Elizabeth I: Exception to the Rule

It is easy in the 21st century to conjure up the image of a powerful Tudor queen. For subjects of the second Queen Elizabeth, her namesake and predecessor is an iconic cultural presence who looms even larger in the English historical consciousness than her extraordinary father, Henry VIII. Herein lies a problem.

We know that England was ruled by kings until the second half of the 16th century, when the crown passed to two queens, one of whom was among the most successful and significant monarchs that England has ever had. But in the first half of the 16th century no one – not Henry VIII, not his children, not his ministers, not his people – had any inkling of what was to come. There was no twinkle in Elizabeth’s eye to alert her contemporaries to the unimaginable prospect that Gloriana was waiting in the wings. To understand the enormity of the challenges that confronted Henry VIII’s daughters, therefore, we have to work hard to free ourselves from the coiling embrace of hindsight.

For Henry VIII, as for his medieval forebears (not that the artificial boundary between ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ would have made any sense to contemporaries), the power of the crown was male. A king was required to preserve order within his kingdom by giving justice to his people and to ride into battle to defend its borders against external threat. Neither role was a job for a woman. A queen – a word derived from the Anglo-Saxon cwén, meaning the wife of a king, not his female counterpart – was called upon to represent a different facet of monarchy: bringing feminine prayers for mercy and peace to the masculine business of making law and war.


http://www.historytoday.com/helen-castor/elizabeth-i-exception-rule

I feel sorry for Jane.  That child never had a life, from birth.  She was used by her mother, and then by Northumberland.

The Economist wrote:The traditional story runs like this: Lady Jane Grey was born in 1537, the daughter of Henry VIII's royal niece, Frances, and her husband, Harry Grey, Marques of Dorset. The stout, bejewelled woman in a double portrait by Hans Eworth is still used to illustrate Frances's nature. "Physically she bore a marked resemblance to Henry VIII," notes Alison Weir, a best-selling historian, in her book "The Children of Henry VIII". Here was a woman, "determined to have her own way, and greedy for power and riches," who "ruled her husband and daughters tyrannically and, in the case of the latter, often cruelly."
So Jane grew up an abused child, beaten regularly by her unloving mother. In 1553 the 15-year-old Jane was forced (beaten again) to marry the 18-year-old Guildford Dudley, son of the principal figure in the King's Privy Council, John Dudley. Frances believed the marriage would promote Jane as heir to the dying Protestant King Edward VI. Weeks later Edward did indeed bequeath Jane his throne, in place of his Catholic sister Mary Tudor. Jane was obliged to accept, though she protested through tears that Mary was the rightful claimant.

*  *  *  *
As Queen regnant Jane wielded, in theory, a monarch’s power over church and state. But Edward had chosen Jane as his heir not only because she was a Protestant, but also, he noted, because he trusted her husband’s family. Jane’s father in law, John Dudley [John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland], was the Lord President of his Council. Since female rule was considered unnatural, it was assumed that Jane’s husband or father-in-law would take effective command. Unfortunately for Jane, Edward’s love for the Dudleys was not shared by the country. Indeed, John Dudley was widely hated, considered the root of the government's unpopular policies.

"DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF LADY JANE GREY," http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/leanda-de-lisle/lady-jane-grey

Unfortunately, even Lady Jane didn't see the tragedy at the time.  "One of the greatest benefits that God ever gave me, is that He sent me so sharp, severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster," Elizabethan scholar Roger Ascham recalls her saying.

There is an element of tragedy about Mary Tudur, too.  It's as if she were trapped twixt two eras, which she was religious-wise.  But also with the advent of the female monarch--always an ambiguity, not even resolved today.  The French went with Salic law; the English went with circumstances and precedent, established by Henry I (on behalf of his daughter, Matilda).

Do the estates of a woman pass with the woman if those estates include a kingdom--the ultimate in power estates?  Salic law prohibits even that. And secondarily, if the kingdom passes with a female, what status her husband if she should marry?  (The husband controls the duchy, as we saw with Blanche of Lancaster, with the regrettable result that her name became synonymous with the Wars of the Roses three generations later.)  The inability to resolve these questions led to evil being visited not only upon Mary Tudur, but Mary Stuart as well.

That leaves Elizabeth, for whom I have no sympathy.  Yes, she sought to avoid complications by remaining husband-less--the so-called, Virgin Queen--but she was also a manipulative, dissembling, over-cunning cunus.  Never a more self-centered, selfish monarch.  But then, look at her parents.

All-in-all, the Tudurs were a mess.  But I liked the first of them, Henry VII, if not his overbearing mother, Margaret Beaufort.  (Incidentally, it is an interesting aside that Lady Beaufort was largely responsible for the raising and educating of her grandson, Henry VIII, who was at the center--dare I say, was the center--of all the trouble.)