Jane, Mary and Elizabeth She-Wolves: England's Early Queens

CHEERING

1953. A coronation fit for a king.

But it's a young queen who's about to be crowned.

And the crowd roars its approval.

The fact that she's a woman attracts no comment,

and she will go on to reign over us for six decades.

But England's queens haven't always been greeted with such adoration.

'The first woman who sought to be crowned queen in her own right

'here in Westminster, 800 years earlier,

'received a very different response.'

She wasn't met by cheering crowds.

Instead, she was chased away from the capital by an angry mob.

That's because throughout our history,

'women and power have made an uneasy combination.'

Never more so than in the Middle Ages,

when monarchy was forged in the cut and thrust of battle.

It was taken for granted that men would rule.

So what if the king died

and there were no men to take the reins of power?

In 1553, the only heirs to the Tudor throne were female.

The next three monarchs of England would be women.

But they would each discover that power

did not rest easily in the hands of a queen.

When they pursued power like kings,

these royal women were criticised and condemned.

Most graphically of all, they've been vilified as she-wolves.

These are the stories of the she-wolves of England.

And to explore them is to realise just how far we've come,

and how little has changed.

This impressive building is the Old Royal Naval College.

500 years ago, another, even grander building stood on the same spot.

It was one of the greatest residences of the Tudor kings.

On the 6th of July 1553,

in the magnificent palace that once stood here at Greenwich,

a 15-year-old boy lay dying.

He was Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII.

Edward was the male heir for whom Henry had been so desperate

that he'd divorced one wife and killed another.

And Edward had been a golden boy,

until he was reduced by a horrifying illness

to a grotesque and lonely figure

struggling for breath in a gilded bed.

But this wasn't just a moment of unbearable pathos.

It was also a moment of extraordinary political crisis.

Because when Edward died,

there was no-one left to claim the title of King of England.

For the first time in English history,

all the contenders for his crown were female.

Hindsight makes it difficult to appreciate

just how great a crisis this was.

For the men who stood around Edward's deathbed,

the prospect of being ruled by a woman was deeply troubling.

What they thought they knew was that women were not equipped to rule.

Weaker than men, less rational, more sinful, unable to fight,

unable to make law.

Over the previous 400 years,

the handful of women who had tried to take power

had found themselves condemned as unnatural, even monstrous.

Whether through inheritance or by force,

the crown of England had always been worn by a man.

And Edward's father, Henry VIII, had gone to extreme lengths

to ensure that he would have a son to succeed him.

This painting offers a revealing insight

into Henry VIII's view of his dynasty.

In the centre is Henry himself,

flanked by his third wife, Jane Seymour, and their son, Edward.

On the left is Henry's older daughter, Mary,

by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

On the right is his younger daughter, Elizabeth,

by his second wife, Anne Boleyn.

The painting is a fabricated representation,

rather than a portrait from life.

In fact, Jane Seymour had died just a fortnight after Edward's birth.

But here she sits as the beloved mother of Henry's male heir.

Henry's daughters, by contrast, are left on the sidelines.

He even went as far as to declare that they were bastards

after he'd disposed of their mothers.

Daughters, for Henry, would not do.

He was a king, and only a king could succeed him.

All of Henry's hopes for England's future

rested on his son's shoulders.

And when Henry died in 1547,

nine-year-old Edward became King of England.

He knew it was his destiny

to continue the glorious line of Tudor kings.

But a few months after his 15th birthday, Edward fell seriously ill.

Throughout the winter, he was confined within the palace walls,

and by the spring of 1553, it was clear he was dying.

But the identity of his heir was far from clear,

and that left England facing an alarmingly uncertain future.

As well as his two half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth,

Edward had seven cousins, but all of them were women.

For the first time since the Norman conquest,

there were no male heirs to the throne.

Whatever happened, England's next monarch would be a woman.

And the question now was, which woman would it be?

Mary and Elizabeth both knew

that under the terms of their father's will,

if Edward died, the crown should pass first to Mary,

then to her younger sister.

But they also knew there was a complicating factor -

Edward's faith.

He was an ardent Protestant,

and Mary an equally committed Catholic.

Mary's fear was that faith would usurp bloodline.

MONASTIC CHANTING

Mary had watched her father, Henry VIII, break from the Church of Rome,

and make himself head of the Church of England.

But it was under Edward that England underwent

a fully-fledged Protestant reformation.

Edward was a precociously intelligent child.

He'd been educated by Protestant tutors, and despite his young age,

he was determined to make his people follow his faith.

