I’ve been thinking lately about various scenarios involving the hypothetical marriage of Queen Elizabeth I to various men of her time. I’m sure I’m not the first and won’t be the last to consider it, but I’ve come up with some potential suitors for her and I wonder about what others here think would have happened if they did wind up marrying.
(Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that these men would not already be married in this hypothetical scenario.)
Robert Dudley - this is the obvious choice that people have speculated on for centuries, and clearly they had some kind of attraction to each other. Clearly, also, Dudley wanted to marry Elizabeth. But this marriage would have no political advantages. It would not help solidify an alliance with a foreign power; the most that could happen would be a possible boost in national pride at keeping the marriage within England, and even that is debatable.
Other choices seem more interesting:
William the Silent - born in 1533, he was the same age as Elizabeth, and they also both shared a conviction in Protestantism and antagonism with Spain. Eventually the English wound up allying with The Netherlands anyway, with Dudley as Governor-General, and then the Dutch ruling family literally merged with England during the so-called Glorious Revolution - but a Tudor-Orange marriage would have established this about 130 years earlier.
I’ll be back to add the other choices after lunch.
I’m not sure if Elizabeth could have married a foreign national. The marriage of Mary I to Philip was such a disaster with her people partly because they feared that it would make England nothing but a colony of Spain. Elizabeth was much too protective of her realm and her power to ever do that.
If she had married, I think it would have been to an English subject. They were the only ones she ever showed real attachment towards.
You think she wouldn’t have chopped his head off if she could have married him? I don’t know. She was already in her 50’s when he came to court, and he was much younger than her.
Unless we are talking about someone else and I’m insane.
I think Essex would have been too young to be seriously considered, and he also offered no political advantage.
Eric XIV of Sweden would have been a good possibility. He was the same age as Elizabeth, and indeed there actually were negotiations in progress for the two to be married, though apparently the death of Eric’s father interrupted the process. Sweden was not powerful enough for England to have been thought of as a “subject” of it if the marriage had gone through; an association with the growing Protestant movements in Scandinavia and Germany would have been very valuable also. The only possible downside was that Eric is said to have been mentally unstable.
Gaspard de Coligny, the leader of the French Protestants, also would have been a good match.
The Duke of Norfolk would have been an interesting choice. I don’t think it ever would have happened, and it wouldn’t have been a good match, but he was English and was of good enough blood that he would have been acceptable.
One thing to consider is that if Elizabeth married a foreign monarch we would have spent most of his time in his own realm (which could make producing an heir harder) and if he didn’t already have an heir of his own England would face being submerged into a personal union. If she marred a foreign prince without a realm of his own to govern he’d of course live with her in England and she have forced to share power with him and risked being pushed into the political background. Her cousin Mary ran into all sorts of problems when she married a local Scotsman and he insisted on being more than a mere king consort.
Yup. I think to ask the question “What would have been like if Elizabeth had married?” is a bit like asking “What would it have been like if Elizabeth had never existed?” It’s just so impossible to speculate on something that would have required a complete rearrangement of her character.
