Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals and Queens
From the book of the same name by Jane Dunne
“I am already bound unto a husband, which is the kingdom of England”
Elizabeth’s first speech as queen of England before Parliament 10 February 1559
These were dangerous times. The second quarter of the sixteenth century had made Elizabeth and her
generation of advisers watchful, insecure, fearful for their lives. Nothing could be taken for granted. Health
and happiness were fleeting; reversals of fortune came with devastating speed . . . the natural hierarchy of
things mattered to the sixteenth century mind. Men elevated beyond their due estate, women raised as rulers
over men were unnatural events and boded ill. Those with the greatest aspirations could not expect to die
peaceful in their beds.
God remained at the centre of the febrile (feverish) and unpredictable world. His will was discerned in every
random act. Death was everywhere. It came as a sudden sweating sickness and struck down communities of
healthy adults. It came as fire to purify heretic beliefs. It came through poison or the deadly steel to dispose
of inconvenient obstacles in the machinery of power.
The year 1558 opened without any fanfare. Yet this was to become one of the momentous dates in every
British school-child’s history. Along with the Battle Hastings of 1066. . . 1558 was one of the markers of a
seismic shift in English experience. . . It was a year of grand transfers of power as one reign came to an end,
Bloody Mary) and a new era began. It was a time of inexorable (never ending) religious schism, when
universal, monopolistic Catholicism was permanently supplanted by the state religion, Protestantism.
Scotland’s most recent history had been less convulsive. . .Rather than a religious cause, any growing unrest
and sense of danger came more from Scottish resentment against the increasing presence of the French,
garrisoned in various towns and awarded lucrative offices the heads of native Scots. Mary, “Queen of
Scots,” had left Scotland 10 years previously and married the dauphin, Frances, soon to be king of France in
1558.
At the beginning of that year, however, both Elizabeth and Mary were poised on the margin between
apprenticeship and their public lives as female monarchs. By the end of that year both had embraced their
fate. The defining moment for Mary came with a kiss – in effect a marriage to Frances, the supposed future
king of France. For Elizabeth it came with a death (her sister’s) – and an exclusive contract with her people.
It was apparent that a woman in possession of a throne must marry, and do so without delay. All biblical
and classical texts, in which the educated sixteenth century mind was tuned, stressed the natural order of
male’s control over the female. A female monarch was a rare and unnatural phenomenon which could only
be regularized by a speedy marriage with a prince who would rule over her in private and guide her in her
public, God given role as queen. Only by restoring man’s necessary dominion could the proper balance of
the world be maintained.
Although her cousin Elizabeth was revolutionary in her lifelong resistance to this obligation, Mary Stuart
(Queen of Scots) was more conformable and fulfilled this expectation of her status and sex – not once but
three times. In early 1558 she was fifteen and had been a queen since she was six days old. She had never
known any other state. First as a queen of Scotland, the land of her birth and a country she did not know;
secondly as queen of France, the country of her heart. Having lived from the age of five at the centre of the
powerful French court, Mary had grown into a charming and accomplished French princess. Her
spectacular dynastic marriage reinforced the old alliance between Scotland and France.
In England, Elizabeth Tudor, was twenty four years old and living quietly in the country some thirty miles
from London. Expectant and fearful of losing the one thing she desired, she was fearful too of its fulfillment.
She had already been bastardized, disinherited, often in danger and always waiting, never certain of the
prize. Elizabeth had seen her two siblings succeed to the throne before her. If any had had children then her
position on the sidelines of power would have become permanent. But Edward VI died in 1553 unmarried
and childless aged sixteen. He was followed by his half sister Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Now,
in 1558, Henry VIII’s eldest child, Mary Tudor (Mary I) appeared to be ailing.
At the beginning of 1558, Elizabeth and her supporters knew that some grant change was in motion. . . Her
half sister Mary Tudor had been queen for nearly five years. Suspicious, suffering, devoutly Catholic and
zealous to maintain the supremacy of the old faith, her reign had grown increasingly unhappy. Mary’s worst
mistake had been her insistence on marrying Philip II of Spain, for the English hated foreigners meddling in
their affairs, and they hated the Spanish most of all. . .
The fanatical reactions by her decree, and the torture and burnings of hundreds of martyrs, would earn
Mary the epithet “Bloody Mary” for generations to come. The country grew ever more tired and repelled by
the bloodshed. By the beginning of 1558, Mary was herself sick and in despair. Still longing for a child and
heir, once more in desperation she had made herself believe she was pregnant again. No one could know,
however, that the symptoms which Mary interpreted as the beginning of new life and hope were instead the
harbingers of death. Mary would die of cancer of the womb.
Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots had always been aware of each other, of their kinship and relations to
the English crown. As cousins, they were both descended from Henry VII, Elizabeth as his grand-daughter
and Mary as his great grand-daughter. European royalty was a small, elite and intermarried band... As
subject of the English succession loomed again, Elizabeth was acutely conscious of the strength of the Queen
of Scot’s claim to the English throne. Certainly she knew that if her sister Mary I’s repeal of HenryVIII’s
Act of Supremacy was allowed to stand then her own parents’ marriage would remain invalid and she could
be marginalized and disinherited as a bastard. To most Catholics Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn had
always been invalid and Mary Queen of Scots was legally and morally next in line to the English throne, If
Mary united the thrones of Scotland, France and England then this would ensure that England remained a
part of Catholic Christendom.
However, if the Acts of Mary Tudor’s reign should be reversed, then Elizabeth’s legitimacy was confirmed
and she, as Henry VIII’s legitimate daughter, had not only the natural but the more direct claim. She also
had popular, emotional appeal. Her tall, regal figure and her reddish gold coloring reminded the people,
grown nostalgic and selective in their memory of “Good King Henry,” of her father when young. Her
surprisingly dark eyes, an inheritance of the best feature of her mother Anne Boleyn, were not enough to
blur the bold impression that the best of her father lived on in her.
In fact, despite the stain on her mother’s name, it was to Elizabeth’s credit that she was not the daughter of a
foreign princess, that unadulterated English blood ran in her veins and the she had been born in Greenwich
Palace, at the center of English royal; power. In early peace negotiations with France, Elizabeth had an aide
point out she was “descended by father and mother of pure English blood, and not of Spain, as her sister
was.” This meant she was “a free prince and owner of her crown and people.” She was an Englishwoman,
and she knew this counted for much in this island nation of hers (England). “Was I not born in the realm?
Were my parents born in any foreign country? Is there any cause I should alienate myself from being
careful over this country? Is not my kingdom here?”
Although only fifteen, the young Queen of Scots was already tall and graceful; she and her Scottish uncles
towered over her French husband and were all taller and more impressive than even the King and Queen of
France themselves. Mary’s much vaunted beauty was not just a construct of the conventional hyperbole of
court poets and commentators, but a beauty that had as much to do with her vitality and vivacity as the
symmetry of her features. She had a fine complexion, chestnut brown hair and intelligent, lively eyes
beneath prominent lids and fine arched brows. She had a strong active body and was good at sports, loving
to ride hard and to hunt the wild animals with which the royal forests surrounding the chateaus of her
youth.
The French, not surprisingly, stressed the supremacy of France in the union between Mary and Francis II,
some getting carried away with the vision of empire extending through Scotland, England, France and
throughout Europe. Scotland’s independence was assured; Francis would become King of Scotland
alongside his queen; if they should have a son he would inherit both realms; if they only had a daughter she
would inherit the crown of Scotland alone, being prohibited from claiming the French throne. . . If Mary had
no heirs, then Scotland, and also her claim to the English throne, would be inherited by Frances’ family. At
fifteen, and having lived in France for ten years, she thought of herself as French rather than a Scottish
Queen. Scotland and the interests of her people were a long way from where her heart lay. Although her
wits were sharp enough, her ambitions dynastic and her will strong, her characteristic motivation was in
action and desire. Decisions would spring always more readily from impetuous feeling. This was to make
her attractive as a woman, compelling as romantic heroine and impressive in command when things went
her way. But it made her tragically fallible as a queen.
1558 was significant for Mary as the year she married the person she was to love most in her life, albeit with
a sister’s affection rather than a sexual love. With that marriage she had fulfilled the ambitions of her
mother, Marie of Guise, and the King of France himself. Her previous ten years in France had prepared her
solely for this, to be a princess and eventually queen consort (wife of the king) of France. To her family in
France, Scotland was of little value or interest except as England’s Achilles heel, the gateway for a future
French invasion.
The lessons of her past were with Elizabeth always. Born an heir to the throne, she, nevertheless, had
endured disinheritance, reinstatement, exclusion, humiliation, imprisonment and real fear for her life. . .
Although ambitious men would seek her all her life for dynastic alliances, Elizabeth, from a very young age,
had rejected the orthodoxy that a woman must marry, that a princess, particularly, had a duty to marry. . .
