The Rest Is History - 619. Elizabeth I: The Virgin Queen (Part 4)

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

How was Elizabeth I finally crowned Queen of England, after long years of perilous waiting? Why was her early reign so fraught with danger? Who was William Cecil, Elizabeth’s new secretary, and the key political player of her rule? And, why was she so determined to remain the unmarried, ‘ Virgin Queen’? Join Tom and Dominic as they reach the glorious climax of Elizabeth I’s long and dangerous journey to the throne of England, as she finally embarked upon one of the most famous reigns in all English history, rife though it would be with innumerable dangers, and royal rivals…   Hive. Know your power. Visit https://hivehome.com to find out more.  Learn more at https://www.uber.com/onourway Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at ⁠therestishistory.com⁠ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to ⁠www.goalhanger.com⁠ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editor: Jack Meek  Social Producer: Harry Balden Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude  Producer: Tabby Syrett Senior Producer: Theo Young-Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And I acknowledge that thou hast dealt as wonderfully and as mercifully with me as thou didst with thy true and faithful servant, Daniel, thy prophet, whom thou deliveranceed out of the den from the cruelty of the greedy and raging lions. Even so was I overwhelmed, and only by thee delivered. To thee only be thanks, honor, and praise forever. Amen. So that was Queen Elizabeth I, Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, on the 14th of January 1559. Two months into her reign, two months after her sister, Bloody Mary, has died leaving her as the heir. And she is speaking to a crowd who've gathered outside the Tower of London. So that is the place where her mother had been imprisoned and had died, where she had been imprisoned. and had feared for her own life and where she is now staying in the royal apartments waiting for her coronation. And Tom, you suggest in your notes that she's thinking about Daniel and the

lion's den because Tower of the London has a menagerie, an exciting sort of proto zoo. Yeah, with lions. And she's been thinking about lions because of that. That's nice. Well, I'd just throw that out as a possibility. And it's a great speech. And, you know, she is alluding to all the traumas and dangers that you were you were mentioning and she's still only 25 but she has pulled through and I think that by casting herself as Daniel saved from the lion's den I mean it's an absolutely brilliant humble brag because on the one hand she's saying oh it's only thanks to god that I've survived but of course if she is like Daniel who was a prophet who was spared by God to work out his purposes then it suggests that Elizabeth also has been spared deliberately by

God and has great purposes ahead of her. So to quote Helen Casta, who has a brilliant short biography of Elizabeth about this speech, it was a rhetoric and reality fused into a performance that was at once immediately legible and utterly unreadable. So that sense in which Elizabeth is brilliant at speaking, at coming up with phrases and images and ideas that resonate with her subjects, but at the same time keeping her own thoughts and personality completely veiled. Classic display of Elizabethan rhetoric. And right from the start, she proves an absolute master at something that her father, Henry of the Eighth, had been brilliance at, which is the theatre of monarchy, the pageantry,

the spectacle, because she's carried, isn't she, from the tower in a litter to Westminster, and there are pageants and kind of tableau all along the way, and the public are lying the streets, They absolutely love it. Anyone familiar with the reign of Henry the Eighth will know that he loved all this and he was brilliant at it. And so is she. She has that quality that you absolutely need as a kind of early modern ruler, which is to be a superb public performer.

Yeah. And I think that procession from the tower to a coronation is a popularity test. And of course, it was one that her mother, Anne Berlin, when she went to be crowned as queen, had failed. But Elizabeth spectacularly passes it to quote a contemporary witness. London had become a stage wherein was showed the wonderful spectacle of a noble-hearted princess toward her most loving people and the people's exceeding comfort beholding so worthy a sovereign. And the next day, after this procession, she goes to Westminster

Abbey, her hair long and Auburn is flowing and this is to symbolise her virginity. And in Westminster Abbey, she is crowned and people who listen to our episode on Dr. John D., her necroman her astrologer. He had chosen the day because it was a propitious one. And it's clear that Elizabeth felt it as being exactly that. So the Venetian ambassador saw her coming out from the coronation and said she looked far too happy that her smile was very undignified for a queen. But obviously she was delighted by it. And this is despite the fact that as she well knew, the challenges that faced her and England were absolutely overwhelming. So to give an example, A fact I learned from your notes, which is a brilliant fact, actually,

is that she is not crowned by any of the kind of big bishops. She's crowned by somebody who I didn't even know existed. It was the Bishop of Carlisle. Because basically all of the heavyweights say, I don't like this. You know, she's going to be using heretical evangelical stuff in her coronation, and we don't want to be tainted by it. Yeah, because the bishops are all Catholic. Right.

So this is a hint of the enduring religious problems that have been going on now for what, 25 years. It still hasn't quite solidified into very simplistic Protestants versus Catholics. But there is this sort of sense clearly, obviously because she's a very, very keen evangelical by birth, by education, by temperament, that the pendulum is now unbelievably after five years swinging back again away from Catholicism. So people who were saying in the sort of 1530s, God, you don't know where you are these days with Henry the 8th and his wives and his changes of religious policy. I mean, things have only got worse for them, because the pendulum is now swinging wildly

and madly one way or another. I think she is Protestant by private conviction. I mean, her private thoughts are always very hard to pin down, but I think she was a committed evangelical. But even if she wasn't, there is no way that she is going to allow the Pope to maintain his supremacy over the English church, because she, Elizabeth, as the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Berlin, is the living fruit of Henry's break with Rome. There's no way that she can, you know, allow the papal supremacy to continue. And it's very telling that on her way from the Tower to

Westminster, the day before her coronation, with all they were saying, all the crowd's cheering her. One of the cries from the crowd is, remember old king Henry the 8th. And it's recorded that when Elizabeth hears people shout this, again, she smiles. But, To take on the Catholic hierarchy that Mary has spent her reign kind of reinstalling and strengthening, this is a massive challenge, because it's not just in the church, but also in Parliament and in the universities, that the commanding heights of the establishment are occupied by very fervent, very brilliant, very committed Catholics. And on top of that, as we were mentioning in the previous episode, it's also the fact that I think

the vast majority of the population of England are instinctively, if not kind of vehemently Catholic. Yeah. So a small sea conservative, I suppose, is what they are, right? Yeah. And I think that even those who are not fervent in their loyalties either way are kind of weary of what you were saying, this kind of endless seesawing between reformation and counter-reformation, all the kind of endless process of upheavals. And adding to the problems that Elizabeth faced, if she is going to set about transforming England into a Protestant state, as basically she has to, then this has implications not just for domestic policy, but also for foreign relations. Because England is facing two continental superpowers relative to these two superpowers, Spain and France, England is very much a second rate power. And both these superpowers are, of course,

