In Our Time - The Death of Elizabeth I

Episode Date: October 15, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests John Guy, Clare Jackson and Helen Hackett discuss the death of Queen Elizabeth I and its immediate impact, as a foreign monarch became King in the face of plots and plague.By the spring of 1603, Elizabeth had been Queen for 44 years, and it was clear that she would leave no heir. Many feared that her death would spark insurrection, led perhaps by Puritans, perhaps by Catholics, possibly with the support of Spain. As it became clear that she was dying, Elizabeth's chief minister, Sir Robert Cecil, put into action his covert strategy to secure the succession of King James the Sixth of Scotland.What follows is a story of plots, plague and high politics, as a foreign monarch brought a thoroughly Continental approach to Kingship to the English throne. James's accession was widely welcomed, but his relationship with Cecil was initially tense, and his long procession south from Edinburgh attracted both celebration and criticism. His treatise on Kingship, published on his succession, became a bestseller in London - at least until an outbreak of plague, which also drove him from the capital not long after he arrived. His coronation was hurried through to circumvent plots against him, but his triumphal entry into London had to be delayed until a year after Elizabeth's death. And, as the high expectations which first greeted James were increasingly frustrated, the English started to invoke the ghost of their dead Queen to criticise their new ruler.John Guy is a Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge; Clare Jackson is Lecturer and Director of Studies in History at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge; Helen Hackett is Reader in English at University College, London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In February 1603, Queen Elizabeth I began to complain of insomnia and loss of appetite. She'd been on the throne for 44 years. It was clear that she would leave no air and her death had been long expected.

it. But when its imminence became apparent, there were widespread fears of insurrection. A complex, highly stakes, series of manoeuvres followed, and there are devils in the details. To some Elizabeth's passing and the arrival of a younger male monarch, James I, with wife and children, seemed as much a liberation as a loss. And yet in death she became a mythic figure, and remained all too present as her Scottish successor began his troubled reign in England. We meet to discuss the death of Elizabeth I, a John Guy, fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, Claire Jackson, lecturer and director of studies in history at Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge, and Helen Hackett, reader in English at University College London. John Guy, by February 1603, when Elizabeth

falls what became terminally ill, people had been expecting her to die. What do they most fear will happen when she dies? What they fear will happen is disorder because she has made no provision for the succession. In that sense, she was quite a responsible, Henry VIII. left a will defining who would succeed him. She has no child, she has not married. Now, of course, there are Catholics who need to be brought into the system. There are Catholic loyalists and there are Catholics who oppose her. How will the succession be handled?

People are, of course, expecting that James will be an important candidate, but he's 400 miles away. He's a Scot. That is a matter of great concern. Of course, much of the politicking is happening inside the royal palace. Elizabeth falls sick essentially because the Countess of Nottingham dies on the 24th of February. And that's what sets the clock ticking in the short term, and then she's ill for a month.

I don't get it. Why does the clock tick because the Countess of Nottingham do? In the short term. In the long term, of course, there have been other considerations, but in the short term, the clock starts ticking then and she won't eat, she can't sleep, she has no appetite, you know, she can't get to the chapel to hear the service, she has to sit on cushions. So we, and the rumours outside, you've talked about the Catholics, the Catholics are in touch with Spain, it isn't very long since the Spanish Armada came, the biggest fleet ever put to sea, which because of the wind and the rain of the English school was dispersed. So the worries are there worries from the Puritans. of interactions of the common people, as they were then called.

So there's quite a bit bubbling around out there, isn't there? I mean, the question is to get a succession established smoothly, the great difficulty is rumour, you need support in London. I mean, there are rumours that Elizabeth is dead, running around in Leicestershire on the sort of the 22nd. They put the watches out in the city of London. they put the constables on full alert. I mean, on the day of Elizabeth's death,

you know, there's a sort of deathly hush in London for about 12 hours. We haven't got there yet. We wanted to get there. We've got three weeks to go. The man who was orchestrating this in a way, making sure that there will not be, that the worst will not happen, is Sir Robert Cecil. Absolutely.

And the Queen's Chief Minister. So he was all-powerful, or did he have to watch out? Had he got enemies at court? The thing about Robert Cecil is that you have to go back in a way to Essex's revolt in 161 because Cecil and the Second Earl of Essex had been great rivals. And in 161, Cecil boxed in Essex and he rebelled. And that was the end of him. He was executed.

