 Good evening. Welcome to the British Library. For too close to her throne, the other cousins. I'm Alan Bryson, one of the curators of the exhibition, Elizabeth and Mary, Royal Cousins, Rival Queens, which opened at the British Library on Friday and runs to the 20th of February next year. This is the second in a series of public events in support of the exhibition and since the lockdown, we've been presenting a wide range of events digitally on our bespoke online platform and we've welcomed audiences from across the country and around the world. We would like to extend a very special welcome to you for joining us tonight online and we hope that you enjoy this evening. At the end of the lecture, we'll be taking questions. So, might you question choosing the question box below the video? We're pleased to welcome Professor Sue Dorian this evening. In her lecture, she will look at how other close female kin of Elizabeth the First created problems both for her as well as for themselves. Sue is Professor of History at Oxford University. She has written numerous books including Monarchy and Matrimony, Made of Queen of Scots and Illustrated Life, Elizabeth the First and Her Circle. She's edited a number of exhibition catalogs for the British Library as well, including the one accompanying this exhibition, Elizabeth and Mary Royal Cousins, Rival Queens. Sue is completing a book entitled Regime Change from Elizabeth the First to James the First. This explores how the King of Scots took the English throne in 1603. Please join me in welcoming Sue this evening. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. The Tudors were not very good at producing sons, but they were good at producing daughters who lived beyond childhood. During her lifetime, Elizabeth had nine female cousins on her father's side. Three of them, including Lady Jane Gray, died before 1560, but six lived on to cause Elizabeth when Queen considerable problems. Mary Queen of Scots is the most famous and rightly the subject of the British Library exhibition, but this talk is going to focus on the Queen's other female cousins. Now it's hardly surprising that Elizabeth's relationships with her English royal cousins were often troubled. English history contained several precedents where ambitious members of a royal family emerged as rivals to the sovereign. But an even more important issue affected the relationship of Elizabeth with her cousins, the unsettled succession. With the childless Queen on the throne, the descendants of Henry VIII's two sisters were politically significant, being potential claimants on Elizabeth's death and even possibly during her lifetime. So who were these cousins? I hope you can see clearly on the chart in front of you, but if you look beyond Henry VIII, you see the elder sister of Henry, Margaret. Margaret was actually older than Henry, but in this particular chart she's coming later. Now Mary, Margaret married twice. Her first husband was James VI of Scotland and of course Mary Queen of Scots and then her son James VI of Scotland came from that line. But after James of Scotland, the king of Scotland died, she married Douglas Earl of Angus and from that she produced a live daughter Margaret who in turn married a Scott, Matthew Stewart Earl of Lenox and Margaret had Lord Donnelly who as you probably know married Mary Queen of Scots and another son Charles and Charles when he married had as his daughter Arbella Stewart, not Arabella as in this rather old family tree, but Arbella. So another cousin. Now Henry also had a younger sister, Mary, and Mary was younger than Henry and she married Charles Brand and Duke of Suffolk. It was the second married for her and it was I think a third one for him and they had as shown here Francis who married Henry Gray and produced the trio of gray sisters Jane, Catherine and Mary. Now it's their stories I'm going to talk about tonight but there are one or two points that I think just looking at them as a whole that needs to be said and the first is that apart from Mary Queen of Scots the cousins and indeed Elizabeth herself were not unimpeachably legitimate. The Earl of Angus had had a pre-contract before his marriage to Margaret and this raised a question mark over whether or not Margaret the daughter I'm afraid there's too many Margaret's and too many Mary's here so bear with me but whether the daughter was legitimate. Similarly if you go to Henry's sister Mary, Charles Brandon whose marital career rivaled his great friend Henry VIII though he only had I think three or four wives, four wives, not six. His marriage to Mary was at a time when he had an existing contract to marry someone else and that meant there was a question mark over the legitimacy of his children even though that pre-contract was indeed nullified. We move on to the next slide. There's one group that wasn't in that family tree and indeed it's not in the family tree that's in the British Library. It was another branch of the family from Mary and Charles Brandon. Mary didn't just have Francis she had another daughter whose name was Eleanor and that line is very often left out but today I'm going to talk a little bit about her daughter who is Margaret Clifford before she married because Eleanor married the Earl of Cumberland and the Countess of Derby because afterwards she married Lord Strange who inherited the