All that Mary held dear,

the Latin mass, sung in churches full of images and incense,

was swept away, to be replaced by an English prayer book

and simpler forms of worship.

MONASTIC CHANTING CONTINUES

For Edward, it was unthinkable that his own death

should send his people back into the darkness of Catholicism.

MONASTIC CHANTING CONTINUES

'Housed in the Inner Temple Library in London

'is a document which shows just how far Edward was prepared to go

'to stop this happening.'

This extraordinary document

is what Edward called "My Device for the Succession."

You can see that it's drafted and redrafted in his own hand.

And what this is about, above all,

is excluding his sister Mary from inheriting his crown.

Mary anticipated that her father's will would prevail,

but Edward found a loophole.

Henry had declared in law that his daughters were illegitimate.

And that gave Edward his chance.

English monarchs, he decided, had to be legitimate.

And they also had to be Protestant,

which ruled out his Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots.

That left his only remaining cousins,

the descendants of Henry VIII's younger sister.

There was Frances Grey and her three daughters,

Jane, Catherine and Mary.

Jane Grey in particular

shared Edward's fierce devotion to the Protestant faith.

But Edward planned that all future English monarchs would be kings.

He intended to cut women out of the succession altogether.

So in his first draft, he left his crown not to the Grey girls,

but to the sons they might one day have, their heirs male.

But there was no time for the Grey girls to have a son.

By the summer of 1553, Edward and his ministers knew he was dying.

On his sickbed, Edward took up his pen once again.

At the 11th hour, and faced with no other choice,

he accepted that he would have to name a female heir.

His Device said that the crown should pass to

"the Lady Jane's heirs male,"

but now the king altered it to read "the Lady Jane and her heirs male."

With the addition of two small words,

Jane Grey became the chosen heir to Edward's throne.

Mary was the rightful heir,

but she had no inkling of these manoeuvres,

and neither did Jane Grey.

She was merely a pawn in a much larger political game.

During Edward's reign, England had been ruled by a noble council

as they waited for Edward to reach adulthood.

These men ran the country in the name of the young king.

At their head was the Duke of Northumberland.

For him, 15-year-old Jane Grey was the perfect choice as Edward's heir.

Not only was she a Protestant, like Northumberland himself,

but she had just been married to his son.

June 1553 was a month of mounting tension.

Northumberland sent warships to patrol the Thames,

and did everything he could

to ensure his coup would go according to plan.

Meanwhile, Mary and Elizabeth were kept ignorant

of their brother's weakening condition,

as, one by one, the king's lawyers and councillors

were called into his bedchamber

to put their seals to the "Device" for Lady Jane's succession.

THUNDER RUMBLES

On the 6th of July, Edward died at Greenwich

as a summer storm raged across the capital.

But the would-be queens of England

didn't yet know that their moment had come.

The Duke of Northumberland wanted to ensure

that the king's death was kept secret

until the levers of power had been secured.

Three days after Edward's death, Jane Grey was summoned

to meet Northumberland and other members of the Privy Council.

She watched in bewilderment as they knelt before her,

offering their allegiance to the new Queen of England.

Her first reaction was a storm of grief for her dead cousin.

Her second was horror.

"The crown is not my right and pleases me not," she said.

"The Lady Mary is the rightful heir."

Jane Grey was strong-willed and ferociously intelligent,

but she was only 15, and struggling with shock and grief.

In the end, she couldn't hold out

against her powerful and manipulative father-in-law,

Northumberland.

On the 10th of July, heralds at last appeared on the streets of London

to tell Edward's subjects that their king was dead

and to proclaim the accession of Queen Jane.

The heralds' proclamation was a lengthy document,

largely because of the need to explain to Jane's subjects

exactly who their new queen was.

If the idea that she might inherit the throne

had come as a shock to Jane herself,

it was a bolt from the blue for the people of England,

and beyond.

The Emperor Charles V had to ask his envoys

to send a family tree to explain Jane's claim to the crown.

And on London's streets,

the news was met in puzzled and fearful silence.

But Jane soon realised even more was expected of her.

As she was taken to the royal apartments in the Tower of London

to prepare for her coronation,

it became clear that her father-in-law Northumberland

expected his son to become king once she was queen.

Jane later wrote that she was wrestling with "a troubled mind,

"infinite grief and displeasure of heart,"

as she struggled to cope with the shock of her situation.

But, all the same, she was prepared to flex her royal muscles.