Now, in the run-up to Elizabeth's death, Cecil is in one sense all-powerful. But in other sense, he's extremely vulnerable. He doesn't know what's going to happen either. he's making a lot of preparations he's been writing to James he's trying to get the nobility involved he's been writing to the Earl of Northumberland And these are potentially treasonous

aren't they? They are potentially treasonous And of course I mean he had to pretend to Elizabeth that he wasn't doing it And of course she knew that he probably was But she chose to turn a blind eye But what Cecil's also doing is hedging his bets He's buying land borrowing money in the city of London

He's buying land to establish in a sense himself as a sort of great independent lord So that if it all goes wrong he can retire. So there she is. People know a fear that this is the last stroke, really, the last part of her life.

And the court outside there's great anxieties and inside there's great scheming. Claire Jackson, is there a broader sense of unease? I've hinted at it, but can you just fill it in in the country at the end of the 1590s?

I think this is very much a sort of fantasy eclect atmosphere of insecurity as well as the anxiety over the succession, there are broader socio-economic concerns. There's been a series of grain harvests, prices are going up. Grain-grain-grain. Sorry, grain-grain-grain-grain-hares failures. Prices going up, wages falling, population rising, a growing distinction between rich and poor in the towns that's been plague and influenza, decimating urban communities. And the Elizabethan poor laws, that, for all their shortcomings, remain the backbone of English

poor legislation until the 1830s are framed in this decade. and they give an indication of the sheer proportion of the population that are hovering around subsistence or actually living in poverty. So those socioeconomic tensions are exacerbated by the fact that England is also at war in the 1590s, the period of military non-intervention, a policy of military non-intervention that Elizabeth had pursued stopped in the mid-1580s. England's now at war, places strains on the treasury.

It also means that there's rising xenophobia and war weariness in the 1590s. there are criminally inclined deserters, troops being billeted on the populations, there's a rise in crime and vagrancy. A lot of that's met with quite harsh repressive authoritarianism. So there's a real sense that there might be just an undercurrent of trouble. So the vacuum of power that will emerge whenever Elizabeth dies, and obviously that could be at any point really in the 1590s, is against this much broader background of unease generally,

this feeling, as well as being at war, that England could at any point be in sluble. circled by these much superior counter-Reformation forces, and alongside Essex's revolt that John alluded to, Spain invades Ireland in 1601, it's a fiasco, but there's always this fear that Ireland might be that very worrying Catholic side door into England. So that sort of mix of socioeconomic distress and war is quite a potent,

worrying background. Let's go into it even further. Was there a sense then in the late 90s that this was Elizabeth's fault, that the country, because she went with the execution of her, of Marriveno Scots in 87, wasn't? She'd got rid of a lot of problems at great cost to herself, emotional costs, which we might come to,

and the Spanish Amada was a great triumph, and she was given a lot of credit for that, speech at Tilbury, and so on. But this build-up in the 90s, I just want to get it clear to the listeners, it was very, very serious trouble, and very unstable, economically and politically, and was she blamed?

I think there is a sense of fear and anxiety. It's very easy retrospectively to say, well, as we'll probably see later in the programme, that the succession is not as disruptive as it might have been, but nobody knows that in advance. And that question that John alluded to at the outset, I mean, when one asks, what should a monarch do? Often the first duty is surely to secure the succession.

From the very beginning of Elizabeth's reign in 1558, it wasn't clear how she could be secure in her throne unless she produced an heir. It's the very first day of her first parliament, the House of Commons give her a petition urging her to marry. she makes very clear that her position is not to declare the succession right from the beginning of her reign as she famously put it people will look to the rising than to the setting sun she didn't want an alternative constituency around her going to the as they did in the time of the georgias the hanoverian reign they fled it to the lakefront

even in elizabeth's own reign she'd been aware that during mary's reign those who didn't like the rain had looked to her so she didn't want an alternative rival power base but actually very very much it's her in elizabeth's own lifetime she'd been aware that during mary's reign those who didn't like the rain had looked to her so she didn't want an alternative rival power base but actually very soon she succumbs to smallpox in 1562 and that shows the fragility of her succession as well as the whole Protestant establishment and those fears are obviously much more acute the more that she begins to seem no longer immortal in the 1590s a Puritan MP Peter Wentworth in 1593 urges her to declare her succession and is placed in the Tower of London for four years for refusing not to remain silent I mean interestingly he makes the argument that if she doesn't declare her successor she'll remain unburied at her death because all of of her courtiers and all of her officials will only have their posts for as long as her reign continues. So you would need to find a successor who would need to be crowned and identified and crowned before she could be buried and that could take weeks or months. Elizabeth tries to get around this by saying that she's not to be disemboweled. So the court will decays her rapidly that she'll have to be buried. But it is an indication of how irresponsible is a word that's

