The English Succession Crisis and Debates about Mary Stewart: Law, National Identity, Citizenship and the Queen’s Two Bodies

Abstract

Sir Ralph Sadler wrote this speech for the House of Commons in 1563, shortly after Queen Elizabeth I had recovered from her almost life-depriving case of smallpox, and the question of succession was foremost in the thoughts of many of her subjects. Debated among many members of the Houses of Lords and Commons, discussed in private letters that circulated among the Members of Parliament, and read in various published pamphlets during the 1560s, the question of the Elizabethan succession became what J.E. Neale, using Elizabethan terminology, called the ‘great and weighty matter’ of 1560s English politics.² The emphasis on the succession among members of the political nation of England and the importance of the issue resulted in great debate about the legal and philosophical reasons for and against the exclusion of the line of Margaret Tudor from the English throne. The arguments promoted by both sides in these debates discuss contemporary opinions about inheritance law and nascent ideas about citizenship in England in the mid-1560s. In addition, the Succession Crisis debates, which revolved around the right of Mary Stewart to inherit the throne, emphasized some of the great medieval political theories, such as that of the king’s ‘two bodies’. In their writings, English lawyers utilized the concept of the king’s two bodies in sixteenth-century political philosophy, demonstrating how early modernists understood the medieval concept.³