To remain unwed was also a masterly diplomatic ploy, for the unfulfilled prospect of her marriage to various
foreign princes kept the equilibrium between the great European powers in constant suspension
She was twenty-five and had been through a rigorous training for something much greater than submission
to a husband in marriage and sharing her monarchic power with a prince. She had her sister Mary’s sad
example in near memory; her father’s ruinous effect on the women he married as a more distant example.
Yet to remain unmarried flew in the face of pleas of her increasingly desperate councilors. Almost every
parliament included a petition that she should marry. For a monarch so insistent on her primary concern
for her people, it seemed perverse to persist in celibacy and risk at her death the eclipse of the Tudors and
the possibility of civil war.
Elizabeth was her sister’s legal heir, after the deaths of Edward and Mary, as declared by the succession
statute of 1544. . .The dying Mary even had given her blessing, urged on by her husband Philip of Spain, who
feared Protestantism less than the imperial ambitions of France. . . So it was that on 17 November 1558,
Elizabeth learned the waiting was over and her father’s crown was finally hers. . .Fortuitously, Parliament
happened to be sitting that day, and when the Lords were brought the news of Mary’s death, in measured
tones “with joint consent of the whole assembly,” they declared “ the Lady Elizabeth might forthwith be
proclaimed Queen.”
Another female monarch, after the last disastrous experiment (Mary I), seemed too risky when England was
in need of inspired and powerful leadership. There was a profound cultural and religious acceptance that it
was unnatural, indeed impossible, for women to be successfully in command. But the prospects of marriage
for Elizabeth also brought the real fear, acted out in Mary’s reign, of alliance with a dominant foreign
power.
John Knox, the fiery Scottish Protestant, argued “to promote a Woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion,
or empire above any Realm is repugnant to Nature; contrary to God, a thing most contrary to His revealed
will, and approved ordinance, and finally, it is the subversion of all good order, of all equity and justice.
Knox’s view of the natural and divine order of things, with woman subservient to man, was a commonly
accepted one. His stance was uncompromising and his language colorful, but he was not saying anything
new... The lower orders knew of woman’s inferiority through the traditions of their lives and the
discrepancy between the sexes in simple force. The educated aristocracy was imbued with the necessity for
this human hierarchy from their readings of classical authors, like Plato and Aristotle, and the thundering
metaphors of the Bible. Did not God say to Eve, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in
sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee?”
In fact the mortality rate of women in childbirth made it clear that they were the more expendable half of
the species, that God and nature put a lower value on womankind.
The male was the norm and the female a deviation, the mysterious, less adequate “other”. . . Everything
these young women (Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland) read and were taught informed them of their
intellectual and moral limitations and the narrowness of their vision. “Man is active, full of movement,
creative in politics, business and culture. The male shapes and molds society and the world. Woman, on the
other hand, is passive. She is matter waiting to be formed by the active male principle.” . . . Not only
endowed with more of the best qualities, a man was closer to God. These were the prejudices they had to
overcome.
Both Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots were of course regnant queens (ruling queens, not eye candy as the
wife of the king), monarchs in their own right, ordained by God. A female monarch was in a different
relationship with the world: she had a public, political and spiritual contract as ruler of her people, while her
personal and private relationship as a woman made her naturally dependent on the male. Elizabeth at least
was able to counteract the perceived weaknesses of her sex with the certainty that as a queen she was
divinely chosen above all men, “by His permission a body politic, to govern.”
Mary’s sense of herself as queen had been with her from the dawning of her consciousness. It was never
disputed or tested, as was Elizabeth’s. This awareness of her pre-eminence was her companion through life
… Just as the death of her sister Mary I transformed Elizabeth’s destiny so too it altered the course of the
life and aspirations of the youthful Queen of Scots. Catholic Europe could not accept Henry VIII’s Act of
Supremacy and considered his only legal wife to have been Catherine of Aragon. Given this fundamentalist
approach, Elizabeth was undoubtedly a bastard born to a royal mistress, not to a wife. Consequently much
of Europe considered the more direct legitimate heir to be Mary, Queen of Scotland and of France.
Traditionally English monarchs claimed dominion over France (remember Henry II and Eleanor of
Aquitaine). Mary, however as the Queen of France and Scotland, both England’s old enemies, was in
dangerous territory. To claim England and Ireland as her realms too was considered an insult to Elizabeth. .
. Mary’s claim implied that Elizabeth’s mother was a whore not a wife; that Elizabeth was a bastard child
and not the legitimate daughter of the King of England; that she had no claim on a divine right to rule but
instead had usurped another’s.
