Succession to Elizabeth I

[1] Separate aspects have acquired their own nomenclature: the "Norfolk conspiracy", Patrick Collinson's "Elizabethan exclusion crisis",[1] the "Secret Correspondence",[2] and the "Valentine Thomas affair".

She was also concerned with England forming a productive relationship with Scotland, whose Catholic and Presbyterian strongholds were resistant to female leadership.

A number of authorities considered that the legal position hinged on documents such as the statute De natis ultra mare of Edward III, and the will of Henry VIII.

Descent from the two daughters of Henry VII who reached adulthood, Margaret and Mary, was the first and main issue in the succession.

Mary I of England had died without managing to have her preferred successor and first cousin, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, nominated by parliament.

James VI's mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was considered a plausible successor to the English throne.

While the Stuart line of James and Arbella would have had political support, by 1600 the descendants of Mary Tudor were theoretically relevant, and on legal grounds could not be discounted.

Frances Grey, Duchess of Suffolk, and Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, both had children who were in the line of succession.

[11] Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, a survivor of the Plantagenets, was his great-grandmother (on his mother's side), and her paternal grandfather was Richard, Duke of York.

[13] The major political issue of the reign of Richard II of England, that his uncle, the magnate John of Gaunt, would claim the throne and so overturn the principle of primogeniture, was revived in the context of the Elizabethan succession, after seven generations.

John of Gaunt's eldest daughter having married into the Portuguese House of Aviz, one of his descendants was the Infanta of Spain, Isabella Clara Eugenia.

It in consequence supported in parliamentary terms the succession claims of Lady Catherine Grey, Protestant and born in England, over those of Mary, Queen of Scots.

She did not follow the precedent set by her father in allowing parliamentary debate on the subject of the succession but instead actively tried to close it down throughout her reign.

[19] In 1563, William Cecil drafted a bill envisaging the Privy Council having wide powers if the Queen died without an heir, but he did not put it forward.

[24] John Stubbs, who published on the closely related issue of the queen's marriage, avoided execution in 1579 but had a hand cut off and was in the Tower of London until 1581.

That by Hales reflected a Puritan view (it has been taken to be derived from John Ponet);[28] and it to a large extent set the terms of the later debate.

[29] John Hales wrote a speech to give in the House of Commons in 1563;[30] he was a partisan of the Earl of Hertford, in right of his wife, the former Lady Catherine Grey.

What Hales was doing was quite complex, using legal arguments to rule out Scottish claimants, and also relying on research abroad by Robert Beale to reopen the matter of the Hertford marriage.

[29] A defence of the honour of the right high, mightye and noble Princess Marie (1569) had its London printing prevented by Lord Burghley.

Robert Persons's pseudonymous Conference about the next Succession to the Crown of England, by R. Doleman (comprising perhaps co-authors, 1595), was against the claim of James VI.

[39] This work made an apparent effort to discuss candidates equitably, including the Infanta of Spain, Isabella Clara Eugenia.

[43] From the point of view of Elizabethan and Jacobean literary criticism, it has been argued that it is significant to know when the succession was "live" as an issue of public concern, right into the reign of James I, and in what form drama, in particular, might be expressing comment on it.

In particular, Hopkins points out that Macbeth and King Lear, both relating to legitimacy and dynastic politics, were written in the early years of James's reign.

Plays mentioned in this way include, among other works by Shakespeare, Hamlet;[45] Henry V;[46] A Midsummer Night's Dream through allegory and the figure of Titania;[47] and Richard II as an atypical case.

[51] Hopkins sees the work as a "genealogical chain" leading up to the succession issue, and points out the detailed discussion of the Yorkist claim, in the annotations to the epistles between Margaret of Anjou and William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk (thought in Drayton's time to have been lovers).

[54] The Doleman tract of 1594 suggested one resolution to the succession issue: the Suffolk claimant William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby should marry the Infanta of Spain, and succeed.

Catholic opinion suggested he might marry a female claimant, Lady Anne Stanley (the Earl's niece), if not Arbella Stuart.