title Earl of Derby on the death of his father. The closest male cousin to Elizabeth was a fairly long way away. As you can see here his name was Henry Hastings III Earl of Huntington and he came from the Yorkis line, the line of George Duke of Clarence who you may remember from Shakespeare's Richard III died in a butt of Mousy Wine due to the machinations of Richard III and Hastings came from that line and so was a pretty distant cousin of Elizabeth I and was quite a long way away from a direct line with a a monarch Edward III goes way back. So he was a long way away but he did have two advantages in terms of being perhaps the successor of Elizabeth. One was that he was male as we've seen virtually everybody else was female and the other was that he was a staunch Protestant and if we compare that with Mary Queen of Scots he was Catholic he stands out more strongly and there was some suspicion that Margaret Clifford was also Catholic so in fact she died a Protestant and Margaret Countess of Lenox was a Catholic so Henry Hastings did have an advantage in that respect and there was a bit of a power base behind him because his wife was Catherine Dudley the sister of Robert Dudley the Earl of Leicester who had quite a following. Now Henry Hastings happily for him did not want to be King of England it was a far too dangerous a position and so he kept in the background and he never gave any hints out that he was royal that he had raw blood in his veins even if it was a long way back or that he could be the next King of England on Elizabeth's death. What complicated the whole issue of who was going to succeed Elizabeth was the will of Henry VIII. Henry VIII's will which was just before his death complicated it because he moved away from the standard line of primogenitor which was accepted in common law and was traditional in all kinds of inheritance cases within England and instead he privileged the line of Mary over Margaret were his three children to die without airs which indeed they did. Another element of Henry VIII's will which is I think important but not entirely relevant here but it comes into the exhibition so I will mention it is that of course it laid down that his two daughters Mary another one and Elizabeth who despite being bastards should inherit the throne if Edward and then afterwards Mary died without issue. So we have a will then that effectively disinherits the Scottish line why did he do that? Well some think that it might be because he was more fond of his sister Mary than he was of Margaret but it wasn't that it was political. It was because he didn't want a Scott to sit on the English throne and furthermore in some ways I think he was trying to punish the Scots because those who go to the exhibition will see that at the beginning at the end of his reign and at the beginning of Edward's reign there was an attempt to get Mary Queen of Scots married to Prince Edward later Edward VI and the Scots resisted and in some ways this was a punishment and perhaps an inducement that Henry was laying down in his will that the Scots would not on their own merit and their own bloodline inherit the throne of England it might only be through marrying the um Edward VI of Scotland. Now when Elizabeth came to the throne and we can see the picture on the left that's in the exhibition a drawing of her coronation procession which took place in November 1558 when she came to the throne of the many royal cousins only Mary Queen of Scots then the Dauphines or the Dauphine of Scots of France contested her title through her gieze relations on the grounds of Elizabeth's bastity. As you can see here in this drawing that was sent to William Cecil from France she courted the arms of England and Ireland with those of France and Scotland and again this particular drawing can be seen in the exhibition. While not challenging Elizabeth's succession the remaining royal cousins probably had mixed feelings about her coming to the throne not least because they had had somewhat surprisingly all been very close to Queen Mary and during her reign Mary had given some of them precedence over her half-sister then the Lady Elizabeth whom they possibly thought and probably hoped would be disinherited to their advantage but despite that they all accepted um Elizabeth's accession and were prepared to offer her loyalty sorry that's let's look at now the first one I want to talk about is Francis Brandon who as we saw was of the Suffolk line. Francis actually died very soon after Elizabeth came to the throne and in that respect is not particularly um significant but I think it's important to remember that Francis was behind Lady Jane Gray's attempt to oust not just Mary, Mary Tudor from the throne but also Elizabeth. She had given her as it were her right to the succession to her daughter Jane while she was still alive and she only survived this attempted coup by appealing to Mary on the basis of their personal relationship and Mary's relationship too with her mother Catherine of Aragon and Mary did forgive her and indeed brought her into the court and allowed her daughters to come over time into the privy chamber but Francis married again and she married as was not uncommon with widows of noble status she married a commoner it was her master of the horse this may have been one reason why some people thought that it wasn't going