The crowning of the new Queen of England needed to be quickly done. . . To all who hailed her for the
crown, Elizabeth exhibited the authority and gift of attention that had so distinguished her in her dealings
with her subjects so far. A salty humor (and language) and an air of God-given majesty seemed to her eager
people to be united in Elizabeth Tudor in irresistible combination. She indulged in the kind of direct
dialogue and repartee which the French court never encouraged in their monarchs. . . Her ability to unite
magisterial grandeur with informality was at the heart of her unique attraction to even her humblest
subjects. It also discomforted her enemies.
But there was still a general uneasiness as to what sort of monarch she would make. When she succeeded to
the throne no one was certain what form her religious policy would take. There was a national longing for a
strong wholly English king. Despite her many good personal qualities and the great swell of popular support
with which she began her rule, Mary I’s reign had been disastrous. Now people wondered if some were
correct in dis-liking a woman raised beyond her natural estate to be a ruler over men. What if Elizabeth,
with all her well-known virtues, was to fail as calamitously as her sister? There was natural optimism at the
prospect of this new reign after the miseries of the last, but everyone from her greatest ministers of state to
her lowliest subjects agreed Queen Elizabeth had to marry, and marry quickly. A king was desperately
needed, first as her consort, the steadying hand on the tiller of this vast ship of state, and then as the father of
a male heir to secure the succession.
The timing of the coronation was of crucial moment. With the implicit threat from the French with Mary
Queen of Scots claim to the English throne in their pocket, and the firm insistence of two popes that
Elizabeth was illegitimate, it seemed necessary to claim her throne as soon as possible.
Elizabeth’s coronation managed to be both a grand spectacle and yet intimately involving of her subjects.
This ability to combine to unite grandeur with a genuine touch was memorably displayed in Elizabeth’s state
entry into London on the Saturday afternoon, the day before her coronation. . . What struck the
commentators who watched her stately progress through the city was the attentiveness and light-heartedness
of her manner to everyone who called out or approached her. She was quick witted and could be alternately
funny and moving in her responses to the crowd Her progress was leisurely; she kept on stopping, getting
out of the carriage to receive blessings, appeals and posies of flowers from even the poorest and humblest of
her subjects.
No one was inclined to call her a great beauty. Elizabeth’s coloring was much admired; the pale skin and
reddish gold hair was considered closer to perfection that dark hair and olive skin of her mother’s, but her
face was thought too long, as was her nose with its “rising in the middest,” for classical beauty. Her eyes
though were strikingly dark like Anne’s and full of intelligence and humor. . .But what set her apart from all
others was the vitality and force of her character and mind.
Her ability to be affectionate and informal with the crowd was all the more surprising given that this was
queen who was a natural autocrat of the most self conscious kind, in all ways the daughter of a ruthlessly
autocratic father to whose memory she aspired. With a penetrating intelligence and lively sympathy,
Elizabeth was never to be as brutal or warlike as Henry, nor as self serving, but she was capable of being as
kingly as anyone to do what was necessary.
Some Catholics hoped she would only rule for a short time before Philip II of Spain was once more back in
power, presumably as her husband; others thought her growing popularity and the promise of change would
pacify the discontented; others looked to French Catholic alliance with Mary Queen of Scots as queen. But
most rejoiced in the fact that Elizabeth was a monarch in whose veins ran unadulterated English blood. And
no one seemed to take seriously Elizabeth’s professed contentment with the ring of state she had worn on her
marriage finger since pledging herself to the nation at her coronation: “bound unto a husband, which is the
kingdom of England.
And so with Mary Stuart’s marriage to Frances II of France and Elizabeth Tudor’s coronation, both in 1558,
the two most important celebrations of their lives marked the increasingly divergent yet interdependent
paths of the Queen of Scotland and the Queen of England. The one had married her prince to pursue her
destiny as a woman. The other had married her people in recognition of her destiny as a queen. Mary’s
status as queen also matter greatly to her but she considered it an immutable right somehow divorced from
any real sense of self-sacrifice and responsibility. Whereas Elizabeth never doubted the awesome
responsibilities of her task, “the burden that is fallen upon me maketh me amazed.” The struggles, triumphs
and tragedies that followed were a direct result of each woman’s individual decision: the one to put the
personal increasingly before the political; the other to sacrifice the personal and place her responsibilities as
queen as the center of her life.
Assignment – Write a sentence illustrating the main idea of each paragraph. There are 34 paragraphs
therefore you must have 34 grammatically complete and accurate sentences. (68 points).
There are also 18 vocabulary words that you should do before the sentencing (36 points)