already been used. This decision not to name a successor could be seen to be. Alan Hagger, can we bring to about the literature of the period in the late 90s and very early 17th century with regard to the prospect of Elizabeth says? What was it saying? We tend to think of it as being very reticent and fearful and mask and metaphorical. But can you get more out of it than that? Some of it is. It's very double-sided. This is the period when we get the most extravagance in the praise of Elizabeth. So we have poetry which is saying she's conquered time. She's ever young. She's going to live forever. She's immortal. And I think the way we can read that with retrospect is it's actually bespeaking this anxiety about her death,

the more they protest that she's immortal, the more they're actually very conscious of her mortality. Running counter to that. Who are these poets? Can you ever some names? Well, court poets, people like Sir John Davis writes some verses of the Queen at Christmas 1602, which present her as a sort of virgin saint and say virgin's milk, the Church of God Death Feed,

and they talk about her conquering time, her living forever. That's a very recurrent theme. in the public poetry of the 1590s, but in manuscript you have more sinister, more bitter notes being sounded. There's Henry Cuff, who's secretary to the Earl of Essex, and he's very much involved in the Essex uprising in 1601.

And he writes a poem where he imagines all the courtiers as insects, and they're all feeding on a rose, which is Elizabeth, and they're all glutting and surfeiting on this rose. And Cuff writes, I work on weeds when moon is in the wane, and clearly this waning moon is Elizabeth, and he's expressing his disaffection, his cynicism. The moon image

very much comes to the fore because you can use it to suggest that she's conquered time because of the way the moon renews itself for its cycles but also of course the moon has a dark side a sinister side it's associated with the occult with mutability, particularly female mutability so even in the more public court poetry even say Spencer's poetry

Raleigh's poetry very much we have the moon image being used to express ostensible praise of Elizabeth but within that there are often these quite clear notes of dissent and cynicism Can you illustrate that? Yes. Shakespeare is actually a good example. In a Midsummer night's dream,

Obron has a vision of an imperial votress, a fair vestal thrown at by the West, which is clearly Elizabeth. This is how he explains how the love charm comes into being because this imperial votress is immune to Cupid's arrow, and it falls instead on the flower, which becomes the love charm. But the way he describes this imperial votress, she's very ethereal.

Again, she's the moon. Which is an image commonly used for Elizabeth. Yeah, very much. It's the predominant image in the 1590s. And she sort of drifts off the scene, very chaste, sterile, ghostly. She's very much at odds with all the other imagery of love and marriage and youthfulness, which is predominant in the Midsummer night's dream. And right at the beginning of that play, when Theseus is complaining about the delay of his marriage,

he says, how slow this old moon wanes. She lingers my desires, like to a stepdame or a dowager, long withering out a young man's revenue. And I think we can quite plausibly read into that, impatience among the young men of the nation about this old woman lingering and a feel of stagnation that's coming with that. Can we

go for a few moments into the details of the last few days? Because I found them fascinating. We're dealing with, let's say, 21 days. Now we've got close reports on that, don't it? Can you just, we've got... Tell us how close we are to knowing about it. Real reports from the bedchamber.

And then we'll go into one or two of the things that happened. The problem is that the reports are so varying. We have Elizabeth Suther who's a lady in waiting in Elizabeth's bedchamber, but she later becomes a Catholic. And the reports she gives... Gips her a factor make it unreliable. Well, it makes her biased. It makes her want to present Elizabeth's death as surrounded by sort of sinister doings and uncertainties.

And she talks about Elizabeth being haunted by visions of her own wasted body. She talks about how a playing card of the Queen of Hearts with a nail through its head was found on the bottom of Elizabeth's chair. And after Elizabeth's death, she says that her corpse, was so full of noxious vapours that it exploded in the coffin. Now, she's the only one who gives us these details, so they are perhaps not entirely right. She talks about her having nightmares and stabbing the arras, doesn't she?

No, that's Sir John Harrington, who is Elizabeth's godson, a sort of favourite godson, and he talks about how he visits Elizabeth in November 1602. She's very melancholy, and he talks about her walking around her chamber, stabbing the arras with her sword in case there are interlopers and treasonous platters there. John God, there's this unwillingness to die, which is splendid in a way. way. Can you just talk about she wouldn't go to bed, as I understand it, because she said if she did, she'd never get

out of it. And can you... Well, she wouldn't go to bed because she said, you know, she'd never get out of it. But, you know, I think she knows by, certainly by the end of February that her numbers up. And, you know, she is just waiting. You see, one has to get a sense of what Elizabeth is actually like. Yeah, that's what I want to guess.

At that time. I mean, she's bald. She wears a wig. Her breath stinks, her teeth are bad because she absolutely had a fad for sugar, you know, much earlier in her life. She puts a silk, perfumed handkerchief in her mouth when she receives any visitors. And she won't appear without her makeup and to look beneath her makeup would essentially require an archaeological dig.