to be unusual if Elizabeth married her master as the horse Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester who was her favorite but for Francis marrying beneath her meant that she left court she went to live in Richmond but she left her daughters there now for all these kinds of reasons Elizabeth had no had there was no matter why Elizabeth should like her I mean they didn't have a close relationship and it's often said that Elizabeth therefore had a prejudice against the gray line Francis Brandon and her children nevertheless on Francis's death in 1559 21st November Elizabeth paid for the funeral at Westminster Abbey and at the same time she issued a warrant granting Francis and her posterity as her two daughters who had survived her a royal quartering of their arms and she did this because Francis's mother had once been Queen of France she'd been married to Louis the 12th of France before her marriage to Charles Brandon and also because Francis's grandfather was Henry the 7th of England so whatever bad feeling there might have been Elizabeth still behaved royally and regally to Francis on her day Francis's daughter Catherine who you can see in on the right of course in a miniature which was probably painted in Elizabeth's reign around 1560 when when Catherine was a maid of honour to Elizabeth now she also had been caught up in the plans to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne but I won't take you through that story what I'm going to do is take you into Elizabeth's reign when the story involves Edward Seymour the earl of Hartford who had been the son or was the son of Lord Protector Somerset who had been tried for treason and had been executed and so for a time Edward Seymour had lost the title and lost the lands of his family now these two young people that were in there there were 20 of Catherine and Edward was 21 around the time when they fell in love and got married. Elizabeth was never going to support a marriage between the two of them Catherine wasn't actually known to be disaffected so she was an object of suspicion at Elizabeth's court and it might be thought that were she to marry and particularly she would have male children this might be a problem for Elizabeth before she had consolidated her position on the throne of England. What's more Seymour himself was from a noble family which was as I've shown through his father the Duke of Somerset was an ambitious family and so it was a problematic relationship politically and that was known William Cecil advised Seymour to drop Catherine and Catherine's mother advised her to do the same but neither of them would give up their romance. They decided on a secret marriage they married they didn't live together because they couldn't but they definitely had sexual relations because in August after the marriage 1561 Catherine was pregnant. Now this meant that it was going to come into the open and Catherine appealed to Robert Dudley to have a word with the Queen that would mean her anger would be elade and she also spoke to the woman who was in charge of the maids of honours at court but to no avail. Elizabeth was furious and Elizabeth was so angry not just because Catherine had gone behind her back but also because both Catherine and Hartford had lied had lied to William Cecil had lied to people in authority that they were in a relationship they had both denied it but there was another problem too Elizabeth suspected a plot and you can see by this statement by Elizabeth that she is demanding who knew about it and as I've written in yellow at the bottom for it does now appear that sundry personages have dealt here in. She was particularly concerned that this was a plot not necessarily to put Catherine and her child on the throne in her place but to secure a place for Catherine and her child in the succession and this was something that Elizabeth could not allow particularly at that time because it was at that time Elizabeth was trying to reach an agreement an amity with Mary Queen of Scots and Mary Queen of Scots was demanding that her place in the succession would be acknowledged and Elizabeth feared that if she didn't at least give intimations and show Mary that she supported the right of Mary to the to the succession even though she wasn't going to make it a matter of law she wasn't going to introduce a parliamentary statute that would allow it she wasn't going to make a major announcement about it but if she intimated to Mary that she would be the next successor then the amity between them could continue but Catherine and Hartford's marriage threatened to to to to prevent that because if Elizabeth recognized the marriage and recognized the next the child as as legitimate that child would have a lot of people behind it especially as it was part of Henry VIII's will that this line should succeed it would make Mary's position much more difficult and hence Elizabeth's and this was why Elizabeth to my mind came down so hard on the to the three people involved Catherine Hartford and Edward the the new child the baby son of of of Catherine and Hartford now the baby was born in 1562 September I'm sorry it was the the marriage was in 61 but it was discovered in 62 I this set spoke that but on the 24th of September 1562 Catherine delivered a boy Edward and within months of his baptism the Hartford marriage was declared