AQA 7042 · 1C · R20 - Succession, Mary Stuart and Spain
Why did a captive Scottish queen matter to England’s war with Spain? Connect Mary Stuart’s claim to the succession, Elizabeth’s marriage diplomacy and the decisions that turned distrust into open war.
Succession as foreign policy
The identity of Elizabeth's eventual successor could change England's religion and alliances, so succession was an international question as well as a domestic one.
Succession
The transfer of the Crown when a monarch dies. A claimant has an arguable right to inherit; an acknowledged successor has been publicly accepted as the next monarch. Elizabeth had claimants but named no successor.
The succession was disputed because different principles pointed towards different people. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was a great-granddaughter of Henry VII through his elder daughter Margaret Tudor. That gave Mary a strong claim by hereditary descent, strengthened for Catholics who considered Elizabeth illegitimate. Yet Henry VIII's will and the statutory succession had passed over the Scottish Stuart line in favour of descendants of his younger sister Mary Tudor, including the Grey family. Mary was therefore a formidable claimant, not an uncontested heir.
This was a long-term consequence of earlier Tudor marriage diplomacy. Henry VII's marriage of Margaret to James IV of Scotland in 1503 had sought to improve relations with a neighbouring kingdom; it also gave their descendants a claim to the English Crown. Elizabeth inherited that dynastic connection but faced it without a child of her own. A policy designed to secure one Tudor monarch could therefore create a difficult succession choice for another.
Elizabeth's near-fatal smallpox in October 1562 exposed the danger of leaving this question unanswered. In 1563, both Houses of Parliament pressed her to marry and secure the succession. Elizabeth would neither commit to a husband nor name an heir. Her refusal was rational as well as risky:
- Control: a named successor could attract a rival court of dissatisfied nobles and foreign ambassadors while Elizabeth was still alive.
- Diplomatic leverage: possible marriages to foreign princes could be explored without surrendering authority to a husband or committing England permanently to one alliance.
- Instability: if Elizabeth died suddenly, disagreement over the lawful heir might divide the political nation and invite foreign intervention.
- Religious uncertainty: a Catholic or Protestant successor could alter the Church settlement, so the identity of the next monarch mattered to foreign powers as well as English subjects.
Marriage diplomacy remained active after 1563. Negotiations with François, duke of Alençon and later Anjou, were especially serious in 1579–81. A French marriage offered an alliance against Spain and the possibility of an heir, but his Catholicism and the prospect of a foreign husband's influence provoked opposition. The negotiations show the tension between using marriage for security and protecting Elizabeth's authority and Protestant settlement.
Mary's marriage to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in 1565 increased the pressure. Both were descended from Margaret Tudor. Their son James, born in June 1566, gave the Stuart claim a male future; after Mary's deposition, Scotland's Protestant regents raised him as a Protestant king. Elizabeth now faced not just one rival claimant but a continuing Scottish dynasty.
Mary from queen to captive
Mary did not begin the period as Elizabeth's prisoner. She was a reigning queen in Scotland, and Elizabeth treated the security of Scotland as a foreign-policy question. The sequence from 1565 to 1568 changed Mary's power without removing her English claim.
| Date | Development | Why it mattered to Elizabeth |
|---|---|---|
| 1565–66 | Mary married Darnley and gave birth to James | The Stuart succession gained a direct heir, increasing pressure on Elizabeth to settle her own succession. |
| February–June 1567 | Darnley was murdered; Mary married the Earl of Bothwell; Scottish nobles opposed her | Mary's authority collapsed amid disputed responsibility for Darnley's death and outrage over the Bothwell marriage. |
| 24 July 1567 | Mary was forced to abdicate for her infant son James VI | A Protestant regency governed Scotland, but Mary remained an anointed queen with supporters. |
| 13 May 1568 | Mary's forces lost at Langside after her escape from Lochleven | Her attempt to recover the Scottish throne failed. She then crossed into England seeking Elizabeth's help. |
Elizabeth now faced a three-sided dilemma. Restoring Mary by force would be costly and would oppose the Scottish Protestant lords. Sending her abroad might allow France or Spain to use her in an invasion. Keeping her in England placed a Catholic claimant close to English supporters. Elizabeth chose detention, which lasted for nineteen years.
