She’s on her deathbed or near to it, she’s aware her popularity is already pretty much gone since marrying the King of Spain and persecuting Anglicans, and she knows or should know that Elizabeth is going to return England to Protestantism once more. Why not trump up some charges and have her executed, or quietly send an assassin to Woodstock Palace, where Elizabeth was being held in virtual house arrest, and pull some strings for a Catholic successor?
Because she didn’t want to be remembered as “Bloody Mary”? Perhaps she was worried about revolt since Protestants were in the majority and she didn’t have the physical strength to manage a civil war.
Mary did agonize over that possibility, but did not kill Elizabeth because she was her half-sister and rightful heir to the throne. Regicide was a serious matter then, and Mary, a good Catholic, may have feared that it would prevent her from entering heaven. (Killing heretics, of course, was a good thing).
In addition, though Elizabeth was raised Protestant, she attended Catholic Masses and worked to avoid giving Mary a reason to kill her. She had at least twice been suspected of plotting against Mary, so was careful to to be circumspect in that regard. Basically, she gave Mary no smoking gun to order her killed and obeyed Mary as the rightful queen.
Mary’s advisers argued on both sides of the issue, but the “let Elizabeth live” side won out.
Because the next in line to the throne was the Dauphine of France and so she would, in effect, have been handing England over to the French. From a Habsburg perspective, that would have been a seriously dumb move. It’s the same reason why Philip supported Elizabeth’s accession when Mary did die.
Also, Mary’s husband, Phillip, had specifically asked her not to do such a thing and to reconcile herself with Elizabeth as much as possible. He knew Mary would probably never give him an heir, Elizabeth was the next in line for the English crown, and he may have been hoping to either marry her later after Mary’s death or use the favor of helping to protect her to leverage things in his favor.
How far down the line of succession was the next Catholic heir? Killing Elizabeth would be a more attractive prospect if she were the only Protestant in the way; much less so if she were the first of ten or twelve. It would be hard to justify skipping over so many heirs without pissing a lot of them and their supporters off.
See post no 3.
There’s nothing in that post which indicates the next Catholic in the line of succession. Do you mean post no. 4? If so, could someone identify the dauphine for me so her religion can be identified? “French” is not synonymous with “Catholic”; 16th-century France had at least one Protestant king, and probably at least a few other Protestant royals.
The Dauphine was Mary Stuart –
(1) Mary Queen of Scots since 1542, since she succeeded to that throne when just 6 days old.
(2) Queen consort of France in 1559-1560.
(3) Claimant of the throne of England after Queen Mary’s death in 1558, since Elizabeth was not recognised as queen of England by Catholics.
If her first husband, Francis II of France had not died young, and if her supporters in England had been successful, she would have united the thrones of England, France, Ireland and Scotland. However, her son James did get three of them – but not France.
Mary Queen of Scots was Catholic, wasn’t she? That would be fine with “Bloody Mary,” I would’ve thought.
Yes, but as was mentioned upthread, she was also queen consort of France. Her heir would have assumed the thrones of Scotland, England, and France, putting the three countries in an awkward personal union. (As it turned out, she did not end up having any children with the King of France, though of course there was no way Mary I of England could have known that at the time.)
So apart from Mary I of Scotland, who was the next Catholic in the line of succession? Since she was already a queen in her own right, and again in the right of her husband, Perhaps Mary I of England could have arrived at some accommodation with her to allow the English throne to pass to someone else.
But not with her husband Phillip II of Spain, who preferred to have Elizabeth instead of the French raised and engaged to the Dauphin Mary. Power politics often outweighs religion.
There were a number of Protestants who were opposed to Edward VI’s efforts to bypassed Mary in favor of Jane Grey. With a lack of evidence implicating Elizabeth in any plots against Mary, the Queen may have decided that the rule of law was more important and her father’s law said that Elizabeth was heir if Mary died.
And Mary was already brokenhearted enough over losing Calais to the French.
Another point to consider was that Bloody Mary was not all that bloody.
It’s one thing to execute religious types who outright defy perfectly reasonable laws designed to save their everlasting souls from eternal damnation; if they refuse to recant, they are heretics and deserve to be killed.
It’s another thing to kill someone in cold blood. Elizabeth had Mary Queen of Scots executed after fairly solid evidence she was plotting against her (not for the first time, IIRC). The biggest reason for this is that someone on the throne has to beware of rival claimants; whatever the value of the claim, they become a focal point/figurehead for factions seeking to take the throne. (i.e. Lady Jane Grey, the princes in the tower). These executions happen while the ruler is trying to keep their throne against a real threat, not while tihngs are peaceful and there are no threats…
Unlike Richard and the princes in the middle of outright succession wars, Mary was not about to have someone murdered in cold blood in a quiet relatively peaceful time. If she took her religion seriously, she needed a provocation and grounds for a public trial, and as noted above, Elizabeth was determined not to give her one.
Keep in mind too, that monarchs were not as absolute as we think - it was a game of juggling factions. A blatant murder would offend enough people that the threat of outright rebellion by the nobility was a possibility. (If she can kill the heir in cold blood, she could do the same to me…) This is why every execution was backed by some sort of semi-valid cause.
Maybe Mary was delusional enough to believe she had moved England back to catholicism and her beloved subjects would not allow their church to be taken from them?
The other thing is messing with successions - it sets a precedent. Variously IIRC Henry VII monkeyed with the rules and disinherited one or another (Mary, Elizabeth) by questioning the legitimacy of his marriages; but in the end, he left the inheritance rules the way they were. Once set the precedent, you risk opening the door for anyone else. Ambiguous or debatable rules of succession mean that any faction has a valid claim; England went through a generation of chaos within recent history and did not need more of the same.
So in the interest of stability, from Henry to Edward (or his advisors) to Mary to Elizabeth to James, each allowed the legitiamte rules of succession to play out no matter how distasteful their successor or his/her religion might be.
Did you mean Henry VIII?
And I would say Edward VI’s changing of the secession crated a lot more chaos than the Third Secession Act
Doh! Henry VIII - typo.
Yes, read the succession mess Edward VI - Wikipedia - Mary got a lot of her support form people who thought messing with succession rules was a dangerous move - especially when the purpose of such manipulation was to put your own faction in charge of the puppet du jour.
However, the confrontation that put Mary on the throne was evidence that even so, a wildly unpopular monarch did risk losing their throne to a popular uprising. Mary won because peopl wanted to support the legitimate claimant against the unpopular power behind Edward’s throne. If the situation were reversed, if the substitute were popular, Mary could easily have lost.
Well, hold it right there. “Bloody Mary” was only named as such by Protestant propagandists of the later 16th century, especially by John Foxe, the author of Acts and Monuments. It’s no secret that English Protestant monarchs were just as eager to oppress and execute their own set of “heretics”. In any event Mary let Cardinal Pole handle religious orthodoxy for the most part; I don’t think that she herself particularly cared so long as the nation was Catholic (in whatever meaning that had in the mid-16th century) and relatively stable.
In other words, Mary was just Mary. And regicide was, as other posters have said, against the laws of God.
In error there is truth! It could be said that Henry VII monkeyed with the rules of succession by going to war against Richard III…
Humor is lost on some…
Yes, the winner gets to write history. From what I recall reading, other than a number of high-profile executions of those who publicly refused to knuckle under, likely determined to be martyrs - Mary’s reign was no worse than anyone else’s of that era. After all, the country houses of that era don’t have priest holes for protestant ministers…