Abstract
Throughout Elizabeth’s final months, aristocrats, privy councillors and foreign ambassadors anticipated her death as an opportunity for change. Although their expectations differed, even the most conservative members of the ruling elite hoped that things would be different under her successor. Some longed for personal advancement, others for a different managerial style, and still others for sweeping changes in the realm’s foreign, domestic and religious policies. According to the Venetian envoy Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, grief over Elizabeth’s decline was less evident among her ministers than eagerness for fresh leadership. Writing to the Doge and Senate a few days before Elizabeth’s death, he suggested that James’s accession was already a fait accompli: ‘It is, however, a fixed opinion that the Ministers, being convinced that this Kingdom is strong rather in reputation than in actual forces, are resolved not to be governed by a woman again, but to give the Crown to the King of Scotland.’ According to Scaramelli, Cecil and his partisans attributed England’s weakness to the incompetence of female magistracy, and they took measures to ensure a male succession and the recovery of diplomatic and military strength.1
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Notes
G. P. V. Akrigg, ed., Letters of King James VI & I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 172, 175, 182, 193, 200–2, 204–5, 207.
Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes ( London: Longman, 1989 ), 82.
See John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 ), 77–107.
See Robin Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery’, in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (New York: Harper and Row, 1973 ), 144–67
Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past and Present 51 (1971): 23–55.
See Wallace MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 439–41; Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery’, 166.
See Christine Coch, ‘“Mother of my Contreye”: Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood’, English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 429–50.
Quotations are from John Manningham’s notes in The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602–1603, ed. Robert Parker Sorlien (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1976), 214–17.
Richard Mulcaster, The Translation of certaine latine verses written vppon her Maiesties death, called A Comforting Complaint (London, 1603), A2, A3, B2.
John Lane, An Elegie vpon the death of the high and renowned Princessse, our late Souerayne Elizabeth (London, 1603).
See Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I ( London: Thames and Hudson, 1987 ), 80–83.
See Thomas Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter-Reformation in England, 1572–1615 ( Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1969 ), 125–58
Francis Edwards, Robert Persons: The Biography of an Elizabethan Jesuit 1546–1610 (St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995), 321–5, 380–3.
A True Relation of what succeeded at the sickness and death of Queen Elizabeth’, transcribed by Catherine Loomis, ‘Elizabeth Southwell’s Manuscript Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth [with text]’, English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 485. Loomis’s article provides a valuable account of Southwell’s manuscript, its polemic context, and its later reception.
Robert Persons, The Judgment of a Catholicke English-man, Living in Banishment for his Religion (1608), 32, 33, 34.
Barlowe, An Answer to A Catholike English-Man (So By Him-Selfe Entituled)… (London, 1609), 64,85,95–6.
Hatfield MSS, xviii, 36 quoted in Hugh Ross Williamson, The Gunpowder Plot ( London: Faber, 1951 ), 224.
See David Harris Willson, James VI and I ( New York: Holt, 1956 ), 217–42.
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Watkins, J. (1999). ‘Out of her Ashes May a Second Phoenix Rise’: James I and the Legacy of Elizabethan Anti-Catholicism. In: Marotti, A.F. (eds) Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374881_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374881_5
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