Mary, Queen of Scots versus Elizabeth I
Words JON WRIGHT
In the parliament of 1586, Job Throckmorton, the MP for Warwick, launched a bilious attack on Mary Stuart. She was, he bellowed, “such a creature whom no Christian eye can behold with patience, whose villainy hath stained the earth and infected the air, the breath of whose malice towards the Church of God and the Lord’s anointed, our dread sovereign, hath in a loathsome kind of savour fumed up to the heavens.” Destroying Mary would be “one of the fairest riddances that ever the Church of God had” and Throckmorton called upon his fellow MPs to “be all joint suitors to her Majesty that Jezebel may live no longer.”
He was confident that no one would dare “stain his mouth in defence of [Mary],” and he was right. Mary, Parliament explained, was “hardened in malice against your royal person, notwithstanding that you have done her all favour, mercy and kindness.” She was “greedy for your death and preferreth it before her own life,” and who could be surprised after so many years striving “to ruin and overthrow the happy state and common weal of this most noble realm”?
How had matters reached so intense a pitch that a queen was being asked to spill the royal blood of her cousin? Therein lies one of the the most poignant and befuddling Tudor tales.
The relationship between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor was always destined to be turbulent, and the royal succession carries most of the blame. At the outset of her reign, another Tudor parliament had petitioned Elizabeth to marry at her earliest convenience, a demand that she brushed off and declared that, for now at least, she would remain “in this kind of life in which I yet live.” If marriage became a possibility, she would choose a candidate who had England’s best interests at heart, but “In the end, this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen having lived such a time, lived and died a virgin.”
In 1559, almost everyone seemed to have assumed that this was a rhetorical flourish rather than a declaration of dynastic intent, but Elizabeth’s failure to find a husband and produce the all-important heir became increasingly irksome. In fairness, any match would have been problematic. A foreign husband raised the spectre of unwelcome overseas interference in English affairs, and the realm had seen enough of that during the marriage of Mary Tudor and Philip II of Spain. It was also difficult to envision any home-grown husband of adequate stature or whose selection would not stir up rivalries within the English nobility. Early suitors such as Sir William Pickering or Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel, simply did not pass muster.
For all that, many people opined that some solution would have been better than none and, as early as 1562, Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury captured the prevailing mood: “Oh how wretched are we who ca