void by an ecclesiastical commission and the child was therefore bastardized to be fair to the commissioners Catherine and Hartford did they cause no good when they were interrogated they gave contradictory answers they were vague about details and all the proofs of marriage were missing admittedly one of the witnesses had died but the other one was just a preset sort of dragged it off the streets and couldn't find again so it was very difficult for them to actually prove they had been married though most people thought they had met Catherine and Hartford were then placed in the tower of London they were interrogated they spent time there but it was generally believed that it wouldn't be for long however with amazing Hutzpah the Hartford's ignored the ruling of the bastardization of their child and that their marriage was was invalid had never taken place and they bribed guards so that they could resume their conjugal relations and the second son was born Thomas again they were both punished now in the miniature you can see the one on the left it was produced by the Hartford family in order to show Catherine as a married woman and the child as legitimate you can see that on Mary's hand she has a rings for for the marriage that was marriage tokens given of the ceremony and on her head she wore the white cap of a married woman she's giving the child an apple and it's been suggested that this was deniably but nevertheless a symbol of the awe implying that the child would be next in line for the for the succession this picture this miniature of Catherine was widely reproduced and you can see another one a copy that is on the right hand side but in this copy Catherine's does not wear the ring of a married woman even though she does have the cap but these spread quite widely and were part of a campaign which was designed to bring Catherine and her children into the succession to reverse the order that the marriage was not valid and claimed that it was and that the child was legal now had it not been for the controversy that blew up between about 1563 and 1567 that was in print and was through the portraits through a play called Gorder book all of which were designed to get Elizabeth to name Catherine her successor and that in return there were supporters of Mary Queen of Scots who started writing books and manuscripts the books were not published till afterwards and you can see one here which is published much later but all this blew up in the mid 1560s raising the succession issue which Elizabeth just did not want it would create problems with her relationship with Mary Queen of Scots and also as she was to say it would bring danger to her because plots tended to focus round as to the throne as they had to Elizabeth while she had been the heir to the throne of her sister Mary had it not been I think for these these the polemic these debates this this groundswell of support also for Catherine which also came into the parliament of 1566 I think Elizabeth would have been less harsh to Catherine and would have probably allowed her to leave house arrest where where she was not to live with Hartford but at least to have had a degree of freedom but it wasn't to be also adding to the dangers of the situation and to the sense that Elizabeth was really not in control of her relatives Lady Mary Gray also underwent a secret marriage in August 1565 now Mary Gray had been born with a deformity as it was seen then she was probably she was said to have a crooked back whether that meant she had a humpback or not we're not entirely sure but she was also incredibly short and that meant that most people treated her at that time as if she couldn't possibly be a future queen and Mary did not have very many suitors and she took it upon herself to marry the man who was considered the largest man in the court she married the sergeant Port of the Man who was in charge of security in the court in 1565 secretly it was said they were drunk it was after a wedding that they you know hadn't planned it and it was just an impromptu moment of passion but whatever it was it was discovered rumours were spread and immediately both of them were arrested and both of them were interrogated and you can see on your right the list of questions that were put to Lady Mary Gray on the 19th of August about the marriage and once again here the what the interrogators were trying to find out was one was it a legal marriage was it valid that's why they asked who was there were they witnesses and second and what kind of ceremony was it was it done by the Book of Common Prayer and also who knew about it was there some kind of plot going on to get the grays into a position which would push them forward in terms of the succession to the throne in fact it was quite clear it was a marriage that had taken place and it was a marriage that had been consummated but that didn't prevent Elizabeth from separating the two Mary's husband was Thomas Keyes and he was put in the fleet prison in a very cramped space I mean it was really quite cruel because he was a very very tall man he was over six foot five and he was put in a very cramped space for years and Mary herself was was put had a better time of it she was put in in various homes where she had more freedom than her sister did but when Thomas Keyes was was released which happened after the the death of Catherine