Elizabeth I: Sixty Men Who Wanted Her to Marry or Name a Successor

Elizabeth faced sixty men who wanted her to marry or name the person who would rule after her. She had once been the woman waiting behind a queen. It had nearly cost her life.

On 5 November 1566, thirty members of the House of Lords and thirty of the Commons came before Elizabeth I at Whitehall. She had summoned them to receive her answer on marriage and the succession. She was thirty-three, unmarried and childless, and the question of what would happen when she died had become a matter on which members of Parliament were increasingly unwilling to wait.

Their anxiety had a history. Four years earlier, smallpox had brought Elizabeth dangerously close to death, leaving her councillors to confront a future for which no successor had been agreed. Her recovery had spared them the immediate decision. It had not settled it.

Across the border, another queen had recently given birth. Mary, Queen of Scots, had delivered her son James in June. Mary’s claim to the English succession was contested, but she was a Catholic claimant with a child of her own. For English Protestants, the question of who followed Elizabeth concerned the survival of their religion as well as the peace of the country. An heir was supposed to give them something firmer than the continued good health of one woman.

Elizabeth’s possible children were therefore everybody’s business. A husband would provide the prospect of them; a named successor would provide an answer if they never came. The delegation wanted assurance about the country’s future. Elizabeth’s answer asked them to consider what their proposed settlement might mean for her own safety.

She had worked on the opening in her own handwriting. That draft survives, with William Cecil’s endorsement identifying the sixty representatives and the day she addressed them.

She began by defending the government she had already given them. Her actions as queen, she argued, should answer the suggestion that she had neglected England’s welfare. She had been born there. Her kingdom was there. The absence of a husband did not erase the work of a reigning monarch.

Then came the answer on marriage, and it was not a refusal.

“I will marry as soon as I can conveniently,” she told them. She attached conditions: unless she or the man she intended to marry died, or some other serious impediment intervened. She also said that she hoped to have children. They had her public word, and she objected to their unwillingness to believe it. What they did not have was a date or a named bridegroom.

A promise from a queen was to be accepted as a queen’s promise. Elizabeth rejected the suggestion that Parliament could compel her to fulfil it.

On the succession, she brought the discussion back to a woman who had occupied the throne before her: her elder half-sister, Mary. Elizabeth had lived through the danger of being the person to whom others might turn while a queen was still alive. In 1554, following Wyatt’s rebellion, suspicion of her involvement had taken her to the Tower of London. She had been released, but she knew what it meant for a royal relationship to become a question of treason.

Now she reminded the delegation that she had differed from Mary in religion, and that people had approached her during her sister’s reign. She accused some members of the Commons of involvement in those approaches. She would not name them. Nor, she insisted, should her own successor occupy the same dangerous position.

The woman who might inherit could become a danger to the woman who ruled. She could also become a prisoner because other people found her useful.

That was the difficulty Elizabeth put before the men at Whitehall. They wanted protection against the uncertainty of her death. She was describing the danger that a declared heir could bring into her life. Naming the next sovereign did not oblige everyone to wait patiently for the present one to die.

She pursued the argument beyond her own family. A list of successors would not make the people on it immune to ambition. What would prevent the second from wanting to become the first, or the third from wanting to become the second? Nor, she argued, would members of Parliament approach those competing claims without loyalties of their own. They had relatives, masters and friends. An orderly list on paper could become a struggle between the people whose names appeared on it, supported by the people who had helped put them there.

For Elizabeth, the proposed safeguard carried dangers of its own.

“I will never be by violence constrained to do anything.” Her answer left room for marriage and for a future settlement of the succession, but she insisted that she must judge when either could safely happen. The sixty representatives had come to receive an answer about a husband and an heir. Elizabeth gave them a promise to marry, with qualifications. She gave them no wedding date, and no name to put after her own.