You know, she's 70, short, she's in her 70th year. She's reigned for 44 years. Out there, I mean, as Claire has said, you know, there are quite a lot of people, you know, who would like to see the back of her. Can I go to evidence, though? What is the best evidence, in your opinion, from those last? Who is, because there are people sending messages back here, everywhere, the Venetian ambassador saying she's dead, really, and there's a,

so what's the best evidence for what was going on in those days? Because what about her standing all the time and only sitting on cushions not going to do that sort of thing? Is that true, or are we in mismaking or mere gossip? No, I think, I mean, as Helen said, there's a range of things. different testimony, many of which are looking to the future as well in terms of how they want to place it. There are certainly manoeuvres that have been

happening, as has been explained, between Cecil and the English court, looking primarily to James. The one thing that Elizabeth might have been said to have done is placed obstacles in the range of various others. There's a whole host of people who might have a weaker claim to the throne. And even if she won't name James

as her successor, she certainly has placed obstacles in the paths of others. So Cessal has a correspondence as various others with James where people are writing in code and we begin to get a sense of preparations taking place there. And James himself is

at this stage writing accounts of or making his own preparations. So we have this place, just to finish on this, before we move on, Helen Lee, in this confined to this room, she can't get out of her room rate, can't go to the chapel, which is just next or with cushion, ladies and waiting,

follow her with cushions so she can sit whenever she wants standing. Do we have a report of the actual death? You would sort of expect, people's expectation would be of great things happening when the great Virgin Queen died. Do we know what did happen? Well, some of the other reports, some of the perhaps more reliable reports,

are from people like Robert Carey, who's her cousin, who's around the court waiting for news of her death because he's ready to ride up to James with the news. There's John Manningham, who's a law student in London at the day, time and he's a friend of one of Elizabeth Chaplin, so he's getting news straight from the bedchamber. And basically what they talk about is that she's suffering from fever, sleeplessness,

she has swelling in her throat, pain in her throat, she has increasing difficulty in speaking. Now, of course, the big question for her ministers is will she name a successor because of this problem we keep returning to of the succession? And the reports vary. Some say she named James, Camden, in retrospect, who's writing a kind of official, formal history. He says, oh yes, she named James, because he wants to affirm James' authority. Others, like Elizabeth Sutherl, say she went to her grave not having named anybody. It seems quite likely she made some sort of sign or gesture which Cecil and the Council chose to interpret as affirming James. She spends a lot of time in the final days in prayer.

She's visited by Archbishop Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, her chaplains spend a lot of time with her. But towards the end, everyone withdraws. She's left just with about three ladies in waiting. One last interpulation. There was talk of her feeling great guilt for the death of her. of Mary Queen of Scotts sister and of sending Essex after his rebellion in 61

her latest lover to the tower and his execution. Do those play into... It's rather interesting how these... You know, we might think these are rather sort of anti-Elizabeth interpretations or even in the case of Essex quite a romantic interpretation that she pines for the death of Essex. But even in the more sort of official accounts, if I can put it like that, they revert to this.

Sir Robert Carey said he'd never heard her. Heave such sighs since the death of the Queen of Scots. Camden, who writes really the most official public version of her death, says some attributed it to the loss of Essex. So even in these quite formal public versions of events, these things come forward.

Claire. There's also a very poignant moment about a month before her death as well, where her ring, which has been her sign of her marriage to the state, that her union to the country, as opposed to any man that might produce an air, has to be cut from her finger. It's grown into the flesh. And a lot of people take that to be an omen

that this contract between Elizabeth and her that had been made at her coronation is now broken. Although, of course, there's a different version of that story, which, you know, I mean, comes from... You must have such fun, you guys, I mean. Well, I mean, this is the point, because you see, Melvin, actually, we don't actually know. There are all these, there are all these conflicting stories. There are all these conflicting stories. I mean, the most likely, I mean, Camden, in a way, reimagined this, you know, retrospectively.

I mean, he's writing in James's reign. I mean, he's essentially being paid by the Sessels. And, you know, I mean, we know that Camden, although he was actually rather responsible to an historian by the standards of the day, we know that he also, I wouldn't say he made things up. I mean, he saw things in the way that he wanted them to appear, which was part of the way that history was done in those days. But I think there's one, and I've thought about this for many years. I mean, there's one thing that I think has the sort of ring of truth. Robert Kerry does say that the Privy Council had this audience with her on the 23rd the day before, you know, her death.

and when James's name was mentioned she raised her hand to her head as it were a gesture. Now, if that were true, and actually I personally believe it is true, if that were true, then by actually the law of wills, the testamentary law,

then that could be construed as a non-cupative will. You could make a will on your deathbed in front of witnesses. But conveniently, it legalises what Cecil gives him some authority in legal for what he was maneuvering Of course, but that brings us on. That brings us on to, if you like, the question of the transition. Yeah, well, let's get on to that now, because Cecil decides that he's going to take care of this.

