divined by councillors who had privately already committed themselves to James. By then, the great question of who would succeed the queen after her death had been left unanswered for almost forty-five years. Given the importance of a clear line of succession for guaranteeing the continued stability of any monarchy, Elizabeth’s refusal to resolve this basic question forced two generations of English men and women to live under the shadow of profound existential uncertainty. Beginning in 1571, even raising the matter openly became a prosecutable offense.

Doubtful and Dangerous is a superb collection of essays that examine the consequences of Elizabeth’s choice not to resolve the succession until the very last possible moment. As the editors, Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes, observe, discussion of the Elizabethan succession question has usually been focused on the period between the early 1560s and the late 1580s, when the politics centered on who might become Elizabeth’s consort, on the illegitimacy (or otherwise) of Catherine Grey’s sons with the Earl of Hertford, and on the long and twisting relationship between Britain’s two queens who never met, Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots. It is frequently assumed that the eventual succession of Mary’s Protestant son was a foregone conclusion after Mary’s execution in February 1587, when Elizabeth was well past the age of marriage and Catherine Grey long dead, with James’s main concern being how long he would be forced to wait to obtain his inevitable inheritance. However, this volume of essays forcefully underlines that James’s succession was far from inevitable or comfortable. For much of the period between 1587 and 1603, Elizabeth’s subjects had good reason to fear some kind of civil war if she were to become seriously ill or die. Despite the end of assassination plots inspired by Mary Queen of Scots in 1587 and the defeat of Spain’s Gran Armada in 1588, England still had to survive what the late Patrick Collinson termed “the nasty nineties” and the repeated appearance of new Spanish armadas without knowing who would take up the reins of government if anything happened to its queen.

Before turning to the many fine essays in this volume, it is perhaps useful to consider the book’s subtitle: “The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England.” Although the editors clearly have in mind the royal succession, there were also other “succession questions” in this period that made the issue of Elizabeth’s successor all the more pressing. One, which this reviewer has explored at length in the past, was the question of which...