How Queen Elizabeth I's death triggered treachery and deceit as Scotland's James VI STOLE the crown

How Queen Elizabeth I's death triggered treachery and deceit as Scotland's James VI STOLE the crown

How Scotland's King James VI rewrote history to STEAL the English crown after Elizabeth I's death

As Queen Elizabeth I lay dying in 1603, her courtiers begged her to name her successor.

With her last breath the old lady, who famously chose to stay a virgin so had no direct heirs, gasped that she bequeathed the English throne to her cousin, James VI of Scotland: 'I will have none other.'

And just like that, the Tudor dynasty came to a tidy close, to be replaced seamlessly by the Stuarts who reigned over the joint kingdom of Great Britain for the next century until they too ran out of heirs.

Not so fast, says Tracy Borman, who reveals sensational new evidence which throws doubt on everything historians thought they knew about the dying days of the Tudors.

Borman explains that in 2023, curators at the British Library subjected one of their most important holdings, William Camden's Annales: The True and Royall History of the Famous Empresse Elizabeth, to new analysis.

Enhanced imaging revealed that Camden's text, which formed the basis for understanding Elizabeth's reign for generations of scholars, had actually been heavily doctored.

Many of these alterations had been done by Camden himself, who had pasted new pages over his original text and written between the lines.

Other additions were in a different hand, probably by his friend and fellow historian Robert Cotton.

The upshot was that the famous story of Elizabeth's deathbed anointing of her Scottish cousin James as her heir was pure fiction.

Camden and Cotton had been so concerned not to offend the new king that they had added the dramatic scene as a way of making his succession seem like a foregone conclusion.

With this bit of dynamite in her toolbox, Borman now casts an eye back over the last decades of Elizabeth's reign.

And what she discovers is far more contorted, contested and downright bloody than previously understood.

Crucially, it is now clear that there were plenty of Tudor heirs who had as strong a claim to the English throne as King James of Scotland.

These included Lady Arbella Stuart, Lady Katherine Grey, Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, not forgetting King Philip of Spain, who had co-ruled England with his wife Mary I between 1554 and 1558 and was keen to do so again.

Elizabeth's refusal to name any of these as her heir is testimony to her canny statecraft.

She knew perfectly well that the moment she picked a successor, she was effectively toast: all her courtiers would pivot towards the new monarch-in-waiting, leaving her drained of power.

So instead, 'Good Queen Bess', who was no one's idea of a jolly dame, held her tongue and kept a watchful eye on all those cousins, second cousins, first-cousins-once-removed and in-laws who spent their days simultaneously sucking up and scheming in their desperate attempts to be named as her successor.

From the very beginning of her reign, Elizabeth had been obliged to deal with people who thought that they had a better right than her to be on the English throne.

As the daughter of 'the Great Whore', aka Anne Boleyn, she had been declared illegitimate and removed from the succession in 1536 by her father Henry VIII.

Even though she was subsequently restored, Elizabeth's claims remained shaky, especially in the eyes of England's Roman Catholics.

Their preferred candidate was Mary, Queen of Scots, whom they intended to crown once they had safely eliminated Protestant Elizabeth.

No wonder that 'Gloriana' kept her cousin and fellow redhead under house arrest for nearly 20 years before giving orders for her beheading in 1587. She really couldn't be too careful.

All the signs suggest that Elizabeth soon came to feel guilty about having Mary executed, not least because it offered a chilling precedent: perhaps someone would have the bright idea of cutting off her head, too.

From then on she dealt with her rivals using a low-key mixture of exile and imprisonment.

In 1561 she sent Lady Katherine Grey, sister to the ill-fated Lady Jane, to the Tower of London as punishment for marrying another claimant, Edward Seymour, and daring to be pregnant with a possible heir.

Lady Arbella Stuart was banished to the deepest countryside where she was unlikely to find a husband and start a dynasty of her own.

When it came to Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, Elizabeth kept him close with important jobs at court.

Even so, she never lost her suspicion of him, especially after her severe attack of smallpox in 1562 when he was pushed forward as her successor.

And as for her cousin, King James, Elizabeth continued to send mixed messages about whether or not he could count on getting her vote as England's next monarch.

In this thrilling book, Borman does an excellent job of showing us that, far from being a time of sunny stability, Elizabethan England was full of intrigue and insecurity about what – or rather who – was coming next.

Despite the queen passing a law that made it treason to discuss the succession, it had become a topic of constant 'chatting and chapping' in the country's 'taverns and alehouses'.

And even once James gained the throne in 1603 – so becoming James I – things were by no means more settled. There was a great deal of anti-Scottish sentiment swirling around, not to mention a revival of the Roman Catholic cause.

Two years into the new reign, Guy Fawkes and his fellow rebels attempted to blow up parliament, kill the king, and place his nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, on the throne as a puppet monarch.

Even the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot did nothing to neutralise the toxic legacy that Elizabeth had bequeathed.

In 1649 James's own son, Charles I, was executed and for 11 years, England became a republic, doing without a king altogether. Borman argues that this shocking turn of events was only possible because the Stuarts' claim to the English throne was shakier than anyone liked to believe. While it might be pushing it to suggest James I 'stole' the crown from all the other claimants in 1603, he was certainly no one's idea of a shoe-in.

Borman may not have discovered any new sources, but her interpretation of the latest forensic scholarship on the Elizabethan end days makes this a model work of popular history.