And that Cecil family, they've got us through, they've got us through the Catholic to Protestant, they've got us through the Mary Queen of Scots, and now he's getting us through, his son is getting us through this. He brings, you tell us, but just as a headline, he brings together something called the Great Council, gives this a constitutional burnish and gets on with it. This, to me, is the essence of it. Because what you have on the death of Elizabeth, as Claire has said, is essentially an interregnum.

When the Queen dies, the authority of the state officials of the court, everything, ceases. Now, we've also said that one of the biggest issues in Elizabeth reign was the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, which was, in a sense, the armada of Elizabeth's soul. and also as she believed in the divine right of rule, an offence against God. Absolutely. Now, what happens is that Robert Cecil uses a device that his father, Lord Burley, had invented when Burley was trying to go behind Elizabeth's back and exclude the Queen of Scots from the succession. But he was looking ahead to a world in which suddenly Elizabeth would die, say, from smallpox, which she had in 1562. Now in 1563 and in the 1580s, he devises a scheme for the succession, and that involves the Privy Council reinforcing itself with the great nobility,

and that would be called the Great Council. Now, there's a tradition in English history going back to the Middle Ages that the Great Council can summon Parliament in its own name in the absence or incapacity of the monarch. And what Robert Cecil says is, as his father had said before, that that great council could, in full, fact choose a successor, you know, put it to Parliament, get it all ratified, and, you know, bingo, the job is done. And in fact, what the actual, of course, of events after Elizabeth's death,

you know, if we now cut or scroll back to, you know, three o'clock in the morning of the 24th of March when Elizabeth dies, what happens is that immediately Cecil gets as many of the councillors as he can together, and he sends for the Earl of Northumberland, he sends for the Earl of Shrewsbury. It's all done by 6 a.m. By 6am at first light, they have had the meeting. And here's also something interesting. When that meeting takes place, Robert Cecil sits in the chair. And the Earl of Northumberland, who's the senior peer, says,

hang on a minute, this ain't the Prevy Council. You know, this is something different. This is the great council. I'm the senior peer. I should sit in the chair. And Robert Cecil says, okay then, a little bit worried. But the Earl of Northumberland says, no, it's all right. You can stay there.

That's actually rather a telling detail. Now, this great council, in fact, then approves the paperwork, the draft proclamation for James's accession that Cecil has already had in the bag, in fact, in the filing cabinet probably for a year or more, and then it's proclaimed at the gates of Whitehall. That morning. It's first proclaimed, you know, I mean, sort of six o'clock in the morning.

I mean, you know, it's not even light. So, and then it's done again in the city of London, because as we said at the outset, what the London has said about this, how they went along with this, is a very big deal. We'll come to that to remember. So Cecil make sure that the Interregnum lasts precisely three hours.

Yeah, but the problem is, there's the distance problem. No, I'm going to come to the distance problem, but that's very good. We know where we are now. There's this man Robert Kerry, you mentioned once or twice before, who was a relative of one of the days in waiting.

And he wants to get to Scotland, as fast as he can. Somebody's got to get there and tell James of the actual death. Cecil wants to control all this, doesn't want him to go. He illegally, as it were, or again Cecil's wishes, sets off and rides there. One of the amazing things is that he gets there in three days. Did he take spare horses with him? It's 400 miles. It must have been a tricky track. He had horses set up all along the route to Scotland. How did he get them set up? I mean, there was no...

He'd made plans, you know, written letters, made plans well ahead. Everyone's foreseeing this event. You know, he's got it all laid on. But still three days. Yeah, he rides at full tilt. He does have an accident on the way. He falls off his horse, partially the way there, and is kicked in the head by his horse, but continues and makes it to James at nightfall on the 26th of March,

which is rather extraordinary, yes. He gets there, he proves that he's good because he's got this ring. And what does James, how does James meet and or greet him? With great delight, I think. This is what James has been waiting for for a very long time, and James sends his salutations back to the council. But James doesn't use the right form of words, So again, there's a slight moment.

I'll take care for a moment because it's fascinating. He went there in order to get a reward, Claire. What did he get a reward from that? Did he be pretty worse? He did, but then so did lots of other people at this stage. I mean, one of the stories of the next few weeks is the extent to which James has to create loyalty immediately. I mean, as John Guy initially said,

one of the uncertainties of not knowing who's going to succeed is actually people having to back the right horse. and James very quickly finds it's not just Cary, then it's not just Percy and Somerset, the officials, but it's actually most of the English hierarchy who start flooding north, not to contest James's right, but immediately to sort of pledge their allegiance.