Gray which I'll come to in a minute Mary was determined to call herself Mary Keyes and she did that for the rest of her life it was part of her protest at the way both of them had been treated now Catherine died in January 1568 she was a she was in a house um she'd been moved from one house to another and she died while she was in Suffolk in Oxford and she was buried unlike all her other female cousins in a small parish church not Westminster Abbey she was um allowed a royal funeral and there were people who were told to come down from the court to attend the funeral and it was said that Elizabeth was very sad but nobody believed that the effect of the marriage of course was that her the effect of her death of course was that Mary actually was shunted up in the line of succession but once again that no one really thought that she would ever be queen but according to Henry's will that's was the next one really in line after Catherine's death some time after Catherine's death during James the Sixth Ray her sons were legitimized the other half that had tried to get that done during Elizabeth's reign but Elizabeth would never agree to it and Hartford wanted it not because he wanted his sons to be Elizabeth there I think he'd given up on that one but he wanted them to be his heir he wanted them to inherit his title and his lands and that did happen and at the time of of James his his grandson because his son actually died before him inherited his title and his grandson built this magnificent monument to his relatives to the Earl of Hartford who died in 1621 this monument was put up in Salisbury Cathedral in 1625 and also you can possibly see at the bottom there is Catherine Gray allowed at this time to be accepted publicly as Hartford's wife so with Mary Gray as the person who was next in line as it were on the on the Suffolk side it it it meant that someone called Margaret Clifford who I'd mentioned already who was the daughter of Eleanor the cousin of Mary and Catherine was also really brought to become more important in the line of succession this became even more true once Mary Mary Gray died which he did in 1578 April 1578 let's just turn to Margaret Clifford and and see what we can find out about her because she doesn't appear very much she's not much in the record what we do know about her is that when she married during Mary's reign her husband all seemed bright for her she was brought into brought into court Mary Queen Mary gave her precedence over Elizabeth during her reign and her relationship with her husband seemed fine but things went downhill her marriage to the Earl of Stamford Derby Stam Henry Stanley Earl of Derby proved to be disastrous they quarreled they separated Derby took a mistress and set her up in his own home and Margaret was left stranded and what is interesting is that for all the reputation that Elizabeth had for being cruel spiteful to her female cousins Elizabeth helped Margaret out despite Margaret's precedence over her in Queen Mary's reign Elizabeth was friendly and kind to Margaret Clifford she chose to have her regularly in attendance upon her at court she treated her as near in blood to us and she often held Elizabeth's train in processions which was a place of honour often given to an Ed the throne and after Margaret separated from her husband and was financially embarrassed Elizabeth tried several times to help her out and even entered into a financial arrangement that would give Margaret an income so again this goes against somewhat Elizabeth's reputation for parsimony however things went wrong for Margaret because after Mary Gray's death she began to consider herself next in line for the throne and she began to meddle in politics and she did this in two ways the first was around 1579 1580 Elizabeth was considering marriage to a French Duke of Anjou it was not popular at court there were some who supported it most didn't and Margaret came out opposed to the marriage despite the fact that Elizabeth had ordered all her women and indeed most of the court not to talk about it secondly Margaret started to use a doctor who was considered to be something of an astrologer and something of a bit of a a cunning man and that man was arrested and it was said and it may well be true that Margaret had encouraged him to set out a horoscope of Elizabeth's life to predict her death and all this then was revealed Margaret was arrested she was not treated that badly given that there was the suspicion that she was planning some kind of plot against the queen but it was decided that there was maybe because it would have just been too embarrassing for Elizabeth to put her on trial maybe there wasn't enough evidence but whatever the case was Margaret was not kept in the in the tower for long she was banished from from court the cunning man the wizard was was actually put on trial and executed but Mary was allowed to live and she was not in a in a strong financial state but she was able to lease a house and she was able to live on independently and when she died in 1596 she too was buried in Westminster Abbey so that's the grey line that's the Suffolk line let's turn to the Stuart line and here we have Margaret Douglas Margaret Douglas is a fascinating woman she was a very strong woman and she was someone who almost certainly was ambitious for her children to have a chance at