why didn’t elizabeth marry?--2/4/25

04 Feb 2025

why didn’t elizabeth marry?--2/4/25

1 COMMENTS

Today's selection--from Unruly by David Mitchell. Queen Elizabeth I, one of England’s most powerful monarchs, never married:

“Like her father's reign, Elizabeth's was dominated by thoughts of marriage. On average, they got married three times each. Poor Elizabeth had zero spouses. It looks as if she went to her grave straight from the shelf, where she'd been desperately hoping for a guy.

“That's not how it was. She didn't want to get married but felt it impolitic to say so. She played along, apparently entertaining the notion of several suitors, including King Eric

XIV of Sweden (wow — fourteen Erics! The Louis-loving French were only on twelve at this point). He sounds fun. And he was fun — he conquered Estonia, went insane and was deposed. In general, Elizabeth used her eligibility on the international marriage scene to short-term diplomatic advantage, but never let it get too serious.

“She had her crushes, mind you. Most notably, she was very keen on her childhood friend Robert Dudley, another son of the Duke of Northumberland who had tried to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne. Small world. Dudley was Elizabeth's favourite for much of her reign and she might have thought about marrying him, but he was already married. And then, in 1560, his wife died in suspicious circumstances — which made people suspect that he or Elizabeth had had her killed so that they could get married. But that very suspicion then meant they certainly couldn't get married so, if that was their plan, it was a bad one. They didn't marry but, in 1564, she made him earl of Leicester instead.

“The reason for the pressure on Elizabeth to marry was the need to sort out the succession. She was the last of Henry VIII's children and the other two hadn't lived very long. If Elizabeth died without issue, it wasn't clear who the next ruler would be and fifteenth-century history suggested that the clarification process would be bloody — plus the Reformation had now given everyone an extra reason to hate everyone else. When Elizabeth nearly died of smallpox in 1563, her ministers panicked, started making speculative lists, and questions were asked in parliament afterwards.

The Darnley Portrait, c. 1575

“So why didn't she marry? We must resist the answers that conform to the value system of the many screen depictions of her: that she never fell in love. Or, she did fall in love with someone, but the match was forbidden by the mores of the time. And she could never bear to marry another. Fuck all that. The fact that she wasn't in love with anyone, or was in love with someone else, didn't get in the way of royal marriages in the sixteenth century — it didn't get in the way of Prince Charles's in the twentieth century. Those royals weren't looking for love in a marriage and, for a monarch, a loveless marriage didn't preclude finding love elsewhere, unless you ran into someone unusually stubborn like Anne Boleyn.

“Elizabeth was Anne Boleyn's daughter so maybe she had inherited some of that stubbornness — or, to put a more positive spin on it, sense of self-worth. Her other parent also had abnormal levels of self-esteem. Was it in that spirit, of stubborn tyranny, contrarianism, that Elizabeth resisted the enormous pressure to marry?

“I don't think so. She was well educated and very clever. Also she'd had a traumatic life. Her mother had been executed when she was two, she had endured the slur of bastardy, restoration to legitimacy and bastardy again. Her brother's will had passed her over in the line of succession in favour of random cousins, and then her Catholic sister had suspected her of disloyalty for her whole reign, even briefly putting her in the Tower in the aftermath of Wyatt's Rebellion. She acceded at a perilous time, with everyone wishing she were a man and half of everyone wishing she were a Catholic. The tenor of international relations having darkened somewhat in the previous half-century, the latter group was not above trying to murder her. How does an intelligent person react to all this? With caution.

“The hallmark of Elizabeth's reign was caution. She didn't marry because to marry anyone was a risk. It would have weakened her position. It was also weakened by there being no clear succession, but either by calculation or by default she took that long-term risk instead of the sharper immediate existential risk of being married to, and so owing obedience to, the wrong man: an English nobleman with a thirst for power or a foreign prince with mental health issues. As time went on and she didn't die, there were fewer short-term nerves among the magnates, and then it gradually became clear that she had become too old to have children. The pressure to marry was off because it was too late for it to help with succession planning.”