So when the poor bleeding, Kerry arrives, James has already gone to bed and he falls to his feet and acclaims him, King of Scotland, England, Ireland, sort of somewhat euphemistically France as well. The moment James has been waiting for, James later says, is there anything I can do for you? And he said, I'd like to be a gentleman in the bedchamber, and James says, that's fine.

Can we just finish this correspondence, so Helen, so I interrupted you. So James writes back and says, I accept or whatever he said. It isn't good enough, though. He doesn't phrase it properly. He doesn't use the right form of words to reaffirm the council in their positions,

and so they have to write to him again, and he has to reply again somewhat tetchily, I think having had his first experience of English bureaucracy, saying, oh, all right, then, you know, here's the right form of words. You can assume your authority. English constitutionalism, which he didn't like. Yes, yeah, that's right, yes.

I think I mean we shouldn't also lose sight of the fact since we're talking about the instability of all this that Robert Kerry actually slipped out without permission that actually Cecil had told the gates to lock the gates and no one's to go out Why did Cecil want no one to go?

Did he want his man to go out? Yeah, because well he wanted to control it it isn't actually that he might not have sent Kerry he might have sent Kerry but of course he hadn't given the signal to go you see it's all a matter of who controls the power and how Kerry got out of the palace is quite interesting because in fact after Settle had gone

you know Kerry's brother, the old Lord Hunsden told the porter to open the gate and he was also on the council you see it's extraordinary even within the council it's family because that touches to the heart of the way that politics works it isn't just institutions it's families families work together in their own interests and those interests can sometimes cross the interests of the state

we talked about it being proclaimed at 6am And then it had to be proclaimed in London. Now, London's reaction from the reading what you three of Britain was rather unusual. Who wants to dive in on that? Well, John Manningham's a very useful source on this. I mentioned him earlier, this student at the ends of court, a law student. And he writes a very vivid account of how the people hear the proclamation in silence.

He says there's no shouting, nothing happens. And he gives a very vivid sense of London really existing in a sort of suspended animation. Why was that? Because it's this mingling of this anxiety and anticipation, I think. A lot of people have right at the time of how people thought that Elizabeth's death would be like a thunderbolt. They trembled at the prospect, quite apart from all the specific threats from specific alternative claimants or Spanish invasion. I think there's a general fear that things will just break down into anarchy. They'll just be disorder.

Thomas Decker writes, this nation was begotten and born under her. No one had ever known any other monarch. They couldn't quite imagine life without her. I think they just in a quite sort of vague general sense thought everyone would be up in arms, their houses would be sacked and spoiled. This doesn't happen. So we have these few hours of silence, of tremendous stillness in London, as everyone waits with bated breath. And then in the evening they start lighting bonfires,

they start ringing bells, and then increasingly a sense of celebration breaks out. And relief, in fact, that it's all been achieved peaceably. Can we talk about... Sorry, you wanted to say something like, because I'll ask you a question anyway. Oh, well, what was the question? And the question was, before he comes from,

and James sends down a book Basilicondoran, which sells an amazing 16,000 copies to the then-tine-in-that-n... entire new population of London. Why is that important? Well, it's quite a strategic move on James' part. He actually sends it down the day before Elizabeth dies, so he gets his timing very good. It's a book that he wrote in and published for his son and heir,

at that stage his only son and heir, Prince Henry in 1599, so it's already been published in Scotland. It's the more informal handbook of practical kingship. It's really telling Henry how to be a king, what a king's duties are before God, what a king's duties are before his subjects. James writes two tracks, actually, about kingship. It's not the more systematic true law,

monarchists that had appeared the year before. This is a very much how to do it manual. James sends one copy down the day before Elizabeth dies. As you say, within three weeks, from that one copy, there's eight different editions, about 15,000, 16,000 copies. At that point, the plague hits London, so we don't really know much thereafter. There's been a lot of bibliographic work done on it, the book, to suggest that actually it was a book that perhaps wasn't read very well. The large numbers

of copies that survived, and the good condition that they're in suggests that either it wasn't read or it was read maybe once. but actually had people read it and engaged with it, if you like, it would have given quite a good indication of the type of monarchy that James intended to operate in practice. A lot of people have seen it as a sort of Jacobian equivalent of a coronation. People bought it more to cherish than to actually read. Can we come back to London now, John?

