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Tracy Borman, "The Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)
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Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Elcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Tracy Borman about her book titled the Stolen Treachery, Deceit and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty, which takes us right back to the death of Elizabeth I and the then taking over of the crown by her successor James I or 6th of Scotland, depending on which side of the border you're on. And of course, in and of itself, that's always been a fascinating question for historians, kind of, how does that transition work? Elizabeth? I famously didn't want to think about succession. It was a big topic that everyone avoided for ages. And as this book helps us understand the details of what happened in the lead up to this moment, in the moment itself and afterwards is maybe more intriguing than we've even thought for hundreds of years. So there's a lot for us to talk about here. Tracy, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to tell us about it.
- [02:48]
C
Oh, it's a pleasure. And thank you for inviting me. We've certainly got a lot of interesting stuff to talk about.
- [02:55]
B
We definitely do. And I think for me, the first interesting thing I'd love for you to tell us about is a bit of introduction of yourself and also why you decided to write a book. I mean, there's a lot of books about the end of Elizabeth I and how we got to the succession of James the first and sixth. So what made you decide that this was a topic that you wanted to tackle now?
- [03:15]
C
Okay, well, a bit of background. So I am an author, historian, broadcaster, and I specialize in the Tudor period. I'm also a chief historian at historic royal palaces, and I work for the Heritage Education Trust. So I have a number of different things that I do, but all related to history. And I have to say, the sort of why this book? Well, Elizabeth is an obsession of mine. She's probably the number one obsession. And really, I think it's not overstating it to say the reason I became a historian. I was utterly fascinated by her at school and just wanted to find out more about this remarkable woman who managed to command a kingdom and establish England's sort of preeminence on the world stage against all the odds, because she was just the illegitimate younger daughter of Henry VIII with a notorious mother, Anne Boleyn. So fascinating. Well, I was actually in the middle of writing a completely different book when I heard this news story. It flashed up on my screen a couple of years ago, and it made me literally just stop in my tracks, because the British Library had just published some research that proved that everything we thought we knew about the Elizabethan succession and who she intended to leave her throne to was a complete lie. It was fabricated on the orders of the new king, James the First. It all feels very current, this, you know, those in power controlling the narrative. And it absolutely happened 400 years ago. And so I was astonished and I wanted to find out more. And I looked into it. I thought, my God, this is an incredible subject. And because I am such an Elizabeth obsessive, I sort of got straight on the phone to my publishers and said, look, please, could I just pause the book I was writing and write a book on this? And. And luckily they agreed. It was just astonishing. And. And really, I think the most important discovery about Elizabeth, even about the Tudors, in, in at least a generation, I would say kind of for many, many years, actually. And it does rather give a different perspective on this apparently smooth transition from. From the Tudors to the stewards.
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B
Well, any time a historian comes here and tells me that something we've been taught is smooth is more complicated than that, that's always absolutely fascinating. But myself included, most of us are not nearly as expert on the Tudors as you are. So I think for the rest of us to as fully understand and appreciate just how amazing this was when you got this bit of news, we should probably fill in a bit of context first. So I think the place to start there is understanding how succession decisions are usually made so that we know when something unusual is happening. What was the kind of typical process like in the Tudor period, obviously, what was Henry VIII up to? Because he's always up to something. And what did that mean by the time we got to Elizabeth having to make decisions about succession?