The question of the status of a reigning queen's husband

was without precedent in English history.

Jane's husband Guildford had assumed

that he would become king when Jane became queen,

but she was having none of it.

She was worried that the crown might not rightfully be hers,

but she was sure that it wasn't her husband's.

Jane's stand precipitated a furious row

with her father-in-law and her husband.

When it was suggested that a crown be made for Guildford too,

she said she would make him a duke, but not a king.

Northumberland had expected a puppet.

Now he was finding Jane wouldn't be so easily manipulated.

But for the moment, this battle had to wait,

because another strong woman was preparing for a fight -

Mary.

It was Mary, Henry VIII's eldest daughter,

who was popularly understood to stand next in line

to her brother's throne.

Mary's sex had compromised her standing

as his heir in her father's eyes,

but the fact that she was female could hardly be used against her

by supporters of Queen Jane.

Still, the fact remained

that Northumberland controlled the formidable machinery of government,

and it wasn't clear what Mary could do to oust him.

Sinister whispers had reached Mary

that Northumberland was planning to arrest her

and imprison her in the Tower.

Mary fled to her estates in East Anglia,

and then made her way to her castle of Framlingham in Suffolk,

with its moated defences.

Mary was safe, but she was far from the centre of political action,

and her enemies controlled the capital.

She seemed to be a woman alone, and her chances of becoming queen

were written off even by her allies.

Her chief supporter overseas was her cousin Charles V.

As the King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor,

he was one of the most powerful men in Europe.

And his ambassador told him Mary stood no chance.

"All the forces of the country are in the Duke's hands,

"and my lady has no hope of raising enough men to face him."

As a female heir to the throne,

Mary found that her judgment was questioned and her claim dismissed

because she couldn't lead her own troops to enforce it.

But what they hadn't taken into account was Mary herself.

And that was a misjudgment on a massive scale.

Mary was determined she would be queen.

She sent letters to noblemen and gentry around the country,

summoning them to come to their rightful queen's defence.

They answered Mary's call in their thousands.

The men who mustered their troops here,

at her castle of Framlingham in Suffolk,

were loyal to the old religion,

or more simply, to the lineage of Henry VIII.

And their confidence in the justice of their mission was palpable.

The same wasn't true of Mary's opponents.

Northumberland wasn't popular, and he had misjudged his reach.

Just because he had proclaimed Jane queen

didn't mean the country would accept it.

At Framlingham, Mary's forces now counted 10,000 and rising.

Northumberland marched his men out of London to meet them,

but on the 18th of July,

Mary heard that he had stopped short at Cambridge

in shock at the overwhelming strength of her position.

And in his absence, the other lords of the council

collapsed into panic and recrimination,

claiming Northumberland had prevented them

from declaring their loyalty to Mary.

On Wednesday the 19th of July,

Mary Tudor was proclaimed Queen of England.

Jane's proclamation had been greeted with uneasy silence.

Now London's streets erupted in a wild explosion of joy and relief.

In the Tower, the girl who'd been queen for just nine days

relinquished a crown that she'd always believed was Mary's by right.

Jane had reigned, fleetingly and powerlessly,

but now Mary faced the reality of ruling England.

In just nine days, Mary had routed her enemies.

She ordered a traitor's death for the Duke of Northumberland.

And Jane Grey,

who had entered the Tower of London to prepare for her coronation,

now remained there as a prisoner.

But Mary refused to order the execution

of a girl she saw as a wronged innocent.

Mary's own right to the throne had been vindicated

with overwhelming popular recognition.

But as a woman,

her right to exercise power as she saw fit was another matter.

Mary's cousin, the Emperor Charles V,

had no doubt of the constraints her sex would impose on her rule.

Just three days into her reign,

he sent his ambassadors some advice to pass on to the new queen.

"Let her be in all things what she ought to be -

"a good Englishwoman, and avoid giving the impression

"that she desires to act on her own authority."

No king could have tolerated the prospect

that he shouldn't "act on his own authority."

But Mary was being told she couldn't do that

AND be a "good Englishwoman."

For the time being, however,

it seemed that Mary would play the "good Englishwoman" to perfection.

Three days before her coronation,

Mary made a remarkable appeal to the members of her council.

'Sinking to her knees before them,

'she spoke at length about her responsibility

'to God and her people,'

and then implored them to do their duty as her councillors,

because, she said,

she had entrusted her affairs and person to them.

The imperial ambassador reported that these great men of the realm

were moved to tears.