He must know that James has got the news, obviously by then, because how's he holding things together? Is he the man in charge? London is now celebrating and accepting. Cessal. What's going, Cessal? Yes. I mean, Cecil, yes, I mean, Cessal now is holding the fort. I mean, they managed to get, but, I mean, it takes even, you know, days to get this letter of authority, you know, back. I mean, it's a very interesting, you know, difference of opinion about the nature of rule, as you said.

I mean, the English essentially want to do this in the English constitutional way. James just think, you know, Bessleic and Dauron essentially, you know, puts the theory of divine right kingship. We must point out that James had been a king since he was 13-month-old. He had. He had. He had, but of course there were different styles of kingship. And, you know, what's happening in, what was happening in Scotland was that James' theory of kingship was being framed,

essentially in a polemical sense, against the Presbyterians, you know, who actually, you know, didn't want that sort of divine right kingship and didn't want the king ever interfering, you know, with the Kirk. So in a way, James' Scottish background is pushing him towards, if you like a more exalted theory of kingship then you actually would expect from a Scot, from a Scottish king. What was Cecil's problems then in this business

where there's a manoeuvring going on? There's between London and Edinburgh. There are days difference just getting things back and forward. Everybody can't ride as fast as Kerry. So we're talking about a week or so for a letter. But Cecil can't ride there. He's got to stay in London. No, he can't ride there.

But how is he holding things together? In London? Yeah. With difficulty. With great difficulty. and, you know, if you're like, the instability, the structural instability in the system, you know, is actually there because to say to hold down London, you need to have the mayor, the alderman, the authorities in London, the civic authorities, who control the watches, you know, the equivalent of the police on your side. They do that. Cessle does that by binding in the mayor of London into this great council. I was just going to say, I think one thing that helps Cessle a lot is that there is this popular, upswelling of support for James. I think people are very pleased to have a male monarch.

They think he's going to be more active, more martial than Elizabeth was. The eleges, there are eleges published for Elizabeth's death, but not that many of them. In fact, a theme of the eulogies is that they are quite rare. A lot of the poets write about how other poets are not writing. Henry Chettle, who writes an elegy specifically chides Shakespeare for not writing an elegy. But the ones that do appear, they say things like, Eliza's dead, that rends my heart in twain. And James proclaimed, that makes me well again. So I think the general popular feeling is that people want James. They don't want any of the other claimants, and that helps Cecil.

You want to pop in, then there's two things I want to talk about before we finish. I was going to say a very obvious way in which your question could have been answered was to actually summon James, but James himself has made it very clear that he doesn't want to appear until after Elizabeth's funeral. That's what I don't want to talk about. Elizabeth's funeral. Now, that was one of the most expensive pageants demonstrations had been for centuries. Yes, well. Can you tell us a bit about it? It's very lavish. It's on the 28th of April. It's a huge procession through. London and in fact a lot of the eleges they include

a list of who's in the procession and it's fascinating because it includes even the most lowly members of the royal household so people like the maker of spice bags and the wine porters and the scullery maids they're all in this procession and then of course all the lords the council and at the end

of it there's the hearse with a life-size effigy of Elizabeth lying on the coffin Thomas Decker no it's wooden it's painted wood Thomas Decker describes how never had England seen so much black worn is on that day. There's a whole sense of London has been kind of swathed in black,

and he says the hearse is like an island in an ocean of tears. So a great public outpouring of grief. So certainly the forms of mourning are very much observed, despite what I've said about the allergies. And that was well and truly stamped the beginning of the posthumous mythic status of Elizabeth. Well, it did for a few days. I mean, I think in a way the sort of atmosphere of Elizabeth's funeral,

I mean, having had that instability in people wanting her to go. I mean, Bishop Goodman said late, you know, the people were weary of an old woman's government. It's a bit like the funeral of Princess Diana. You know, there was this sort of enormous, on a baton, perhaps on a smaller scale. There was a sort of enormous sort of moment. We're getting mixed up here. Elizabeth on a smaller scale. There's this sort of, if you feel like almost sort of hysteria, you know, the queen and nostalgia.

But of course, the idea that Elizabeth was a better ruler than James, it seems to me, comes in really, much later it comes in the 1620s. Sorry, if I can just briefly come, and we do get mythification going on. There are a lot of emphasis on how she was born on the eve of the feast of the nativity of the Virgin Mary, and she dies on the eve of the feast of the enunciation. So these are two Marian feasts.

And this is mentioned a lot in the elegies in the accounts of the funeral, and they're seen as showing that she's now some sort of virgin saint in heaven. There's a lot of expression of the idea that she's now crowned in heaven. So she begins to be apotheosites at this point. I was trying rather feebly together. Claire Jackson, he comes down from Scotland.

