Abstract
In early September 1533 Henry VIII was not the only one to eagerly anticipate the birth of his child by his second wife, Anne Boleyn, nor the only one to hope that this child would be a son. Everyone in England, and, indeed, Western Europe, was waiting. Henry would eventually have a son, Edward, but his short, unhappy reign would be eclipsed by the long and far more successful reign of his sister, Elizabeth. Her success demonstrated that Henry’s belief that he must have a son to secure England’s safety was misplaced. Nonetheless, Henry’s desire for a male heir was understandable; we may, however, question if his anxiety justified his six marriages and the beheading of two of his wives.
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Notes
As Retha Warnicke points out. “Family and kinship relations at the Henrician court,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 31. essay runs from 31–53]
Elizabeth and her parliaments will be discussed throughout the text. For more specific sources on this issue, the classic work is Neale, Queen Elizabeth and Her Parliaments, 1559–1581 and Queen Elizabeth and Her Parliaments, 1584–1601. For modifications and critiques, see T. E. Hartley, Elizabeth’s Parliaments: Queen, Lords, and Commons, 1559–1601 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,, 1992);
D. M. Dean and N. L. Jones, eds, The Parliaments of Elizabethan England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990);
D. M. Dean, Law-Making and Society in Elizabethan England: The Parliament of England, 1584–1601 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
G. R. Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559–1581 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
Michael A. R. Graves, Elizabethan Parliaments, 1559–1601 (London, New York: Longman, 1987).
David Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), 42.
James McConica and John N. King argue that Katherine’s concern for learning and religion were important lessons for Elizabeth, and had a great impact on her development both at the time and later when she was Queen. Maria Dowling, however, counters that Parr’s own ability, and thus her impact on Elizabeth, have been overstated. King, “Patronage and Piety: The Influence of Catherine Parr,” in Margaret P. Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985), 43–60;
James McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 7, 215–17;
Maria Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 235.
MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I, 11; John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. Stephen Reed Cattley (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1838), VIII, 603.
Letter to Johann Sturm, Letters of Roger Ascham, trans. Maurice Hatch and Alvin Vos, ed. Alvin Vos (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 165.
John Guy, “Tudor Monarch and Political Culture,” in John Morrill, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 234. According to Gerry Bowler, the anonymous tract, Certain Questions Demanded and asked by the Noble Realm of England, of her True Natural Children and Subjects of the Same published in Wesel spring 1555, was the first of the exile works to claim that no woman could legitimately rule. “Marian Protestants and the Idea of violent Resistance,” in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling, eds, Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 128. For the early part of the reign, see
Wallace MacCaffrey, The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968);
Norman Jones, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
John Guy, “The 1590s? The Second Reign of Elizabeth I,” in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, published in association with the Folger Institute, Washington DC, 1995), 13.
As pointed out by R. B. Wernham, The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1558–1603 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 10.
For more on the development of the Privy Council, see Penry Williams, The Later Tudors: England, 1547–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 131–5.
MacCaffrey, Queen Elizabeth and the making of Policy, 1572–1588 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 343; Haigh, Elizabeth I 123.
Haigh suggests that the pressure on Elizabeth to marry came not from the belief that the men around Elizabeth thought that women were incapable, but from the need for an heir, suggesting if that were the case, they would want to rule for her themselves, not get a king. “They sought not a consort for the Queen but a father for her son–not a sovereign, but a stud.” Elizabeth I 10–11. But they did try at the beginning to rule for her, and the rhetoric they used about Elizabeth marrying and having a child was very different from that used toward a male sovereign. For a more thorough discussion of the difference in rhetoric, see Carole Levin, “‘We shall never have a merry world while the Queene lyveth’: Gender, Monarchy, and the Power of Seditious Words,” in Julia Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 77–95.
As Lacey Baldwin Smith points out, there was a degree of anger and desperation in the comments made. Elizabeth Tudor: Portrait of a Queen (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1975), 120–2.
On 8 September 1560, she was found dead with her neck broken at the bottom of some stairs in the country house where she was living. Though there was a strong popular belief that Robert had had her killed, it seems more likely that she either committed suicide or, indeed, may have simply died accidentally, her spine so brittle from metastasized cancer from which she was suffering that even the act of walking down stairs–especially if she stumbled could have caused her neck to snap. See Ian Aird, “The Death of Amy Robsart: Accident, Suicide, or Murder–or Disease?” English Historical Review, 71, 278 (1956), 69–79.
On this issue, see particularly the work of Simon Adams, “Factions and Favourites at the Elizabethan Court,” in R. G. Asch and A. M. Birke, eds, Princes, Patronage and Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c.1450–1650 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 265–87
Simon Adams, “Faction, Clientage and Party: English Politics, 1550–1603,” History Today, 32 (December, 1982), 33–9
Simon Adams, “Eliza Enthroned? The Court and its Politics” in Christopher Haigh, The Reign of Elizabeth I (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 55–77. See also, Adams, “The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective,” Natalie Mears, “Regnum Cecilianum? A Cecillian perspective of the Court,” and Paul E. J. Hammer, “Patronage at Court, faction and the earl of Essex,” in Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, 20–45, 46–64, 65–86.
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© 2002 Carole Levin
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Levin, C. (2002). Overview of Elizabeth’s Life and Reign. In: The Reign of Elizabeth I. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1939-7_2
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