the succession as I said to you she married Matthew Stewart the 4th Oliver of Lenox this was in 1544 during Henry the 8th during before that she had become involved with Thomas Howard now this was around 1535 and it was at a time when actually she was second in line to the throne and Henry the 8th did exactly what Elizabeth would have done he stuck her in the Tower of London Thomas Howard was also put in the Tower of London and indeed Thomas Howard died there probably of jail fever Margaret however was allowed out and a marriage was arranged which was a dynastic marriage that suited Henry politically to the Earl of Lenox who was the Scottish Earl now Scottish politics and were extremely complex at this time and I'm not going to take you through them but what you need to know is that Lenox was effectively thrown out of Scotland and lost his lands and most of his estate at the same time Margaret was not able to inherit the land of and the estates of the Earl of Angus because he married again and left it to the the children of his of his next wife so Margaret Lenox and the Earl of Margaret Douglas Countess of Lenox and the Earl of Lenox were not exactly penniless far from it but they were not well off indeed and they relied on the English crown to give them houses and property where they could could live now Margaret Douglas comes into problems with Elizabeth quite early in the rain because she starts speaking very indiscreetly about her desire for her son Henry Lord only to marry the widowed Mary Queen of Scots when Mary had gone back to Scotland Elizabeth heard about this and for a time Margaret was put in the Tower of London she was released though and she was then to spend another spell in the Tower because as is well known Henry Lord Darnley went up to Scotland he married Mary Queen of Scots against the will of the Queen this seems a danger to Elizabeth and it was believed that Margaret was behind this marriage because of the ambition she had already demonstrated earlier on her husband too was in Scotland with Henry Darnley so he couldn't be put in the Tower so Margaret was was there for a while on her own she was released after Henry Lord Darnley was was murdered but over time we're going to see she has another period in the Tower but let's just move on before we get there it's the third picture we see the picture of Margaret Countess of Lenox here and of her husband and we can also see Henry Stuart who we've seen Lord Darnley who married Mary Queen of Scots but the little one the little brother and his side was Charles and after the murder of Darnley Margaret had ambitions for Charles and she hoped that he might too marry well and their child would be put in line for the throat if Mary's son her own grandson James were to die because after all male royals did not seem to do very well on the living stakes so it was quite possible James would die so it was going to be possibly Charles's child who could be Elizabeth's successor and so Margaret arranged possibly or maybe it just happened spontaneously but whatever the case a marriage took place between Charles Stuart and best of hardwick son Elizabeth the Countess of Shrewsbury who was the custodian of Mary Queen of Scots a marriage took place which resulted in the birth of Arbella Arbella Stuart who was now going to be in line for the succession as well Elizabeth was once again furious that Margaret had done this and she was sent to the tower for her third time before Charles's marriage and the birth of Arbella we had had the death of Darnley and I wanted to show you this painting that was commissioned by the Lennox's which called for revenge on the murderers of of Darnley we can see in that portrait I hope you can see that behind the three kneeling figures kneeling figures of Margaret Lennox and Charles there is the tomb on which Darnley is placed there are pictures on the tomb one showing Darnley and his page being dragged from their beds and the other showing their bodies in the garden at Cocoa Fields and you'll see a drawing of that in the exhibition and at the bottom left of the canvas you can see a canvas a painting depicting Mary Queen of Scots's overthrow at Carberry Hill another picture of that actually is in the exhibition you can see them all closely there and all around the painting there are messages that James should take revenge you can possibly see an inscription which is calling for vengeance surrounding James's head so Margaret was concerned that at the end of the episode where Darnley is killed that they should be revenge I just want to show the Lennox's jewel now people are not certain when this jewel was commissioned I'm showing it here because some people think that it was commissioned at the time of Darnley's death but others think that it was commissioned at the time of Lennox's death her husband's death and you'll find out how Lennox died when you go to the exhibition because it's part of the Scottish politics side but this jewel I think does show the ambitions of Margaret it has in many ways it's a love statement because it is in the heart it's a heart which is there is another sapphire heart in the centre of the jewel and it has messages all around it which are demonstrating the patience was needed for the Lennox's to get what they wanted I would love to show you what's inside the jewel but as you can see it's all