Catholic. And Mary Tudor, Elizabeth's elder sister, who's just died, she had been Catholic and so she had been able to ally herself to one of these superpowers, namely Spain. And this had actually been excellent for England's security because it had buttressed England's ability to defend herself against her traditional enemy, which of course is France. And if Elizabeth is going to ram through a Protestant restoration, then what are the implications of that for English security? Because if she loses Spain as an ally, then that may well leave her very exposed to French machinations. And the threat from France isn't just to England, but to Elizabeth personally. Because her claim to the throne, although the mass of people in England

accept it is not absolutely rock solid because she rules as queen by virtue of an act that her father had passed in 1544 settling the succession. And it's really important, which is why we've kind of mentioned it several times over the course of this series. It had restored first Mary and then Elizabeth to the line of succession after Edward the Sixth, if Edward the Sixth doesn't have any children which he doesn't. But it had left both Mary and Elizabeth as bastards. So there was a kind of inherent contradiction there, an inherent tension. Mary, when she becomes queen, had got Parliament to repudiate her bastardy, but she had left Elizabeth as a bastard. Now that Elizabeth is queen, is she going to do what Mary had done and have her bastardy removed? She doesn't. And I think

the reason for that is that she knows that the entire issue is incredibly toxic. Amber Lynn is much less popular in the kind of national imagination than Catherine of Aragon had been. And And she is widely viewed as having been Henry's concubine, as having been the great whore. And the implication of that is that Elizabeth is therefore the little whore. And so she just doesn't want to kind of poke that hornet's nest. And so she leaves it alone. But the downside of that, of course, is that there are questions over her legitimacy. And therefore, there is lots of scope for the French to make mischief.

And what is worse, the French actually have. a possible replacement, don't they, to hand, who is Catholic, who is clearly legitimate because she's a relative of the Tudors, she's a cousin of Elizabeth, and she is very pro-French. And this is somebody that we have already covered on the rest is history at some length. That is Mary Stewart, Mary Queen of Scots, who's married to the dauphin. Remember, Tom, you described how she single-handedly steered a ship to France and the and the teeth of a gale at the age of five. And the French have started to promote her already as acclaimant to the English throne, haven't they?

The French love a pretender. They love a pretender to the English throne and they've got a brilliant one in Mary Stewart. Yeah, so the moment Mary Tudor dies in the Dauphin's household where Mary is married to the Dauphin, all the crockery starts, you know, the royal coat of arms of England starts appearing. Whenever Mary Stewart enters a room, people say make way for the Queen of England. And from this point on, the story of Mary Queen of Scots is shadowing the story of Elizabeth Tudor. So anyone who hasn't listened to the series on Mary Queen of Scots, it's episode 584 continuing on from that. It's a good compliment, I think, to this series.

And so the threats to Elizabeth as a Protestant internally and externally are absolutely immense. And there's a real kind of aura of Cold War paranoia in the early months of Elizabeth's reign. I think often people have the idea that when Elizabeth becomes queen, you know, the maypoles go up, the sunshine, it's Mary England and all that. That's not at all the environment. So as a contemporary makes clear, the atmosphere is dark with kind of tension, with menace. So he wrote every report was greedily both inquired and received, all truth suspected, diverse tales believed, many improbable conjectures hatched and nourished. It is an absolute viper's nest. But Elizabeth has come into power, hasn't she?

You described last time how she has, you called it a shadow government. She has been, she has always had people around her. And some of them have been around her for a long time. So we've had a lot of Welsh history in recent episodes because of the presence of this guy, Thomas Parry. And he's back, isn't he? He becomes controller of the household. And despite being, what was he, a fat, garrulous Welshman, a self-indulgent, greedy Welshman? Fat self-satisfied Welshman.

Fat self-satisfied Welshman. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, he is appointed to her council. So he's done very well. And someone else who has always been very close to her, of course, is Kate Ashley, who had been her kind of nanny, her teacher, and then her confidante throughout all the kind of years of danger and peril before she became queen. She gets appointed chief gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber.

and the privy chamber is an important part of any monarch's household. And because Elizabeth is a queen, men can't really be a part of this. So therefore, Kate actually has, you know, she wields quite a degree of influence. She's a significant player too. But the key player, the key player is the man who we basically ended the last episode with. And this is William Cecil. And she has been appointed Elizabeth's new secretary. but that title kind of barely hints at his significance

because in effect he is prime minister and Dominic I think he is a very Sandbrookian character you mean that surely is there as high praise I hope you will take it as high praise because I actually think that in any ranking of the most impressive political operator in the British history so not just English but British history

I would say he is very much at the top he's an extraordinary competent Right. I mean, more than competent. He's brilliant. Okay, it's very clear to me there's going to be some hideous sting in the tale in this comparison. But I wait to see what that's going to be. No, not at all.

No. It's Cecil in the first days of her reign, who essentially guides Elizabeth in the selection of her council. And this council is very streamlined. Essentially, it's kind of halved. Under Mary, it becomes very cumbersome. Cecil wants a much more readily controllable body of men. By convention, there are several secretaries. Cecil's not having that. He is the only secretary. He is operating alone. And of course,

this is absolutely punishing because it means that he has a lot on his plate. But that Dominic is how he likes it. So he chairs the council. He runs the royal secretariat. If there's a pie, he has his finger in it. So to quote Stephen Alford, who's written the definitive biography of Cecil, he was everywhere and everything in Elizabethan government. No piece of paper, no report, to no policy, no event or panic, or crisis at home or abroad could escape his attention. And Elizabeth had appointed him partly because he's incredibly able, partly because he's a very committed Protestant, very loyal to her, but also because he knows, but also because she knows that he is equal to the challenges of such an exhausting role. And right from the beginning, so from

the first meeting of her council, which was held at Hatfield 10 days after her accession, She's absolutely upfront about what she expects from him. Her kind of prescription that she gives him is very famous. But I think that any leader, even today, could do worse than tell, you know, their kind of ministers or their right-hand people to echo Elizabeth's words. So she says, this judgment I have of you, that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift and that you will be faithful to the state and that without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel you think best. So essentially, Elizabeth is saying to Cecil, you know, speak truth to power. Even if I don't want to hear what you've got to say, I still want to hear it. I respect your opinion that much.