"Amazed as they all were by this humble and lowly discourse,

"so unlike anything ever heard before in England."

How much of this public performance was heartfelt,

and how much was strategy?

Mary was conservative by temperament,

but she was also highly intelligent, and like all the Tudors,

had a formidable will.

And whether or not she genuinely believed that, as a woman,

she needed help in governing her kingdom,

it was certainly the case that this display of female frailty

proved an effective way

of uniting a fractious and divided council around her.

And with the backing of her council, Mary was about to achieve something

no woman before her had ever managed.

Jane may have been proclaimed England's queen

for a fleeting moment, but she was never crowned.

On the 30th of September 1553, Mary became the first Queen of England

to be crowned in her own right.

At her coronation in Westminster Abbey,

like all previous kings, she wore crimson robes

to receive the orb, sceptre, ring, spurs and sword

that represented the powers of kingship.

And she was anointed with holy oil, like a king,

before the crown of England was placed on her head.

But the triumph of this ceremony was soon overshadowed

by the prospect of another - Mary's marriage.

She might be a crowned sovereign, but she was still a woman,

and the consensus was that she needed a husband.

At the age of 17, Mary had been declared a bastard.

This toxic status had made her un-marriageable,

but now, 20 years later, she was the most eligible woman in Europe.

And the question of Mary's marriage

would dominate the first year of her reign.

It would bring into open discussion

whether a woman could be both a ruler and a wife.

Her cousin, the Emperor Charles V,

had advised that she needed a husband

so that she could be "supported in the labour of governing,

"and assisted in matters that are not of ladies' capacity."

Mary remained calm in the face of such patronising advice

because she agreed that she needed a husband, and quickly,

but for a very different reason.

Mary was 37, and she wanted a Catholic heir.

Everyone agreed, then, that the queen should marry without delay,

but it was much harder to decide

which husband in particular she should take.

At the heart of the problem was the unresolved question

of the balance of authority between husband and wife

when the wife wore a crown.

If Queen Mary took a husband, would England acquire a king?

Many of Mary's subjects believed that she should marry an Englishman,

fearing that if she married a European prince or king,

England would be subjected to foreign rule.

The leading candidate,

qualified by his Catholic faith and his royal descent,

was a nobleman named Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon.

Just a month after her coronation, in November 1553,

a parliamentary delegation visited the queen

to tell her why Courtenay should be her husband.

They lectured Mary at length about all the disadvantages,

dangers and difficulties that could be imagined or dreamt of

in the case of her choosing a foreign husband.

Mary might kneel before her council when she chose,

but if they thought she would simply do what she was told,

they were very much mistaken.

"Parliament was not accustomed to use such language

"to the kings of England," she blazed back,

"nor was it suitable or respectful that they should do so."

And what angered her more than anything was the suggestion

that she should marry one of her own subjects.

The difficulty was that a good Christian wife, as Mary said,

should "wholly love and obey" her husband.

But she was a queen, so how could she obey a husband

who was also her subject?

Her authority as a female sovereign could only be safeguarded, Mary believed,

if she married a man whose status was the equal of her own,

and that, by definition, meant that he couldn't be an Englishman.

And marrying a foreigner would also allow her

to separate her private responsibilities as a wife

from her public duties as England's queen.

She would wholly love and obey her husband, she said,

but if he wished to encroach in the government of the kingdom,

she would be unable to permit it.

And Mary already had a suitable candidate in mind.

Her first thought had been of her widowed cousin

and her greatest supporter in Europe - Emperor Charles V.

But he was 53, immobilised by gout, catarrh and haemorrhoids,

and he had no appetite for another marriage.

In his place, he proposed his son, Philip,

who was already ruling Spain on his behalf.

While Mary's councillors were arguing for an English husband,

she had already committed herself to this Spanish match.

Mary's decision to marry Philip

has been seen as the defining mistake of her reign.

And with hindsight, it's certainly clear that it had profound and destructive drawbacks.

But there are good grounds for thinking

that he was the best of the very limited choices available to her

as a female monarch in search of a husband

who wouldn't compromise her power in her kingdom.

By making an alliance with Spain,

one of the most powerful countries in Europe,

Mary was following in her own father's footsteps.

Henry VIII had married Mary's mother, Catherine of Aragon,

as a matter of political strategy.

Mary applied the same hard-headed calculations to her own match.

But the reaction of the country to Mary's Spanish choice was very different.

As soon as the news began to spread

that the ruler of Spain was coming to England to marry the queen,

a plot was hatched to save England's autonomy

by removing Mary from the throne.

