The transition from Tudor to Stuart England has generally been seen as smooth. But according to historian Tracy Borman, the tale we’ve been told is a lie. Richard Nye hears her case...
It’s an oft-told tale. Tucked up in her beloved Richmond Palace, Elizabeth I lies speechless and dying, the glamour of the Gloriana years behind her. The interminable search for a successor, bane of courtiers and councillors for almost 45 years, has reached the final furlong.
Is it to be James Stuart, King of Scots? Everyone at the bedside believes so. And finally there comes the sign: the ebbing Tudor queen raises a frail hand to her forehead at the mention of her Scottish cousin’s name.
Now Richmond Palace, destined for dismantling 50 years later in the wake of the Civil War, enjoys its most consequential hour.
From a window in the royal bedchamber, a lady throws a ring, given to her by James himself, into the hands of her brother, Robert Carey.
Riding like the wind, he reaches Edinburgh in little more than two days to present it to the Scottish king. Within days James is in London, king of both England and Scotland, the instrument of a seamless transition to an informal union of the crowns.
Well, not quite. Hindsight has taught us to see this transference of power as an almost metaphysical necessity.
But according to Tracy Borman, Chief Historian of Historic Royal Palaces and Tudor expert nonpareil, the rearview mirror deceives.
The apparently effortless glide from Tudor to Stuart England in March 1603 masked a churn of anxious indecision, with a range of contenders circling the throne.
Elizabeth’s deathbed gesture, seemingly so decisive, may well have betokened nothing more than piety or pain.
Only the firm smack of government by her Privy Council, implacably set against European Catholic pretenders, ensured that James would triumph unopposed.
Tracy Borman
Borman’s book The Stolen Crown, out now in paperback, charts the story.
“It’s a provocative title, and it’s meant to be,” admits the prolific author, whose theatre show Tudors on Tour comes to Surrey this month, and whose interpretation of events surrounding the end of the dynasty has sparked vigorous historical debate.
“You could reason that the crown wasn’t stolen, as James was really the natural successor, but you could equally argue that it was. I hope that I’ve presented the story in a balanced way, enabling people to decide for themselves.”
Elizabeth’s refusal to marry is at the root of it. For years, as her early reign unfolded, foreign suitors came and went in search of her elusive hand.
Yet the Virgin Queen held out, using the marriage game as a diplomatic tool to keep European powers at bay and her own fragile sovereignty intact. It was, says Tracy, a strategy upon which she was always firmly resolved.
“She had fun with her suitors, but she knew all along that a husband would take away her authority. ‘I will have but one mistress here and no master,’ she famously declared. Remember that she had seen both her mother [Anne Boleyn] and Catherine Howard executed by her father [Henry VIII].”
The result was unending suspense. With no direct heir, a series of improbable candidates flaunted their strained credentials. Mary Stuart, the exiled Queen of Scots imprisoned in England for 19 years, stirred up Catholic souls and plots, before finally falling beneath Elizabeth’s axe.
But in all the uncertainty, one aspirant seemed odds-on to succeed: Mary’s son James, a Protestant and – since his mother’s flight from her former realm – King of Scots.
“Elizabeth probably thought that he was the best of a bad lot,” says Tracy. “They kept up a correspondence for 30 years in which she gave him plenty of advice. That was the kind of favour that she hadn’t shown to anyone else. She was telling him how to be a good king.”
Tracy Borman
Then why not simply name him as her heir?
“Because people tend to gravitate towards the one who is next in line. She had experienced this herself, in the 1550s, when people started flocking to her side as the coming queen while her sister [Mary Tudor] was dying. It made a deep impression on her.
“I think there is a genuine chance that James would have tried to take the throne from her if she had publicly acknowledged him as her successor. To name him outright would have fed her paranoia, which ran through the whole Tudor line. The Tudors were a fundamentally insecure dynasty because they themselves had effectively seized the crown.”
And so it came down to a deathbed in Richmond and that one ambiguous sign. In the weeks following her demise, the story of Elizabeth’s gesture grew with the telling, acquiring embellishments and self-serving spin-offs, until the generally preferred narrative had hardened into historical fact. The great men of England willed it, and their willing had made it so.
Four centuries on, however, long suppressed marks of dissent are peeping through the pages of time.
By 1608 James had sat on the throne for five years, but it was proving an uncomfortable seat. Anxious to shore up his increasingly precarious position, he ordered a respected historian, William Camden, to resume work on a largely abandoned project: a chronicle of Elizabeth’s life. His design was clear: to underscore, by the creative reframing of events, his undisputed right to the succession.
The first volume of Camden’s Annales appeared seven years later, skewed by royal interference to ensure that it told the right tale. But buried within the British Library, largely ignored until now, is the author’s original manuscript.
Here, through the wealth of rewritings, crossings-out and interlineations, an entirely different story emerges: one that reveals the tortured evolution of Camden’s account regarding the Queen’s final days.
What finally appeared was not fact but fable; an invention conceived by the necessity of pleasing a king. Draft manuscripts of the period were typically destroyed. In ensuring the survival of this one, was Camden trying to tip off posterity about the flaws in the published work?
Tracy Borman
Borman believes so.
“Camden knew that his version of events was fake news. He didn’t want to falsify history, but you can’t say no to the king. It fascinates me how we’ve been looking at this the wrong way for 400 years.”
And what, therefore, of Robert Carey and his ride from Richmond? Can we at least believe in that?
“Yes,” says Tracy. “The particulars may have been embellished, but he certainly did ride to Edinburgh. Carey was determined to be first to James with the news. And he was rewarded too. It was the opposite of shooting the messenger.”
For all the distortion of the wider truth, the Richmond legend is safe. From melancholy palace ruins, a ghostly horseman still thunders north to tell a king that Tudor England is dead.
The Stolen Crown, by Tracy Borman, is out now in paperback (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99)
Tracy Borman
Tudors on Tour
Tracy Borman brings the Tudor court to life this month with her brand new theatre show.
Through stories, costume, music and more, Tudors on Tour tells the turbulent tale of our most colourful ruling dynasty in all its glory, glamour and gore.
From beheadings and scandals to Shakespeare and the break with Rome, the immersive live show takes audiences through the royal keyhole into an age that changed England forever.
Epsom Playhouse, Oct 20 (8pm); Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford, Oct 25 (7.30pm); for tickets visit tracybormanlive.co.uk