He sounds brilliant. And actually, even better, Tom, because you describe him in your notes. He was subtle and self-disciplined, but he believed to the core of his being that Elizabeth's kingdom was called by God to cast off the shackles of papist bondage. So, I mean, he's not wrong, right? well discuss certainly what's not wrong is that he he wants Elizabeth and England to embrace

what he always calls true religion which effectively is what I think we can now start to call Protestantism he wants England to be properly Protestant and he's not alone in this ambition so we talked in the previous episode how there are a lot of Protestants who've basically hunkered down under Mary's reign

who've kept quiet who've played it cool and who've lived to tell the tale there are also quite a lot of Protestants, those of the hotter variety, the more vehement in their opinions, who have hot-footed it to Geneva, where John Calvin has set up a godly republic. And they, with the death of Mary and the accession of a Protestant queen, start returning to England. And their view of Elizabeth isn't always 100% complementary. So John Knox, the Scottish radical Protestant. who had gone to Geneva and had lambasted women as queens, which then makes him very unpopular with Elizabeth. But also something else that made him unpopular with Elizabeth. She basically accuses Elizabeth of having been a massive tremor. He wrote to her, for fear of your life, you did decline from God and bow in idolatry. So there's this sense that the exiles in Geneva have kept their purity, whereas, you know, people like Elizabeth and indeed Cecil have had to play

the hypocrite. And so when people like this come back to England, they are pretty intemperate in their demands of Elizabeth. They're saying, you know, fine, you're a Protestant, but you went to mass, you're not as good as us, basically do what we say, hand over the reins of government to us, we know what's best. And again and again, whenever I read about this, this dynamic between Elizabeth as a Protestant leader, but with kind of hot heads, if you like on her left, I think about Labour Prime Ministers who are being harassed by left-wing backbenchers to be more radical. Yeah, and this is something that's going to endure and run and run in English history, isn't it? So these people are basically the ancestors of the Puritans.

They are more extreme and they suspect the court of trimming and of basically being only half-heartedly committed to the Protestant cause. And Elizabeth, I guess she would say, I'm not Kirstama, I'm not a Labour Prime Minister. what makes me different is I don't answer to you. You know, I am the queen. I am the daughter of Heming the 8th. I am the head of the church. I answer to God. I know best.

And you basically pipe down and, you know, you knuckle under and do what I tell you, right? Yeah. So she's got all these people coming back and telling her what she must do. You don't say must to a queen. That's unacceptable. And it's really telling, I think, that she loathes, clerical. essentially. She's the first monarch not to have any clerics, any clergyman on her council. She really, really dislikes them. But I think her contempt for all these kind of Protestant radicals

coming back and mansplaining to her how she should be a queen. It's not just a kind of a political distaste for them. It's also because she's smarter than them. She's got her finger more on the pulse. She's more alert to the currents of politics. And of course, she wants a Protestant in England, not at the cost of her throne. And all the time while she has been kind of in the cockpit of political power, she has been learning lessons from her predecessors. So from her brother, Edward VI, she has learned, don't push things too hard. Don't alienate people by rushing things. So to quote Lucy Wooding in Tudor England, it could be argued that Elizabeth wanted stability as much as she wanted Protestantism. And so the question there is, you know, is her policy on

religion, is it being dictated primarily by her spiritual convictions or by her sense of what was possible politically? And Wooding actually argues there's no real contradiction there. So to quote her, for a woman who understood that she had been appointed by God to protect her realm from divisional conquest, while at the same time promoting the true faith, it is likely that there was no separation between these two motivations. That's surely the key to it. We're great politicians, and she is a great politician, arguably the greatest in England's history. They see no difference between the demands of political pragmatism and the dictates the political principle, do they? They come to say, well, what I can do, actually, you know what? Coincidentally,

it turns out to be the right thing to do. Yeah. And I think that's exactly how she perceives it. Maybe there's a degree of self-delusion in that, you know, as in, but I think you tend to believe your own agenda, don't you? And she is brilliant at judging just how far she can push the English people without them breaking. And indeed Parliament, because she's, you know, She wants Parliament with all the Catholic bishops inside it to vote to repudiate the papal supremacy and restore the royal supremacy. In other words, she wants to leave the Catholic hierarchy in no doubt that this is the will of the English people. Mary, when she had reversed the royal supremacy, had made sure to get rid of the Protestant bishops. Elizabeth doesn't do that. She doesn't

kind of clear parliament out of the bishops. She wants everybody to be complicit in the decision that Parliament reaches. And so it's, you know, that's a massive risk because it could easily have exploded in her face. And in the event, this kind of revolution is forced to parliament by the absolute skin of its teeth. And it's chiefly thanks to Cecil's genius for kind of whipping and arm twisting that MPs and then the House of Lords do vote for the religious settlement. And this settlement is sometimes described as kind of centrist as being a compromise between Catholic and Protestant, but it isn't because by this point, definitely a point has been reached where it's either or you either have the papal supremacy or the

royal supremacy. And by voting for the royal supremacy, Parliament is voting for a church that is unmistakably Protestant. Elizabeth, unlike her father, does not call herself the supreme head of the Church of England. That's reserved for Christ. But she does call herself the supreme governor. And accepting Elizabeth as the supreme governor of the Church of England is now established as the absolute litmus test for loyalty. Everyone in government, everyone in the council, everyone in the church, everyone in parliament has to swear it. And because the Catholic bishops can't do that, effectively they are committing a kind of mass letter of resignation. They leave en masse. So that clears Catholics out of the upper echelons of the church. At the same time, a second act is passed

imposing uniformity, which basically is prescribing doctrine. So this gets rid of lots of kind of Catholic aspects of religion, so prayers for the dead, veneration of saints, pilgrimage, rosaries, images in churches, all that kind of thing. And it also affirms the primacy of scripture, which is very Protestant. There's an evangelical prayer book, kind of based on a prayer book that had been written by Kranmer, Elizabeth's Godfather, and there's a liturgy in English. And this may sound to people who have no interest in religion who couldn't care less about the Church of England as something that's kind of peripheral and irrelevant. It absolutely is not, because by establishing this, Elizabeth is establishing the fundamentally