Under the leadership of a Kentish gentleman named Sir Thomas Wyatt,

3,000 men marched on London in February 1554,

intending to make a new and safely English queen out of Jane Grey,

or Mary's sister Elizabeth.

But, once again, Mary showed that a female sovereign could lead her people in time of crisis -

not by fighting, but by talking.

She rode to the heart of the City of London to rally her subjects.

It was at London's Guildhall

that Mary declared her dedication to her realm

by playing on her double identity as a sovereign and a woman.

She showed the people her coronation ring, signifying her marriage to her kingdom,

which, she told them, never left her finger.

And she wasn't only the wife, but the mother of the nation.

She said, "If a prince and governor may as naturally and earnestly

"love her subjects as the mother does love the child,

"then assure yourselves that I, being your lady and mistress,

"do as earnestly and tenderly love and favour you."

When the rebels finally arrived in London during the night of the 6th of February,

the queen stayed at Westminster, believing her capital would hold firm.

And she was right.

By morning, the rebellion had collapsed.

It was a triumph for Mary, but a disaster for Jane Grey.

Jane's very existence would always be a focus for Protestant opposition,

and Mary reluctantly agreed to her execution.

Less than a week later, Jane was led to the scaffold

within the precincts of the Tower.

With extraordinary composure,

she admitted her fault in accepting the crown she had never wanted,

before her head was severed from her body.

The events of February 1554 were a dramatic demonstration

of Mary's strengths and her vulnerabilities as queen.

She'd seen off the rebels with a bravura display of her queenly authority.

But the failure of the revolt didn't dispel fears that her idealised marriage to her kingdom

might be compromised by her actual marriage to Philip of Spain.

Fears or not, Mary was determined that the wedding should go ahead.

On the 25th of July 1554,

she and Philip were married with pomp and ceremony

here at Winchester Cathedral.

They appeared an odd couple.

Philip was 27, elegantly dressed,

lantern-jawed and utterly inscrutable.

His bride was 11 years older, short and thin,

her face lined with anxiety, an ambassador ungallantly reported.

Mary was delighted with her marriage,

but England now faced a double challenge -

a woman intent on ruling with a foreign king as her husband by her side.

What would this mean for her kingdom?

This great seal of 1554 brilliantly illustrates

the complicated sexual politics of this royal relationship.

The couple are on horseback,

Mary riding ahead, holding a sceptre,

and looking back at Philip on her left -

the traditional position of a royal consort.

So Mary is the dominant partner here,

but Philip has a sword unsheathed in his hand.

The vital function of king as warrior is one she can't fulfil,

so her husband is there to do it for her.

But even this apparently neat division of labour was fraught with difficulties.

If Philip were to lead his armies in England's defence,

would England be subjected to the military power of Spain?

These difficulties and contradictions were so powerful

that the treaty hammered out to set the terms of their marriage

went to great lengths to prevent Philip from intervening in the government of England at all.

England would take no part in his wars,

Mary would not leave the country,

and Philip would have no claim to the throne after her death.

In effect, Philip would have the title of king in England, but none of the authority.

Mary had got what she wanted.

By marrying a foreigner, she kept all her power in England intact.

And just four months later, there was another reason for her to be jubilant.

On the 28th of November 1554,

the news was made public that Mary was pregnant.

By Easter 1555,

England waited expectantly for the arrival of an heir.

The queen retreated here to Hampton Court Palace for her confinement,

with an exquisitely carved cradle standing ready by her bed.

On the 30th of April, news reached London that Mary had given birth to a boy.

The city erupted in celebration.

But it proved to be rumour,

running wilder than the bonfires in the streets, and was quickly denied.

May came and went and, by July,

when the queen re-emerged in public with no further comment,

it was clear that she was not, after all, pregnant.

For Mary, it was a personal tragedy.

She'd been elated at the prospect of giving birth to an heir.

And though it wasn't easy for doctors then to confirm a pregnancy beyond question,

her growing belly had left her confident that she was about to become a mother.

But her symptoms turned out to be those of a phantom pregnancy, not a real one.

The consequences were not only grief and humiliation,

but a new political vulnerability.

Mary knew that she needed an heir to put an end to the unsettling question of the succession.

But now her hopes of conceiving one were diminished

by the fact that her husband couldn't stay indefinitely by her side.

Philip had waited for the delivery that never was,

but, in August 1555,

he left England to deal with his own royal duties on the Continent.