It takes quite a long time to come down from Scotland, all his goods 40 or days. Well, this funeral actually is five weeks after Elizabeth dies, so that sets a different kind of timetable. But his journey, he doesn't come to London for the funeral. No, he doesn't come to London for the funeral. He makes very clear that he's not going to arrive in London after the funeral. He's a passionate hunter.

I mean, this is the one thing that James is absolutely passionate about, and he wants her that every English gentleman kept his country park well stopped. and he intended basically to hunt his way down, basically, the A-1. And he takes his time about it. He leaves Edinburgh on the 5th of April. He's already tried to assure his Scottish people. I mean, I think one of the themes that isn't often picked up

is that the English often resent a lot of money being spent on Scotland, but they don't really realise the sacrifice that the Scots are making. I mean, they may have succeeded where Elizabeth failed in giving the English a monarch, but from now on they're going to be an absentee monarch. So James tries to leave with a rhetoric, I will come back. salmon-like to whence I was spawned very regularly. He actually only ever goes back once to Scotland. But he sets off on the 5th of April.

He basically, as I say, goes down the A-1, Berwick, Newcastle, York, taking a lot of time off to hunt. Stops in Nottinghamshire, he spends the night of Elizabeth's funeral in Hinchingbrook near Huntingdon with an Oliver Cromwell, who's the uncle of the Lord Protector. But this costs a lot of money,

and right from the outset, he says he's going to need relocation expenses if you need from, if you like, from the English Treasury and the figure of 5,000 is mooted around, which is kind of about the equivalent of half a million now. And one of Sessel's problems is to stop floods of Englishmen driving coming north to join this

enormous train that is following James. It's phenomenally expensive for those gentry that are having to accommodate this royal progression making its way down. James also has a series of hunting accidents en route that reinforce the fragility of this. I mean, his son and heir is only nine.

And James, one of the reasons, that by the time James gets to London eventually, people often see his arrival with his obsession about wanting to unite England and Scotland politically as his own pet project. But it is an indication of the way in which James realizes that this link now between Scotland and England is actually really quite fragile.

It's just the two crowns. He's only the successor to both of these crowns. If in a time of plague and high mortality, four people die, i.e. him and his three children, that link would be broken again. So by the time he gets to London, he's a practicing king, but he's got this further objection.

But on the journey up to London, John Guy, he's already doing things that maybe, did they cause concern that I mean he's very extravagant. That's one thing. He's creating an awful lot of knighthoods. That's another thing. But then he hangs a thief without due process. He says, I am the living law without English due process. And that sets off a last off. He says he says he's a Lex Loquens. He's the speaking law, which is, of course, you know, the metaphor for, you know, an absolute, that's not quite the right word. They would have said a divine right king. Now the last. The last one, he says, he's the last. He says, a legal right king. Now, the last. The last time a monarch had threatened to hang somebody without due process of law was Elizabeth when William Davison sent the warrant for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and let it leave his possession after she had told him, in fact, that it should not leave his possession. And even Elizabeth didn't do it, although she, you know, I mean, she said she really wanted to. I mean, for James, it's almost really quite remarkable. Now, that's one alarm bell. Another alarm bell is that, you know, this hunting down the A1, you know, actually, which of course also means that many of the decisions have to be made by correspondence

is a style that he keeps up really throw out his reign and that's a very different sort of monarchy for them, the Elizabethan style hands on and the third thing that I think really rings a chord is that when he does get down to London it isn't that long

before he issues I mean James has great schemes for the future he issues proclamations without consulting Parliament and possibly not even consulting the Privy Council in a formal sense that there should be, you know, he should be a king of Great Britain, that there should be an integrated coinage, that there should be a British flag. Just want, we've got to get him to London to finish the story to get him crowned. It's not a great occasion, that, is it?

No, because of the plague, the coronation is on the 25th of July, 1603, but by then the plague is at its height in London. He has to get crowned because plots are hatching. And some of the plotters are arguing that it's no treason to plot against an uncrowned king. So he and his queen and of Denmark, they are crowned. But normally the coronation would be preceded by a triumphal entry through the city of London. That can't happen because of the plague. So that's postponed to March 1604.

That means that when that happens, there's been months and months to spend in planning it. There's been a royal commission. It's a very splendid occasion with wonderful triumphal arches, verses by Ben Johnson and Thomas Decker. And it means that when that happens, James, progressive through London as very much a reigning monarch rather than a monarch on his way to the crown. Well, thank you all very much. That was a terrific gallop.

That's certainly he came down the A-Wan. Anyway. Thank you very much, John Guy, Helen Hackett, Claire Jackson. Next week we'll be talking about the geological formation of Britain which began 600 million years ago. Thank you for listening. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program.