very blurry I couldn't get a better picture but inside the jewel there are lots and lots of images and they're all designed to show that the Lennox's have been through a tough time but they're going to come through and I think part of that coming through was going to be in their minds that one of their grandchildren as indeed happened would become King of England that's the tomb of Margaret which is in Westminster Abbey and it was shows you can see there that of course Margaret didn't just have two sons who surprisingly lived but also she had some daughters as well who in this particular case died so finally I want to come to the grandchild Abela Stewart. Abela was possibly for her own safety knowing what had happened to Elizabeth's other cousins and because of the anger that Elizabeth had shown at her birth was kept for most of her life with her grandmother Bess of Hartwick out of the court she did come to court in Elizabeth's reign briefly during the 1590s but whether it was because there were conspiracies around her talks about her marrying a Spaniard or marrying one of the Habsburg friends in Europe we don't know whether it's because she put her foot in it in some kind of way we also don't know but whatever it was she was sent off to lead a very lonely and it seems a very unhappy life along with Bess of Hartwick and at the end of Elizabeth's reign she tried to escape that life by either fantasizing or planning a marriage with the Earl of Hartford's son and again the details of it are not clear. In Elizabeth's reign Abela wasn't really a danger because she was kept out of the way. In James's reign Abela comes to the fore but that's another story it's the story of James the first reign so what I want to do is just say something in conclusion because time is running out and what I want to suggest is that yes the lives of Elizabeth's female cousins were as some people have called it tragic some were more tragic than others I think Catherine Grey really got the worst of it and probably died of unhappiness or even anorexia but I don't think that Elizabeth's attitude towards her cousins came from spite which is often said a very gender term to my mind I don't think it comes from Elizabeth's fear that they were going to unseat her on the throne I think it has a lot to do with the succession I think it has a lot to do with Elizabeth's desire for Mary Queen of Scots to be her heir even if she couldn't come out and say so even though she couldn't ever make it a statute that would give her that right I mean as you'll see in the exhibition there is so much opposition to Mary the Catholic Mary becoming Elizabeth's heir but Elizabeth wanted to clear the way for Mary she believed in her reddatory monarchy and that's why she would never legitimate Catherine Grey's sons and that's why Arbella Stewart had to stay out of the way without having a marriage to a man who might even make a claim for Arbella Stewart because Arbella was born in England and James was born in Scotland and that might give her the advantage when the crunch came and particularly if she was already married to a powerful figure so that's the story of Elizabeth's other cousins thank you thank you very much sir um I've taken lots and lots of notes and I have questions as well for you from our audience tonight I'm going I've lots of questions myself I'm only going to ask one I'm going to have the chair's privilege but limited to one but you've you've given us a lot to think about in a fantastic talk I just wanted to ask if you had any thoughts about why Edward C. Morel of Hartford and Lady Catherine Grey despite being counseled by someone as savvy as civilian Cecil and having taken the temperature of how the Queen felt about it why they went ahead with that clandestine marriage in 1561 that was the first part of your talk tonight did you have any thoughts on that as well as you could draw on I think there were two things first of all I think it's Catherine who's pushing it and she is very keen to get this through and I think she thinks so because her mother married beneath her because around the time there was some talk of possibly Elizabeth's marrying Robert Dudley master of the horse that marriages that didn't look as if they were conventional might be possible and that okay Elizabeth might be cross but she would agree in the end because it was a done deal Hartford it's very hard to say he did actually do it more than once he had a later on a clandestine marriage with one of Elizabeth's women a gentle woman of the Privy Council so he was doing this rather often he was making a practice of it whether he liked to live recklessly whether he was passionately in love with Catherine he was only 21 I don't think we should forget that side of it and whether he too was persuaded that you know all would be all right in the end I don't know but Catherine behaves so irresponsibly because she didn't keep the proofs and that's what's really hard to believe I I have to say she comes across to me in a way that Mary doesn't as rather foolish and Mary I think as was a much more savvy woman with a more intellectual as well Catherine just seems a bit of an airhead I'm afraid despite her her tragic fate Thank you very much of you that perhaps Hartford inherited some of his uncle Thomas Seymour's recklessness and I remember to some of the questions we've got from