18 months later, he returned to England for a short visit,

and in January the following year,

Mary announced the good news that she was seven months pregnant.

She had waited so long, she said,

because this time she wanted to be certain of her condition.

But it was the same story again.

Once again, there was no baby,

and by May, the subject was no longer mentioned.

Despite all Mary's hopes, at 42, she now faced the certainty

that her marriage had not brought her the heir she needed.

For all monarchs,

the need to produce an heir and carry on the royal bloodline

was of the utmost importance.

But for Mary, there was the added weight of her Catholic faith.

Her sister Elizabeth was next in line to the throne,

but Elizabeth was a Protestant.

Now all Mary could do was to try in her own lifetime

to make sure that Catholicism was firmly re-established in England.

After Edward's Protestant regime, many had welcomed Mary's commitment

to the traditional forms of religious practice.

Altars were restored and images retrieved from their hiding places.

But Mary's religious reform went deeper.

She wanted to stamp out all traces of Protestant belief as well as practice.

In November 1554, she had reinstated the old heresy laws,

and over the next four years,

almost 280 English Protestants died in Catholic flames.

And it was that ferocity on the part of England's first sovereign queen

that gave rise to the most explicit condemnation yet formulated of the whole concept of female rule.

From his exile in Geneva,

John Knox, a Scotsman who had served as chaplain at Edward's Protestant court,

watched in horror as Mary undid Edward's Protestant reformation.

Knox responded in 1558 by publishing this book, the gloriously titled

First Blast Of The Trumpet Against The Monstrous Regiment - meaning regimen or rule - Of Women.

And it's clear from the first page that Knox was not about to mince his words.

"To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city

"is repugnant to nature, contumely to God,

"a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance

"and, finally, it is the subversion of good order,

"of all equity and justice."

According to Knox, women's rule was monstrous - that is, unnatural and abominable -

because women were subordinate to men by the laws of God and nature.

For Knox, Mary's "spiritual fornication and whoredom" made her "the uttermost of God's plagues."

This is a piece of thunderingly misogynist polemic.

But behind Knox's ranting lay a much deeper and wider cultural unease

about the very idea of women holding political power.

And there was an intractable catch 22 at work here.

Women were soft and weak, hence unfit to rule.

But a woman who showed herself to be strong

was not the equivalent of a man, but a monster, a crime against nature.

This double-bind stood at the heart of Knox's portrayal of Mary.

He declared that she was "unworthy, by reason of her bloody tyranny, of the name of woman".

History would echo Knox's verdict by dubbing this Catholic queen Bloody Mary.

Mary's desire to be both a female king and a wife

proved just how difficult this combination could be.

England had been drawn into Philip's war against the French,

and Calais, England's last territory in France, had been lost.

Mary was distraught.

It was later said she'd declared that, when she died,

the words Philip and Calais would be found inscribed on her heart.

In the summer of 1558, a lethal flu epidemic took hold of England.

The fever laid thousands low,

and many did not rise again from their beds.

That autumn, Queen Mary was among them.

In the first week of November,

knowing that she wasn't expected to survive,

Mary sent to acknowledge Elizabeth as her heir,

asking only, hopelessly, that her sister should,

"Maintain the old religion as the queen has restored it."

She held on for ten more days, slipping in and out of consciousness,

but on the 17th of November 1558, Mary died.

CHURCH BELLS RING

This time there was no question who would succeed

and no protest that she was a woman.

On January 14th, 1559,

25-year-old Elizabeth was carried in a litter draped with cloth of gold,

in a triumphant progress through the streets of London.

The next day, she was crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey.

When she was presented to her people,

the new queen was greeted with roars of approval,

fanfares of trumpets and ringing of bells.

One eyewitness reported that it was

"as if the world were coming to an end."

The fresh, young queen revelled in this tumultuous welcome,

and the contrast with her weary predecessor was stark.

But behind the pageants and the processions,

Elizabeth shared more with her sister than first meets the eye.

Both faced the same challenge - to be, as Mary's funeral oration

declared, "a queen, and, by the same title, a king, also."

When Elizabeth came to the throne,

the two most urgent questions she faced were the very same ones

that had confronted Mary - her marriage and her country's religion.

Her advisers in England, and observers abroad,

assumed that the two questions were one and the same,

because what would determine England's religion, they thought,

was not Elizabeth herself, but the identity of her future husband.

The Spanish ambassador said as much to Philip of Spain

just four days after Mary's death.

"The more I think over this business," he said,

"the more certain I am that everything depends upon

"the husband this woman may take.