Protestant character of England as a polity. And this, of course, will have a massive influence, not just on English and British politics, but on global politics, because from this moment stems the fundamentally Protestant character, for instance, of the United States of America. So, Tom, you say, you know, this is often seen as a compromise and it's not, and it's not centriism and all of this. And I completely take with your point, because you're basically saying she's pinned her colours to the mast, England now will be a Protestant country. That said, there are lots of people, well, maybe not lots, but there are certainly some people

who do think it's a compromise, and there are aspects. in which Elizabeth does not go as far as she could have done. And isn't that the key to her success, is that actually this point about judging how far you can push things, there are elements of what we would perceive as Catholic religion that she retains that other Protestant policies don't. For example, we have choirs. Priests dress up in fancy dress.

Fancy dress. I think vestments is the word you're groping for. No, I mean, I'm very aware of the word vestments, but I'm saying it with a degree of, with a degree of, I wouldn't say scorn. Russet-coated skepticism. Exactly. Thank you.

That's exactly it. To other Protestants, England does not look like a revolutionary Protestant state because it's only gone some way down that road, right? So I think, you know, choirs and altars and vestments and stuff, it's the sugar that helps the medicine go down for those who are skeptical of Protestantism. You know, there are echoes of the old order still preserved. If you're a bloke in a village who doesn't know much about this, right, and is baffled by it all, you might look on this and say, they've gone back to Protestantism, but thank God they haven't gone full kind of whitewash, scrap eulters, all of that kind of thing.

These people can still dress up and kind of sing songs. Yes, and I think this is motivated partly by pragmatism. Elizabeth, you know, said he's learned the lesson from her brother's regime. don't rush things, don't alienate people needlessly. I think it also reflects her personal convictions because Elizabeth's religious tastes were shaped by her upbringing at the court of Henry VIII and in the household of Catherine Parr

and they belong to a generation where you can basically have the royal supremacy but you can also have altars and choirs and that's what she likes. I mean, Henry VIII's thing, he was a pick and mix man. He liked dishing the papal supremacy, but actually deep down he was a kind of small

see conservative when it came to the content of the services and the liturgy and the theology. I mean, Elizabeth is properly an evangelical. She's properly a reformed Christian, but she likes a crucifix. She loves a choir and a crucifix. And why shouldn't she have it? It's because it makes political sense, but also she's the queen. God has appointed her queen. Therefore, obviously, God likes crucifixes as well. So she's going to keep them. I think surely everybody listened to this will conclude, A, Elizabeth was right, B, the Church of England as it used to be was brilliant. And see the radicals, the evangelicals, they're a bit bonkers, aren't they? I mean, they don't see it this way.

So they think there's too much Catholicism, too much trimming, and this is really the root of the Puritan distrust of the monarchy and the central establishment that will, of course, reach its climax in the 1640s. So it's kind of like Labour MPs on the left sneering at Stama for giving messages in front of a union jack. It is exactly that. He's a fascist. yes and it has to be said that just as you know labor prime ministers tend to store up trouble for themselves with their left wing back benches so Elizabeth is also storing up trouble for herself by you know keeping the vestments and and keeping the altars because she has a problem with the fact that all the Catholic bishops have resigned on mass how is she going to fill the vacancies her preference obviously is for Protestants who like her had stayed in England and haven't gone off to Geneva and learned all kinds of mad ideas at the feet of John Calvin.

And so to the degree that she can appoint such figures as bishops, she does so. And the key appointment is to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the preeminent bishop in the Church of England. And she gives that role to Matthew Parker, who was her mother's old chaplain. People may remember from our very first episode, it's to Matthew Parker that Ambelin, in her last interview with him, says, please look after my daughter, which Matthew Parker had then done over the course of Elizabeth's childhood and youth. And so you can see why he would be an obvious candidate for her. But the problem is, is that there aren't really enough people of good calibre to fill all the vacancies. And so Elizabeth ends up having to appoint eight of these kind of exiles as

bishops. And they are going to embroil her in endless rouse about vestments and crucifixes. And Elizabeth hates this. You know, she takes her God-appointed role as Supreme Governor very, very seriously. And she's not going to surrender her prerogatives to a bunch of, you know, kind of lefty theologians from Geneva. No way. Equally, as you said, the radicals see the Elizabethan Church as being kind of sunk in papist mummery. And this is a story that will run and run through Elizabeth's reign into the, you know, time of James I and then, of course, Charles I, with ultimately explosive consequences.

What about Catholics, though? There's a lot of Catholics, right? What do they think of this? And this is the other thing, which when people talk about Elizabeth's arguments with the more radical Protestants, they tend to ignore the fact that they are just little gnats to Elizabeth. They're kind of little buzzing insects. The huge threat to her is the vast mass of the English population who are Catholic. And they are Elizabeth's real. nightmare because there are just so many of them. And added to that is the fact, of course, that most of the great powers on the continent of Europe are Catholic as well. And to them, you know, a Protestant England is bound to seem a rogue state. And the risk remains that

they will try and overthrow Elizabeth and replace her with a Catholic monarch. And how you head these threats off during the first year of Elizabeth's reign is the most pressing challenge that she faces, and it's the one over which she and Cecil, her first minister, are most bitterly divided, because at its heart are two massively glaring questions, which go to the very core of Elizabeth status as a queen. And the first of these is, should Elizabeth get married? And the second, which is tied in with the first question, should she appoint a successor? and there are questions on which Elizabeth and Cecil have very different points of view and Cecil finds to his fury that Elizabeth is almost impossible to pin down on them.

