After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James. Leanda Lisle de

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Название After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James
Автор произведения Leanda Lisle de
Жанр Историческая литература
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Издательство Историческая литература
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isbn 9780007394395



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her successor. Her reply was to put him in the Tower.

      Harington recalled how from his cell Wentworth wrote ‘to tell [the Queen] that if she named not her heir in her life her body should lie unburied after her death’.43 He remained in the Tower for four years until his death, all the while stubbornly refusing to keep silent on the issue of the succession – a promise that would have given him his liberty.

      Renewed efforts were being made to have the decision on Lord Beauchamp’s legitimacy reversed and the following year Sir Michael Blount, the Lieutenant of the Tower, was caught stockpiling weapons for Beauchamp’s father the Earl of Hertford in the event of Elizabeth’s death. The Earl was put in the Tower with his son. The Cecils and Hertford’s brother-in-law, the Lord Admiral, Charles Howard of Effingham (later the Earl of Nottingham), worked hard for their release, which came remarkably quickly in January.

      Historically, Scotland was ‘the old, beggardly enemy’, and although the Scottish Reformation of 1560 had ended three centuries of armed conflict the English still despised their impoverished northern neighbour.48 For many, the idea of a Scot becoming King of England suggested a ridiculous reversal of fortune. Doleman played up to these feelings, claiming that there was no possible advantage to England in joining with an impoverished country whose people were known for their ‘aversion and natural alienation … from the English’ and for their close ties with England’s Irish and French enemies: James would fill English posts with Scottish nobles and might even oppress the English with foreign armies.

      Furthermore, Doleman warned, while some claimed that England and Scotland shared the same religion, the truth was that Scottish Calvinism was ‘opposite to that form which in England is maintained’, with its rituals and bishops. If James became king the nobility would find the church hierarchy torn down and themselves subject to the harangues of mere Church ministers.49 His words echoed something the Earl of Hertford had once said of the Puritans: ‘As they shoot at bishops now, so they will do at the nobility also, if they be suffered.’50 The fact that episcopacy had been abolished in Scotland in 1593 added credence to the claims.

      Having thus dismissed all the Tudor candidates as unworthy, the Doleman book announced that in seeking a successor to Elizabeth ‘the first respect of all others ought to be God and religion’.51 If this seems a strange argument now it is worth remembering that the rights of the present royal family have been based on this premise since the reign of William and Mary. It held still greater force at a time when kings were believed to rule by divine right.

      The Doleman book accepted that each faith would prefer to choose a monarch of their own religion, but it expressed no doubt that a Catholic choice would win through since Catholics were strengthened by the persecution ‘as a little brook or river, though it be but shallow … yet if many bars and stops be made therein, it swells and rises to a great force’.52 It was a belief shared within the Protestant establishment. Even Walsingham had once observed that the execution of Catholics ‘moves men to compassion and draws some to affect their religion’. The book’s comments were not, however, designed to spread dismay amongst Protestants, so much as to attract the attention of Catholics. Doleman informed Catholics that they were not only bound to choose a Catholic candidate as a religious duty, they were also blessed