"If he be a suitable one, religious matters will go on well,

"but if not, all will be spoilt."

Once again, it was assumed that the queen would have to marry

and that the men around her

would play a decisive role in choosing her husband.

First among the Catholic candidates was Mary's widower,

Philip of Spain himself.

"If she decides to marry out of the country," his ambassador

wrote confidently, "she will at once fix her eyes on Your Majesty."

Meanwhile, Elizabeth's Protestant counsellors,

including her right-hand man, William Cecil,

who "governs the queen," the Spanish ambassador reported,

had other ideas -

the crown prince of Sweden, who sent lavish gifts of gold and horses

to press his suit, or a small handful of hopefuls

among the English nobility.

But within weeks, the men around Elizabeth began to find themselves

frustrated and confused.

"The Queen is a woman who is very fond of argument,"

Philip's ambassador wrote.

"Everybody thinks that she will not marry a foreigner

"and they cannot make out whom she favours,

"so that nearly every day some new cry is raised about a husband."

Surely, they thought,

the matter would be settled at her first parliament.

And so, on February 6th, 1559,

in the Palace of Westminster, a parliamentary delegation,

headed by the Speaker of the House of Commons, presented Elizabeth

with a petition that she should marry and give the kingdom an heir,

which was, said the Speaker, "the single,

"the only, the all-comprehending prayer of all Englishmen."

Elizabeth's reply to her parliament was a masterpiece of oratory

that demonstrated her determination to be both queen and ruler.

If she did ever marry, she would only choose a husband

who would be as careful of her realm as she was herself.

If she didn't, then God, she was sure,

would provide an heir to secure England's future.

And "in the end," she said,

"this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare

"that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin."

This was an extraordinary declaration.

No king would ever have suggested that he should remain unmarried

and give up his chance to father an heir.

But none of her subjects believed she'd meant what she'd said,

and, unlike Mary, Elizabeth, at 25,

had the luxury of time to put off her decision

about who and when to marry.

Her speechmaking didn't stop the suitors,

and their diplomatic overtures continued to be met with flirtatious prevarication.

Her first suitor, Philip of Spain, was the first to lose patience.

When he married a French princess in April 1559, Elizabeth said sharply

that he couldn't have been as much in love with her as he'd claimed,

since he hadn't been prepared to wait four months for her.

But declarations of love had only ever been a political game.

What had changed Philip's mind was the realisation that Elizabeth

would never be a good Catholic wife.

She had made it plain that she, not any husband she might take,

would decide the vexed question of England's religion.

Elizabeth didn't share the dogmatic faith of either of her siblings,

and she had seen, all too clearly, how the sight of Protestant flesh

burning in Catholic flames had discredited Mary's government.

Instead, the main business of her first parliament,

after the question of her marriage had been raised and dispatched,

was to establish a new religious settlement in England.

After weeks of bitter argument

between Catholics and hardline Protestants,

Elizabeth adjourned the session.

And when, on April 3, 1559,

Elizabeth reassembled her parliament,

she had come to a decision that gave in to neither side.

Elizabeth formulated a very English brand of reformed religion.

As Supreme Governor of the Church of England,

not Supreme Head, which was too controversial a title for a woman,

she tried to unite as many of her people as possible

around her own sovereignty.

She had no desire, she said, to "make windows into men's souls."

For this queen, outward obedience to a compromise church was enough.

No-one believed for a moment that this was the last word

on England's religion.

But Elizabeth's subjects were to find that this apparently open-ended

approach to decision-making was typical of their new queen.

They were discovering that their queen could be

baffling as well as brilliant,

with a silver-tongued capacity to say everything, and nothing,

at the same time.

But despite her capriciousness, as the years went on,

they learned that it wasn't for nothing that Elizabeth's motto

was "semper eadem" - always the same.

The queen may have dealt with the question of England's religion

with a compromise, but with the issue of marriage,

there was no such middle ground.

As weeks turned into months and months into years,

the proposals came and went,

and her chance of childbearing began to fade.

There's no way of telling

whether Elizabeth ever really entertained the idea of marriage.

She dallied with suitors,

most famously her favourite, Robert Dudley,

who extended the castle here at Kenilworth specially for her visit.

But in the end, with characteristic insight,

she saw the potential of her status as a virgin queen,

and by putting off the decision to marry until a perpetual tomorrow,

she made herself the source of all security for her kingdom.

And in 1588, Elizabeth's determination that she alone

would protect her realm would be put to its greatest test.