our audience I've got a question from Jane who's asking he talks about the band of interrogators who were created to investigate the marriages I think this was the first one you mentioned was during the Hartford Grey marriage and could you see what is that is that a church court investigation or was it by the Privy Council? It was the church court and the Archbishop Canterbury headed it this had to be a decision that was a decision as to whether a marriage was legal or not had to be ecclesiastical and so yes Catherine was interrogated in the tower by Privy members of the Privy Council and by the actually by Edward Warner who was the the jailer so there were a lot of you know they were secular but when it came to the investigation as to whether it was a valid marriage or not these were churchmen. It's a church court issue isn't it? Sure yeah okay and Carol and Lloyd wanted to ask you first was to thank you for a wonderful talk and she wanted to ask you I think you drew this further on in your talk but why were Margaret Douglas's sons Lord Daly and the Earl of Lenox considered merely as a Elizabeth? Weren't they closer than Henry Hastings? I think this is why supporters of Henry Hastings didn't consider those two men who were both born in England I think that's the point that's been made here yeah yeah they certainly later on yes they I suppose the reason why they're not considered is two reasons one is that if you were going to go by Henry VIII's will you know that they're they're excluded by defaults but nevertheless they're excluded whereas Henry Hastings you know you wouldn't have expected him to have been there but the other reason I think is that Henry Hastings is a really strong Protestant and Henry Darnley nobody's quite sure what he is because Margaret Douglas is sort of as being Catholic so it's it's it's seen as being they were they were not considered in any way as as potential heirs to Elizabeth and I think that's if you're going to go for the Stuart line it would have to be the Mary Queen of Scots line and then later on of course James is born but if you're going to go if you were thinking about them their religion just made them a bit you know there was suspect as Mary Queen of Scots really. I've got a question here from Jeremy Davidson what about the Anglo-Scotty summit between Henry VIII and his nephew James V and 1541 which was set up for Europe and never got off the ground because of the fact James didn't turn up you think that was a motive for Henry because you talked you made that point about the Treaty of Greenwich which would be his next discussion from 1543 do you think that the Treaty of Greenwich allaged to injury and that this not showing up in 1541 for the summit may have been a factor in Henry VIII? It might have I mean certainly you know the Scots would have been considered untrustworthy that's another that's another element but I think things had moved on I think it's much more about the rough wooing I think it's much more which is about the you know it is about the succession isn't it because it's it's about Mary marrying Edward and then they would you know the two lines would be brought together so I think it's a direct well if you won't marry Edward you're out as it were but you know I I mean you're quite right I don't I don't think it is totally irrelevant I mean it's building up the picture of the Scots as unsatisfactory and really they're not I'm not going to give them a place on the English throne I'm going to see if I can squeeze in one last question this is from Rosemary Kelty I chose to thank you for a very detailed talk and amazingly detailed talk how do you think women's political fortunes would have developed if Mary had remained queen and or if Elizabeth had married and had children so I guess that's a counterfactual these these cousins what would have happened if if Mary hadn't been deposed as Queen of Scots in 1567 and maybe if I were right at the same time Elizabeth had married to the outstripped Charles yeah I mean I think if Elizabeth had married and had preferably sons these women would have been members of the royal family they would have been honored they would have been given ceremonials and they would have probably been able to marry pretty much who they wanted not entirely because they were never sort of total freedom to marry who you wanted but yeah their lives would have been very different and it's Elizabeth's failure to marry or you could say her decision not to marry whatever you know whether she was choosing what is is debatable but the failure to marry does create enormous problems for anyone who is in line for the succession thank you I would just like to thank the audience and to wrap up the scene we've got a range of exciting events coming up this autumn especially linked to the exhibition which Sue touched on some of the subjects of the exhibition in a talk and we'd love to welcome you back for lectures conversations and performances do please keep an eye on the what's on pages of the website for information and you can watch past events on the British vibrate player lastly I would like to thank and like everyone else to join me in thanking Sue for a brilliant very engaging talk and it drew out a lot of wonderful details about Elizabeth and her troublesome cousins so thank you very much Sue thank you I'm going to give you a clap