The lie of succession

Did James I 'steal' Elizabeth I's crown? Tracy Borman considers evidence that the transition from Tudor to Stuart dynasties may not have been quite as seamless as we've been led to believe

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Richmond Palace, 22 March 1603. Elizabeth I the self-proclaimed Virgin Queen who had ruled England for 44 years, seeing off the Armada, healing religious divisions and creating a court so magnificent it was the envy of Europe - lay dying. Her anxious advisers clustered around her bedside, urging her to do the thing she had resisted throughout her long reign: name her successor.

Rousing herself from her stupor, the 69-year-old queen declared: "I will that a king succeed me, and what king, but my nearest kinsman, the king of Scots?" Wanting to make completely sure, her chief minister, Robert Cecil, asked whether that was her "absolute resolution" - to which she irritably retorted: "I pray you trouble me no more, I'll have none but him."

That "kinsman" was James VI of Scotland, son of Elizabeth’s old rival Mary, Queen of Scots. Her closest surviving blood relative, he had emerged as the front runner in the race for the English crown. He had the support of Cecil and most of his fellow privy councillors, who had been working behind the scenes to smooth James's path to the throne. The queen, too, had shown him favour, sharing the pearls of her monarchical wisdom during their 20-year correspondence, as if grooming him as her successor. But she had always flinched from actually naming him as such.

Now, almost with her last breath, she had. Elizabeth died two days later - and the Tudor dynasty gave way peacefully to the Stuarts.

This dramatic depiction of Elizabeth’s last-gasp naming of the Scottish king as her heir is based solely on an account by the contemporary historian and antiquarian William Camden. He had begun writing his monumental work