That summer, a vast Spanish fleet, sent by Elizabeth's one-time suitor,

Philip of Spain, lay off the coast of England,

threatening to invade.

Philip had tried, and failed, to keep England Catholic,

first by proposing to marry Elizabeth,

then by supporting any opposition to her rule.

Now, he intended to make England Catholic once and for all,

this time by conquest.

And confronted by Philip's forces, with no husband to hold

a sword for her, 54-year-old Elizabeth faced the challenge alone.

Could a female sovereign defend her kingdom against the might

of the Spanish Armada?

An army was mustered at Tilbury in Essex to resist the Spanish

if they dared to sail up the Thames.

On the morning of August 9, 1588, Elizabeth rode out on a white horse,

with a silver breastplate over her white dress, to rally her troops.

Her courage, and her extraordinary charisma,

had never been more apparent.

"I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman," she said,

"but I have the heart and stomach of a king,

"and of a king of England, too."

Women might be weak,

but Elizabeth wanted her subjects to know that she was exceptional -

chosen by God to be king and queen, in one.

And heaven clearly approved.

The Armada was shipwrecked by storms in the Atlantic.

As Elizabeth declared, "God breathed and they were scattered."

Even without a husband,

the virgin queen had seen off England's enemies.

This dramatic triumph, won by a nation led by a woman,

served to feed the growing cult of Gloriana.

Pictures such as this one, in the National Portrait Gallery,

which was commissioned in 1592 by one of her courtiers

as an elaborate compliment to the queen,

show Elizabeth as a unique being,

armed with an array of images, myths, allegories and symbols.

Here she stands in all her glory - impassive, imperious,

her elaborate dress hung with the pearls of virginity,

now a frame for an icon.

This queen represents the kingdom beneath her daintily-slippered feet

as completely as she dominates it.

She is king, queen, virgin, wife, mother and goddess,

with a man's heart in a woman's breast.

Not simply a woman,

but a woman chosen by God to rise above the limitations of her sex.

But Elizabeth's power entailed a sacrifice.

It had to be exercised alone.

She could only be wife and mother to her kingdom

if she were wife and mother to no-one else.

The virgin queen could dominate her country's present,

but only by giving up any stake in its future.

It was a high price to pay.

In February 1603, when Elizabeth was 69, her health began to fail.

At her palace of Richmond, restless with fever,

she couldn't eat or sleep, but still she did everything she could

to stave off the moment when her kingdom would go on without her,

refusing to make a will or to name an heir,

or even to move from the floor cushions on which she lay.

A courtier told her she must go to bed.

"Little man, little man," she said,

"the word 'must' is not to be used to princes."

CHORAL SINGING

But the flattering rhetoric and the ageless portraits couldn't save her.

Even Gloriana wasn't immortal.

On March 24, 1603, Elizabeth died,

and with her died the Tudor dynasty - the family line

that her own father had gone to such lengths to continue.

The consequences were immediately clear.

As Elizabeth breathed her last, horsemen raced north to Edinburgh,

to tell James VI, the Stuart King of Scotland,

that he was now also King of England,

the first of a new dynasty of English kings.

CHORAL SINGING

Elizabeth had ruled England for 45 years.

She had shown not just that female rule was possible,

but that it could be glorious.

But still she couldn't do what every king saw as his birthright -

to pass on the crown to an heir of his own bloodline.

It's a telling reminder that, for a queen,

there was no neutral in the exercise of power.

Power was male, and a women who sought to rule faced compromises

and criticism of a kind that would never have applied to a man.

All the women who sought to rule medieval

and Tudor England, from Matilda

to Elizabeth I, found from bitter experience

that power wasn't shaped for female hands.

When they did pursue power as a man might,

they were accused of being unfeminine and unnatural -

of being she-wolves.

Now it seems straightforward, even natural,

that Great Britain has a queen.

Elizabeth II has been able to wear her crown

without facing the difficult choices that confronted

her namesake four centuries ago.

But there's a reason for this.

Unlike her medieval and Tudor predecessors,

our queen reigns, rather than rules.

When she comes here, to the House of Lords, to open a parliament,

she speaks her government's words, not her own.

My government's legislative programme will be based upon

the principles of freedom, fairness and responsibility.

A woman with real power is still the exception to the rule.

If we examine our instincts, and our institutions,

power still looks, sounds and feels overwhelmingly male.

So in the end, is the culture of power in the modern world

less different from the medieval past than we'd care to admit?

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