Mary's importance lay partly in what other people could do in her name. That is different from proving that she personally designed every conspiracy:
- The Northern Rising of 1569 sought to reverse the Protestant direction of government and release Mary; plans to marry her to the Duke of Norfolk could connect an English noble faction to her claim.
- The Ridolfi Plot of 1571 combined a proposed Spanish-backed invasion from the Netherlands with Elizabeth's overthrow and a Norfolk–Mary marriage.
- The Throckmorton Plot of 1583 again linked Mary's release to foreign-assisted Catholic intervention.
- In the Babington Plot of 1586, plans to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary were discussed in coded correspondence. Walsingham's intelligence network intercepted and deciphered the letters, and the government used the correspondence to convict Mary.
This pattern shows why the unresolved succession was an international security problem. Mary supplied plotters with a plausible replacement monarch; foreign rulers could imagine changing England's regime rather than merely defeating it in battle. Yet the plots also reveal the limits of her power: they depended on English conspirators, foreign troops and favourable timing, and all were defeated or intercepted.
Mary was dangerous both as an individual correspondent and as a dynastic symbol. A sound judgement separates evidence of her own agency from the greater number of schemes in which other people treated her as the intended beneficiary.
The road to war with Spain
Protestant England and Catholic Spain were not automatically at war. Early in Elizabeth's reign, Philip II preferred an independent England to the possibility that Mary's French connections would place England and Scotland within France's orbit. England also valued trade through the Low Countries, while Spain valued English neutrality. This starting point matters: deterioration resulted from accumulating disputes and decisions, not religion alone.
| Pressure | Evidence of deterioration | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| The Netherlands | Philip's forces tried to suppress revolt in the Low Countries from the late 1560s; English money, volunteers and shelter helped opponents of Spanish rule before Elizabeth made a formal commitment. | A Spanish victory could place hostile forces across the Channel, while open English aid challenged Philip's sovereignty. |
| Atlantic trade and privateering | Hawkins's slave-trading expedition was attacked at San Juan de Ulúa in 1568; Elizabeth seized bullion carried in Spanish ships later that year; Drake raided Spanish possessions and returned from his circumnavigation in 1580. | English captains challenged Spain's trading monopoly, while Elizabeth could profit from or honour their ventures without initially declaring war. |
| Religion and regime security | The papal excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570 and foreign-backed plots made Catholic intervention appear connected to Mary's succession claim. | Confessional hostility made diplomatic disputes more dangerous, but it worked through claimants, rebels and strategic opportunities. |
| Continental alliances | Philip allied with the French Catholic League at Joinville in 1584; Spanish advances and the siege of Antwerp threatened the Dutch position in 1585. | English ministers feared that Spanish and Catholic-League success would isolate England and threaten the Channel coast. |
The decisive English escalation was the Treaty of Nonsuch on 10 August 1585. Elizabeth agreed to provide money and troops to the United Provinces, received strategic "cautionary towns" as security and sent the Earl of Leicester to command English forces. Earlier assistance could be denied or limited; Nonsuch made military opposition to Philip public and sustained. It is therefore a stronger threshold into open war than any single earlier raid or religious disagreement.
Worked example: check the order before claiming a cause
Antwerp surrendered on 17 August 1585, after the Treaty of Nonsuch. Its siege and the wider Spanish advance could help persuade Elizabeth to intervene; its later fall could not cause a treaty already signed. The fall instead confirmed how dangerous the Dutch position had become.
This distinction improves the causal argument: connect the decision to the pressures known at the time, then use later events to assess its consequences.
Nonsuch did not make the other causes disappear. Elizabeth committed because several pressures had converged: the danger of Spanish control in the Netherlands, the Catholic League's advance in France, plots against her regime and the failure of cautious, indirect aid to secure England's position. The move was a strategic calculation made reluctantly, not the automatic fulfilment of an anti-Spanish plan formed in 1558.
Armada and prolonged war
The years 1586–88 brought the succession crisis and Spanish conflict together most visibly. The Babington correspondence persuaded Elizabeth's ministers that Mary remained a mortal danger. Elizabeth hesitated to execute a fellow anointed monarch: killing Mary might establish a dangerous precedent, anger James VI and provoke Catholic powers. Mary was nevertheless executed at Fotheringhay on 8 February 1587.
