Contesting who would follow Good Queen Bess

AFTER ELIZABETH: THE RISE OF JAMES OF SCOTLAND AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE THRONE OF ENGLAND

By Leanda de Lisle

Ballantine, $25.95, 368 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY

History often takes on a sense of inevitability that locates events within a logical pattern of causality. Where Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss repeatedly invoked the “best of all possible worlds,” conventional narratives present their view of the past as the only possible world.

Leanda de Lisle takes a different tack in exploring how Scotland’s James VII gained the English throne after Elizabeth I died in 1603 and thereby united the two kingdoms under a single crown. Far from an uneventful transfer of power from a dying queen to her lawful heir, Ms. de Lisle recounts with verve a story of intrigue and uncertainty.

“After Elizabeth” is a fine book that refreshes an old story by recovering the multiple possibilities of a moment in time. The son of Elizabeth’s cousin Mary Queen of Scots seemed an obvious heir when the last Tudor died childless.

Mary Stuart was also a granddaughter of Henry VII of England through his daughter Margaret who had married the Scots king as part of a treaty. Mary Stuart went to the executioner’s block in 1587 largely because she had become the focus of plots against Elizabeth.

Indeed, Catholic rulers who considered Elizabeth as no more than Henry VIII’s bastard daughter by Anne Boleyn viewed Mary Stuart at England’s legitimate queen. So long as her Protestant son James maintained good relations with Elizabeth and her advisors, he became the logical king-in-waiting.

His accession, moreover, would bring the long-sought aim of uniting Britain under one ruler, but by inheritance rather than conquest. If Elizabeth refused to acknowledge James openly, she had good political grounds because the acknowledged heir provided a natural focus for ambitious men who might challenge her own authority.

This old, familiar story follows the logic of subsequent developments, but it also skips over key facts that Ms. de Lisle brings out. Henry VIII’s will, backed by an Act of Parliament, excluded James from the throne, while an older law from Edward III’s reign precluded the accession of a king born outside the “allegiance of the realm of England.”

Englishmen disliked Scots, and Ms. de Lisle notes the image of Scotland in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” as a wild, backward, and lawless country. Other claimants stood in the wings, including Arbella Stuart, James’ first cousin.

The Spanish infanta Isabella had a strong claim as a descendant of Edward III’s younger son John of Gaunt through both the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. Lord Edward Beauchamp had a stronger claim as both a Tudor and another descendant of Edward III.

The prospect of competing claims to the throne that had caused so much upheaval during the 15th century Wars of the Roses lingered in the background, and some claimants had foreign allies willing to intervene on their behalf.

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