But can he pin her down? What a cliffhanger we will find out after the break. This episode is brought to you by Uber. Now, do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most? We all need that sometimes. times, and Uber knows it. Uber isn't just a ride or a meal delivered, it's showing up no matter what. Like for your long distance friends, bringing soup when they're sick, sending flowers when they're down. When it really matters, whatever it is, you show up. Where there's a will, we're on our way. Uber, on our way. Download the app today. In the end, 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. So that was Elizabeth I, and she was answering a House of Commons petition in early 1559, and the MPs had taken a break from arguing about religious fancy dress to press an issue on which all of them could agree, which is basically they said, come on, you need to get married because you need to have an heir. Ideally, we'd love a couple of sons and then the dynasty can endure. And this is an issue, Tom, that runs right through Elizabeth I'm the first reign. It's one of the things that we know about her. Most people even if they don't know much about Elizabeth I first know that she was the virgin queen, married to her

kingdom. And actually, if Parliament had had its way, this would never have been the case because again and again, 1563, 66, 1576, they petition her and say, Will you please get married? Will you please have a husband and then have children? And obviously the urgency is because, well, it's multiple things. To some degree, I suppose it's about sexism, isn't it? I think probably not much. I mean, there's a shade perhaps of that,

that they think that power is properly the dimension of men and that therefore Elizabeth would be better off with a man by her side. I don't actually think that's a really salient fact. Do you think the dynasty and civil war? is the single biggest thing. That thing that is basically, you don't understand the Tudors if you don't get that all through the decades of the Tudor dynasty, people are thinking this is a dynasty of Parvenus and they're going to fall any moment and then there'll be, it'll be Wars of the Roses round two, basically. Sure. But for, say, Cecil, you know,

an ardent Protestant, there's now an added dimension as well, which is that if the Protestant reformation is dependent on the life of Elizabeth, just as the Catholic Reformation had been dependent on the life of Mary, then it's absolutely crucial that the succession is sorted out. And the best way to do that is for Elizabeth to have a son. And then the succession is clear. And as Cecil is all too painfully aware, the obvious successor is the most nightmarish successor imaginable

if you are a stalwart English Protestant, because that successor potentially is Mary Queen of Scots. Yeah. She's not just Catholic, but also from July 1559, she's become the Queen of France. So the Dauphin, her husband, succeeded his father. I mean, it's a double nightmare. She has so many negatives. She's Catholic. She's Scottish. She's kind of French and she's also useless. But apart from that, she's brilliant. So no wonder that Cecil is saying to Elizabeth, come on, it's your patriotic duty. Get married. Give us a son. So he, you know, he's again and again, he's kind of writing this to all his mates, moaning about Elizabeth's refusal to do this. God send our mistress a husband and buy him a son that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession. And Elizabeth, when she gets messages like this, so actually that petition that she gets from the House of Commons, she's not saying that she's going to stay a virgin queen, but she's saying this might be one option.

She does leave the door open. She's never, you know, she never says never, but in a way she is because it turns out that all these, well, I'm going to think about it. Effectively, she's just kind of kicking the whole issue. down the road, she does not want to commit. So people may wonder, well, why does she not want to commit? And I think there are all kinds of potential answers to that question, some of which perhaps are rooted in her upbringing, you know, which we've been tracking. You can see that perhaps there's a kind of an association of marriage with death, you know, the execution of her mother.

I must surely have kind of weighed on her. And she did once confide that she had, hated the idea of marriage every day more for reasons which she could not divulge to a twin soul if she had one, much less to a living creature, which does suggest that perhaps there are kind of buried psychological reasons. But we can't be sure about that because, as we've said, Elizabeth is a very close person. Her emotions are kept very, very private. So I think you're kind of going into the dimension of psychological speculation there. But there is another much more obvious reason why she refuses to be pinned down. And that is that as she recognizes much more clearly than Cecil, her unmarried state constitutes an absolutely brilliant diplomatic weapon

because she is a queen of England and therefore her hand in marriage is an amazing prize for any Christian prince. And so Elizabeth likes to keep the prospect dangling in front of would-be suitors. And this works brilliantly in two ways, because firstly, every time there's an inquiry from a continental suitor about, you know, could I marry you, that inquiry serves to validate her legitimacy. But what it also does, it enables Elizabeth to bring in her favorite strategy, which is essentially to string people along, to say, oh, I might give you this, and then never giving it to them. And actually, she does it brilliantly because she is a kind of consummate politician. An example of this, of how she pursues this strategy of dangling the

prospect of marriage in front of people, is demonstrated by her relationship with Philip of Spain, her erstwhile brother-in-law, so the husband of her dead sister, Mary. And to Philip, his marriage to Mary had mattered because England mattered. It was, you know, England's a second-rate power, but is a very, very useful counterpoint to France. And so the moment Mary is dead, Philip basically turns through Elizabeth and say, well, you know, let's, what about it? Let's do it. You know, it would be a kind of Catherine of Aragon in reverse. Elizabeth very politely turns him down and Philip then starts proposing a kind of number of other matches for her. All of them are calculated to seal the friendship between the Habsburgs and England. And she's saying, yeah, well, maybe perhaps

kind of prevaricating, playing coy, never committing. And the result of all this, Elizabeth dangling the prospect of marriage, dangling the prospect of an English alliance with Spain against France, is that Philip effectively, for years, plays the role of Elizabeth's defender in Catholic Europe. He refuses to sanction a crusade against her. He leans on the Pope, not to excommunicate her. And this, I think, may seem very counterintuitive to people who know Philip as the man who sends the Spanish Armada, to overthrow Elizabeth. But actually, in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, he is her great defender. He's absolutely not her inveterate enemy. And that is a reflection of Elizabeth's diplomatic skill, essentially, in kind of playing him like a fiddle. So you've got the staying single as a kind of diplomatic maneuver, and she's brilliant

at doing that, partly because it's in her nature. She's brilliant at prevarication as a political ploy, at keeping her true intention and secret playing her cards close to her chess very cleverly and so on. And I think also psychologically, she hates commitment. Well, I mean, this goes to surely what is the single most important reason why she doesn't marry. The moment that she marries, she loses an enormous amount of her power and her agency. So as soon as a foreign spouse arrives with his own courtiers, with his own cronies, He becomes the focus of the court.

