The Half-Blood Princes: Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Their Strategies of Legitimation

Abstract

Visiting England in 1553, an Italian traveler recorded his impressions of a kingdom recently thrown into turmoil by the death of its young king, the rise and fall of a young female usurper, and the revolt by an older princess whose victory established her as the first English queen regnant.¹ With those events still fresh, he explained how a new monarch claimed power:The apparent clarity of this process, however, masked the complicated reality of the tortured marital history of Henry VIII. As the father of two daughters, a bastard son, and finally one legitimate son, Henry needed to determine the succession by weighing the conflicting issues of blood, female rule, illegitimacy, royal authority, and popular support. While no single set of laws governed who would be the next monarch, blood relations were important, and Henry never denied paternity of any of his four children.³ When he at last had fathered a legitimate male heir, he still included his two daughters in the line of succession after his son. Although he considered promoting as heir his illegitimate son, Henry Duke of Richmond, he never did. Rather, near the end of his life, the king ignored the technical bastardy of his two daughters, and by Act of Parliament and in his will Henry placed them in the succession. Through those two documents, Henry bestowed the crown as he pleased and set a precedent that in a patriarchal society relied on popular support for female sovereignty. This transference of royal power would not happen easily or “without fail.”