The execution removed the most prominent Catholic claimant inside England, but it did not create the war from nothing. Philip's invasion planning had begun after the break of 1585. Mary's death sharpened the religious and dynastic case for removing Elizabeth, while Drake's raid on Cádiz in 1587 disrupted Spanish preparations but confirmed English hostility.
In 1588, Philip's Armada was meant to secure the Channel and link with the Duke of Parma's army in the Netherlands for an invasion of England. English gunnery and manoeuvre, the fireship attack off Calais, Spanish communications and rendezvous difficulties, and damaging weather all contributed to failure. The Armada never enabled Parma's army to cross. This was decisive for Elizabeth's survival, but it was not a final victory over Spain.
| After 1588 | What it shows about relations with Spain |
|---|---|
| 1589 | The English counter-expedition against Spain and Portugal failed, showing that Armada victory did not give England command of the war. |
| 1596–97 | England attacked Cádiz, while renewed Spanish invasion efforts and fears persisted. Both sides could still threaten the other without forcing a settlement. |
| From 1598 | After France and Spain made peace at Vervins, Elizabeth's councillors debated whether England should also seek peace; disagreement showed that continued war was a choice, not an unquestioned national policy. |
| 1601–02 | Spanish troops landed at Kinsale to support Irish rebellion but were defeated and surrendered. Spain could still exploit unrest within Elizabeth's realms late in the reign. |
| 1603–04 | Elizabeth died in 1603 and James VI succeeded as James I; peace with Spain followed in 1604, after her reign. |
Elizabeth therefore achieved the essential defensive aim: neither Mary nor a Spanish invasion displaced her, and James succeeded without a dynastic war in 1603. The cost was a long conflict that outlasted Philip II, strained royal resources and remained unsettled at Elizabeth's death.
Weighing the connected pressures
A useful judgement must compare the pressures by the same criteria.
- Enabling power: the unsettled succession made regime replacement imaginable. Mary gave Catholic rebels and foreign powers a named alternative to Elizabeth.
- Immediacy: Nonsuch changed policy more directly than Mary's arrival. It committed English soldiers and money against Philip's rule and made open war difficult to avoid.
- Durability: strategic conflict with Spain outlasted Mary and the 1588 Armada. The Netherlands, Atlantic war and Ireland kept relations hostile into 1603.
- Outcome: Elizabeth prevented conquest and a disputed accession during her lifetime, but did not make peace or publicly settle the succession. James's smooth accession resolved the immediate dynastic question only when she died.
NovaLearn-authored practice interpretation
Elizabeth's foreign difficulties after 1563 grew not because Protestant England and Catholic Spain were destined to fight, but because an unsettled succession turned rebellion and continental crisis into questions of regime survival. Mary was dangerous chiefly as a plausible Catholic replacement: her presence allowed English plotters and foreign powers to imagine removing Elizabeth rather than merely pressuring her. Yet Mary's importance should not be exaggerated. Open war came only when the Netherlands crisis and England's maritime challenge led Elizabeth to commit troops under the Treaty of Nonsuch in 1585. Mary's execution sharpened Philip II's case for invasion, but it did not create the Anglo-Spanish war.
The interpretation offers a hierarchy rather than a list. It treats the succession and Mary as enabling conditions, but Nonsuch as the immediate policy threshold. Evidence from 1563, the plots and Mary's captivity supports its regime-security argument. Evidence that both monarchs avoided open war for years, followed by the formal Dutch intervention in 1585, supports its claim that conflict was not inevitable. A different judgement could give more weight to religion, privateering or Mary's personal agency, but it must explain the mechanism and timing rather than simply name a factor.
The strongest overall conclusion is therefore conditional. Mary made foreign danger more politically explosive because she linked Catholic opposition, foreign intervention and the succession. Nonsuch mattered more as the immediate turning point into war, while the conflict's survival after Mary's death proves that Anglo-Spanish rivalry had strategic causes beyond her. A judgement giving Mary greater weight remains defensible if it distinguishes her own actions from her value as a claimant and explains why that claim altered foreign calculations.
Quick Recap
- Mary was a powerful dynastic claimant, but her claim was disputed and her ability to act depended on others.
- Keeping the succession open protected Elizabeth’s authority while leaving a long-term security risk.
- Spanish advances and the siege of Antwerp helped prompt Nonsuch; Antwerp fell after the treaty.
- The Armada’s failure secured survival in 1588, while the wider conflict continued beyond Elizabeth’s death.