You know, he becomes king, possibly. Lots of people look to him to make decisions and so on. And surely, I mean, it's amazing that actually Cecil never quite gets this, right? Maybe because he's a man and it doesn't occur to him, you know, that she will lose so much as soon as she makes that decision. I think every, they all assume that a queen has to marry, that she has to make, that it's her duty. I think it basically doesn't kind of cross their minds. that she might not. There are any very few people who kind of penetrate to what seems to us an obvious state of affairs. And perhaps it's telling that one of them was, was not English,

but a Scottish ambassador to her court. So James Melville, he was called. And he kind of goes straight, you know, he immediately sees what Elizabeth's up to and wrote to her, Your Majesty thinks if you were married, you would be but Queen of England. And now you are both King and Queen, I know your spirit cannot endure a commander. And he's absolutely right. I think. think. So she's playing two roles right now. She's both the queen and the king, and she'll lose the role of the king. Of course, the tragedy for Elizabeth, though, is that by preserving her own power and agency, she is effectively signing her dynasty's death warrant. Because the moment, you know, by not marrying and having an heir, she is basically saying, well, I will preserve my own

agency, but the cost is the Tudors end with me. Yeah. And that then leaves open the question of who would succeed her. You know, if the Tudor dynasty goes extinct, then who is going to be the next king or indeed queen? Because, of course, the major threat, as it's always been, is Mary Queen of Scots. And, you know, she's legitimate. She's Catholic. She's Queen of France. All these things we've been listing. These make her an incredible menace in the early years of Elizabeth's reign. And it's Cecil's job as Elizabeth's chief minister. If Elizabeth won't marry, then to take alternative steps to guard against what Cecil sees as the ultimate threat of Mary Queen of Scots succeeding her. And the key, Cecil recognizes very clearly, is to disrupt the alliance

between France and Scotland, of which Mary's marriage to the King of France is the kind of the great symbol, the old alliance, as it's called. And so he says, well, what if I can replace the alliance between Scotland and France with an alliance between Scotland and England? And this might seem a huge challenge because Scotland and England have been, you know, ancestral enemies for generations and generations, but he doesn't see it as impossible. He does what he always does when he's faced with a huge challenge, which is to kind of essentially draw up a memo and kind of lay out all the arguments in bullet point form. And so he writes, it must necessarily be provided that Scotland be not so subject to the appointments of France as it is presently, which being an ancient

enemy to England seeketh always to make Scotland an instrument to exercise thereby their malice upon England and to make a footstool thereof to look over England as they may. So Scotland is a French dagger pointed and he recognises keen Protestant that he is and very shrewd and analyst of international affairs that what needs to be done is to support the Protestant cause in Scotland. and his vision is of a united Protestant Britain and he writes that thereby this famous isle, i.e. Britain, may be conjoined in one uniformity of language, manners and conditions. He's a British visionary.

However, what would that would require would be effectively a policy of foreign intervention, right? Liberal intervention in overseas. Or Protestant intervention. Yeah. And Elizabeth doesn't like that because she knows, A, wars are expensive, and also a war is a kind of policy commitment, and her entire reign is basically an exercise in shrinking from policy commitments, right?

And just kicking the can down the road. So Cecil the whole time is basically pushing and kind of trying to cajole her into some form of intervention in Scottish politics. And basically what she finally agrees, what's this, 1560, they can do it financially. They will send money to the Protestants camp. in Scotland. Yeah, so finally she surrenders. I mean, at one point, Cecil had been threatening to resign, and she does kind of give in. And so money and arms start heading northwards to help the Protestants overthrow, not just the Catholics, but the French Catholics who are in hold

of France, one of whom is Mary Queen of Scott's mother, Mary of Geese, who dies in the course of this campaign. And the result by the first week of July in 1560 is one of the superfluous. triumphs of Cecil's entire career. And this is a treaty that is signed by himself in person. He's written up to the Scottish capital, but also by Scottish and French representatives. And because it's signed in Edinburgh, it's called the Treaty of Edinburgh. And basically, it gives Cecil everything he had dreamed of getting. So the French agreed to withdraw from Scotland. They are gone. But even more crucially, the French recognise Elizabeth as queen. And so that then essentially kind of kneecaps any prospect of Mary Queen of Scots having French

support for her claim to the English throne against Elizabeth. And then a month after the Treaty of Edinburgh, there's another amazing triumph for Cecil because the Scottish Parliament meets and effectively disestablishes the Catholic Church, repudiates the papal supremacy, enshrines Protestantism as the state religion in Scotland. And this dream that Cecil has had of a Protestant island of England and Scotland united in a kind of the commonality of true religion seems almost to have been achieved. And these are two absolutely decisive victories. And they serve to keep Mary kind of in her box. Because with the French recognition of her claim to the English throne gone, what is she getting out of the French alliance? And the seal is set

on her effective impotence as a player in French politics, at the end of 1560, when her husband dies of an exploding ear, people who listen to our episode on Mary Queen of Scots may remember that pus starts shooting out of his ear and his nostrils, and it's all very horrible. So she is now no longer queen in France. The game is up there, and so in August 1561, she returns to Scotland. And there she finds that her kingdom is firmly in the grip of a Protestant establishment. You know, this is Cecil's other great victory. He's helped to establish godly religion in the heart of Mary Queen of Scots' kingdom.

And Mary Queen of Scots, when she arrives in Edinburgh, does not do a Mary Tudor. She does not attempt to roll this back. She does not attempt to reinstitute Catholicism. And so Scotland remains Protestant. despite having a Catholic queen, and this enables it to constitute a crucial building block in Cecil's strategy for keeping Elizabeth and Protestantism in England secure. So, you know, this unitary Protestant identity that Scotland and England now share enables a diplomatic alliance between these two old rivals, England and Scotland.

Antichrist basically is being kept at bay, and at the same time, Cecil's mistress is more secure on her throne. So it's brilliant. Win, win, win. That's great, because that's everything we want, because it basically paves the way for the creation of the kingdom of Gate Britain, eventually more than a century later. But also, we love keeping the Antichrist at bay.

So that's great news. However, the Antichrist, you can never completely discount him, can you? I mean, you can never get rid of him completely. He's always lurking there. And I guess the fear is, you know, could the Antichrist return or who knows what might happen if Elizabeth dies? Because this issue of the air. So in 1562, Elizabeth gets smallpox, doesn't she? And people think Elizabeth is for the chop. She might die. And so if you are Cecil and the rest of the political elite, what's your answer to this? Because you obviously don't want Mary Queen of Scots. But who do you want? Who is left? I mean, this is a massive, massive. problem for them. It is. It's a huge problem. And so a few months after that scare with the smallpox in March 1563, he draws up a bill that is astonishingly bold. I mean, one might almost say bold to a revolutionary degree. So it pointedly excludes Mary Stewart from the line

of succession. The line of succession is drawn up and it's a Protestant one. And most startling of all, it legislates for the council, so Elizabeth's privy council, in the event of the Queen's death, to be entrusted with emergency powers. And Stephen Orford in his biography of Cecil spells what these powers would be. Cecil proposed that if Elizabeth died without a successor, the Queen's divine authority to govern would be transferred not to an heir, but to her privy council, and England would become, for a time, an aristocratic republic. And as Alford points out, this is to anticipate by 150 years the glorious revolution,

which sees the Catholic James II kind of chucked off the throne and a Protestant king replacing him. And it's a kind of gobsmacking manoeuvre in the context of mid-16th century England. But as Alford also points out, this is not an expression of kind of crypto-Republicanism. There is, I think, a slight trend in historians studying the reign of Elizabeth to kind of describe it as a Republican monarchy. I don't think that that is the case at all. Elizabeth always remains queen. She's very conscious of her prerogatives.

And I think that her court and Cecil and everybody is very conscious of it as well. So Orford has a brilliant comparison with actually what Cecil is doing here. He says that it's, you know, basically it's Cecil's duty to prepare for the worst. like modern government's planning for nuclear apocalypse, it is incredible that he could bring himself to imagine a scenario so horrific. So he is thinking, okay, if the absolute worst happens, what then do we do? So he's thinking the unthinkable, but actually Elizabeth doesn't allow it to pass. She says there's no way that my power will pass to you guys.

Now, part of this is not just his fear for the succession, is it? It's his fear that Elizabeth is actually going to do something very drastic and very inappropriate and rash and reckless. That's the irony of it. Because he's infuriated not just by her, you know, customary prevarications, but also by the prospect that she might actually do what everyone's been pressing her to do and get married. And get married, right.

So this is the thing with Elizabeth, isn't it? This is the tension that it's one of the fun elements of her whole story, that although she's incredibly cool and pragmatic and shrewd and all of this, she is still a creature of flesh and blood. And she has a succession of kind of infatuations or crushes on people that everybody else regards as absolutely inappropriate and definitely not the right person for her to be considering as a husband. So in 1562 when she was ill, she had named a protector if she were to die. And this is somebody that we've mentioned, or certainly from a family that we've mentioned, which is Robert Douglass. So tell us about Robert Dudley.

So Robert Dudley, we've mentioned him briefly in the previous episodes, but not in such a way that he's probably seared on people's minds. So just a recap, he's the son of the Earl of Northumberland, who had been busy promoting Lady Jane Grey as queen and had ended up executed by Mary Tudor. He was a childhood friend of Elizabeth. When Elizabeth gets sent to the tower in the wake of Wyatt's rebellion by Mary, Robert Dudley is there as well, for the same reason he's suspected. of complicity in Wyatt's rebellion. Both of them get freed, of course. They remain very close in the dying days of Mary's reign. And Robert Dudley is a very, very good-looking, glamorous, swaggering man.

And contemporaries note that Robert Dudley strongly resembled Thomas Seymour, who was her very hansy stepfather, Mr. Tickle, the man who had basically introduced the young Elizabeth to the dimension of adult sexuality. And perhaps that had kind of imprinted a certain type on Elizabeth's imaginings, but definitely Thomas Seymour, Robert Dudley, they're all kind of men of a certain kind. Roysterers. They're roisterers, but they're kind of charismatic and physically attractive.

And when Elizabeth becomes queen, she appoints Robert Dudley as her master of horse, and that is a role that gives him a kind of exceptional degree of closeness and intimacy. because as Master of Horse, he helps her up into her stirrups, which means that he can touch her. He is also given rooms next to her privy chamber, very much a kind of a female dimension, but Dudley is there very close. And she's seen on several occasions to be kind of surprisingly intimate with him.

So there's one occasion she's seen running her fingers over his neck. On another, she mops his brow with a handkerchief. after he's finished a tennis match. And I think the mutual attraction between them is very evident. And so maybe Elizabeth is thinking, well, you know, why shouldn't I, I marry him? Well, there are two obvious reasons why she shouldn't marry him. So a blindingly obvious one is the moment that she marries him, everybody will hate him. And this will cause her enormous problems.

There'll be too many. It's that classic thing that politicians face. When you promote one person, you disappoint all the rivals. and as soon as she does this, surely the chances of rebellion or faction fighting at court will be massively magnified. Exactly, because if the problem with marrying a foreign prince is that it risks locking England into a kind of permanent alliance, the problem with marrying someone from the English aristocracy is, as you say, that it will kind of foster internal dissension, and that is

a massive threat. She would remember how everyone hated the Berlin's, everyone hated the Woodville's, you know, that's what would happen now. Yes. There's also a further problem specific to Robert Dudley, which is that by the early 1560s, he is darkly suspected by his enemies of having murdered his wife. And that also is obviously not a good look. So this was a woman called Amy Robsart, who he'd married in 1550.

But by 1560, so just over a year after Elizabeth had become queen, Dudley is never with Amy. He's spending his whole time with Elizabeth. And then on the 8th of September, 1560, Amy was found dead at the foot of a staircase in their Oxfordshire home in Kumner. And she died of head injuries and a broken back. An inquest was held. Robert Dudley demanded that a full inquiry be made

because he was anxious that he might be accused of the murder. And sure enough, the verdict was that Amy had fallen down the stairs, that her death had been accidental. And it's certainly the case that Dudley couldn't have pushed her because inevitably he was with Elizabeth at the time. He was not in Cumberner. He was in Windsor. But it's perfect for his enemies.

It gives him an ideal way to blacken his name. And so they're endlessly kind of promoting rumors that he had commissioned the murder. They're fanning the accusation that he's a murderer of his wife. And so this is a massive blot. But I suspect that even if he hadn't had this, you know, this accusation of murder hanging over him, Elizabeth still wouldn't have married him. And the reasons for that, I mean, there are many reasons why Elizabeth wasn't going to marry anyway, but specifically, too many people that she depends on are saying, don't do it. So one of these is Kat Ashley, the woman probably that she

trusted and loved more than anyone else in existence. And on one occasion, Kat flings herself at the feet of Elizabeth and declares that she would rather have strangled Elizabeth in her cradle than allow her to marry such a man as Dudley. And the other person who makes it very clear that he disapproves is Cecil. And he says bluntly to Elizabeth, if you marry him, then I'm going to resign. But I think ultimately it's Elizabeth herself who pulls back from the brink because she knows the costs. She can evaluate them. And even to marry someone that she is as obviously devoted to as Dudley, it's still a commitment of exactly the kind that she has always shrunk from. And so in 1564, rather than Mary Dudley, she pushes an astonishing proposal.

And this is a proposal that we didn't mention in our series on Mary Queen of Scots because I was saving it for this series. She proposes that Dudley should go north to Scotland and there become the husband of Mary Queen of Scots. And to make it a more tempting match for Mary, she gives Dudley this magnificent title, The Earl of Leicester. Well, that really is a splendid title because, you know, love Lester on this show, don't we? So what on earth is Elizabeth thinking? I mean, that seems mad. I guess although that said, if she sent a very, very loyal English Protestant to Scotland,

I guess that works kind of diplomatically. Yeah, and also if they then have children, then, you know, the heir to the throne might then become a, you know, the son of Lester. And again, perhaps there are kind of deep psychological waters. I mean, and perhaps actually It's an expression of Elizabeth's own frustration and yearning as a virgin queen. I mean, maybe she's wanting Mary kind of bicariously to play the role that she herself would have loved to have had, you know, the wife of less. I mean, it is a very odd proposal, a very odd episode. And perhaps it's not surprising that Mary Queen of Scots turns it down and goes on, of course,

to opt for too spectacularly our suitable husbands in succession. And if you want to find out just how unsuitable they were, and you haven't listened to our series on Mary Queen of Scots do, because honestly, the story is mad. So first of all, she marries Darnley, the biggest cock in British history, who ends up, his house ends up getting blown up, and he's found very mysterious in a side garden with a chair next to it. All very odd.

And then Bothwell, who basically adducks her, rapes her and then marries her. So, which is a kind of example of what Elizabeth was sparing herself when she turned down Lester. And it's the marker of how in every way Elizabeth is a much astute a player, a more self-disciplined player than Mary ever was. And the result of all this, so I mean,

first of all, it's a massive object lesson and what happens if you, you know, you make the choice and the choice goes wrong. But the result of it is that in 1568, Mary basically is kicked out. She's in England. She's come south.

And suddenly, in England, you have a Catholic, you know, a Catholic claimant, a Catholic heroine, a focus for everybody who disapproves of Elizabeth, disapproves of her Protestantism, disapproves of her regime. And suddenly Mary Queen of Scots has turned up. And she's right there. You know, you could put her on the, you could get rid of Elizabeth, put her on the phone, and for Elizabeth, this is a massive deal. Yeah.

And I think when Mary arrives, she doesn't realize it. but she constitutes an absolutely mortal threat to Elizabeth and to her Protestant regime in a way that she hadn't really done while she was ruling as Queen in Scotland. And so the huge question is, what is Elizabeth going to do? Is she going to tolerate this? What about Cecil? You know, Cecil has devoted his entire life to overthrowing Mary. And now she's a prisoner in England.

Will Mary become a focus for conspiracy? if she does, what resources of espionage and skullduggery is Cecil going to have to depend on to foil Mary's plots? And what will this deadly game of cat and mouse mean for the Catholics of England, for the Pope, for the greatest Catholic king of the age, Philip I of Spain as he is now, where might this flux of conspiracy and plotting and spying, where might it lead to? And Dominic, we will find out in a new series next year, The Tudor Cold War. We'll be looking at the conspiracies that Mary Queen of Scots launches against Elizabeth, the espionage deployed by Cecil and his spy chief, Sir Francis Walsingham, to counter Catholic

plotting, the engagement of the Spanish in the low countries and the process of events that culminates with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in Fotheringay Castle and then in due course we will be coming to the spectacular story of the Spanish Armada. But all that, Dominic, lies in the future. So much to look forward to on the rest is history. Now, you may be wondering what could be more exciting than the Tudor Cold War in the Spanish Armada? The answer is basically practically nothing, especially if it's going to be told Tom with as much dazzling skill as you brought to this series. However, the good news is for the members of the Restus History Club and others,

that Christmas is coming early, or rather the New Year, is coming early, because Tom especially is a very generous and kind-hearted person. We decided to give you your presents early this year. So next week we'll be returning with what's usually a first. festive treat. It's the story of the Nazis. And we will be looking particularly at Hitler's invasion of Western Europe and what that meant. So we'll be in late 1939 and early 1940. The spring and summer of 1940, one of the most dramatic stories in modern history. Of course, if you want to get all of that series right away on Monday, you merely need to join the Restis

History Club at the Restis History.com. Right. So Tom, Thank you very much. That was a genuine toorder force. And on that bombshell, goodbye, everybody. Goodbye. stories from the world of secrets and spars. And this time we are delving into the dark and twisted story of the man who dared to challenge Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Progossian, and the ruthless war machine he built the Wagner Group. From Putin's chef to mercenary warlord, Progoshin's journey is one of the most extraordinary rises and balls of the 21st century. He went from serving canopets to George Bush and Tony Blair to masterminding a covert campaign to disrupt the U.S. presidential election

in 2016 and unleashing mercenary troops that reshaped conflicts across Africa and the Middle East. But when he flies too close to the sun and begins to challenge Putin's power, it's not just ambition, it is a death wish. And for our declassified club members, we go even further. We sat down with Mark Galiati, who's one of the leading experts on Russian organized crime and also a man banned from entering Russia to explore the hidden forces that shape Putin's cold, paranoid psyche and the forces that threatened to take him down. If this sounds good, listen to the rest is classified wherever you get your podcast. Throughout time, celebration has meant to

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