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C
Yeah, so the laws of succession were mostly to do with blood throughout the history of the. The English monarchy. It became the British monarchy when James VI and first took over, uniting England and Scotland. So by blood, what I mean is it tended. The crown tended to pass from father to son, father to eldest surviving son. So even though the system of. Of primogeniture, which, that is the sort of the crown goes to the eldest male relative, the closest relative to the reigning monarch, even though that system wasn't law, it was sort of understood. It had been in place for many centuries and it profoundly shaped the reign of Elizabeth's father, Henry viii. Because, of course, the reason we still talk about Henry viii, he's one of our most famous kings, is not so much because of his politics, because of his religious changes, it's because of his marriages. He famously married six times, and that wasn't just because he got bored easily, of course, it was because he needed a male heir, because there was hardly any precedence for a female monarch. When Henry came to the throne, there had only really been one in the past sort of thousand years, and that was the Empress matilda in the 1100s and. And she plunged the country into civil war. So she was always held up as the disaster that would ensue if you have a woman in charge of the country. So suffice it to say, Henry was desperate for a son, and that really drove most of his marriages. And it also really complicated the succession, because he had three, three surviving children by his six wives, two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, and a son, Edward. And when each new marriage was formed, he kind of disinherited the children from the previous marriage, although when he had Edward by Jane Seymour, the third wife, of course, he's never, ever going to disinherit his son. So Edward was first in line, and then Mary, even though he'd had her declared illegitimate because she was his eldest daughter, and then Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, she was also declared illegitimate. But towards the end of his life, he restored all three to the line of succession. So it was quite a complicated picture, but there was still an understanding that you had to have a male heir. Well, what happened, of course, is that Mary and Edward were both very short reigning. There was a queen in between them, Lady Jane Grey, she was even shorter reigning just nine days. So against all the odds, Elizabeth, who had sort of been way down the line of succession, came to the throne in 1558. And as an unmarried monarch, as a woman, her first duty, and this is what everybody expected, was that she would marry and she would have heirs and spares to secure the Tudor dynasty. So imagine the consternation when in her very first parliament, Elizabeth declared, I will live and die a virgin. I'm not going to marry. And I think nobody took her seriously. Perhaps they thought she was just upping her value on the marriage market by playing hard to get. I don't know. But she certainly knew she meant it. So very quickly, it became obvious that there was going to be a succession crisis unless Elizabeth early on named her successor. And that's something she steadfastly refused to do, both when she came to the throne and for the next 44 years. And I think it's easy to think that she was just being vain about this. You know, she wants all eyes on her, but she had very sound political reasons behind this, because she knew the minute you name a successor, you create a rival who could be a danger to you. She had been a danger to her own sister Mary, during Mary's reign, and there had been a rebellion in Elizabeth's name. She didn't want the same thing happening to her. So when it came to the succession, she played her cards very close to her chest.
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B
Okay, that's certainly a pretty fraught environment to be operating in. But it's not like there were no ideas about who could succeed her, even if she wasn't saying anything. I mean, for one thing, who did Henry VIII have put down in his list of what would happen if it did get all the way down to Elizabeth? What did he say would happen next? And why didn't she just say, yeah, okay, what dad said?
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C
Do you know what? That is such an interesting question. And it would become an increasingly important question because Henry VIII was very vocal about the succession. As I said, he tended to keep altering it according to who he was married to. What he said is that no steward, no King of Scots or Queen of Scots will ever sit on my throne. He hated the Scots. He was always at war with Scots. And even though his eldest sister Margaret had married a Scottish king, James iv, and they had children, thus creating a kind of almost Anglo Stuart dynasty, Henry had specifically barred Stuarts from his throne. And to make sure of it, he didn't only pass these Acts of Succession, which said that he also specified in his last will and testament, when he was dying, that no descendant of his sister Margaret, no Stuart, would ever inherit the English throne. Now, that was really important because even though, you know, by the time of Elizabeth's death, Henry had been dead himself for, you know, well over 50 years, people still revered Henry VIII. And what he said went, you know, so it was important that he had disinherited one of the lead contenders for Elizabeth's throne, James vi. In fact, if Henry's laws and his will had been followed, then we would have had another King, Edward, because he favored the descendants of his younger sister, Mary, who first of all married the King of France. And then she married Henry's best friend, Charles Brandon, and their descendants included the sisters of Lady Jane Gray. Lady Jane herself, sadly, was executed during Mary's reign, but her sisters Catherine and Mary survived into Elizabeth's reign, and they were really seen as favorites for her throne because of Henry viii, you know, stipulating that it would go to the descendants of his. His sister Mary, if his children didn't have children. And then Catherine and Mary Gray. So Mary had no children. They both married, but Mary had no children. Catherine had two sons, and the elder of those, Edward, was still alive at the time of Elizabeth's death in 1603, and he had an awful lot of support. So legally speaking, we should, at that point in 1603, have had a king, Edward VII, not in 1901, when Queen Victoria died and her son became King Edward vii. In fact, that should have happened. You know, a good few years earlier.
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B
Okay, so that's already some intrigue going on. But when you say had a lot of support, what did that look like? I mean, was it obviously not like a democratic election now where we've got candidates with posters running around? I mean, that's not what these different successors are doing. Were they doing anything to advance their cause? I mean, I would imagine that wouldn't make them particularly popular with Elizabeth. So how did it work to be one of these candidates? If did they all, like, want to make a case, or how did it work to kind of be vying in this very tricky environment?
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C
You make such a good point when you say it wouldn't go down well with Elizabeth if people had pressed their claim openly. And most were quite discreet about it. And certainly Lady Catherine Grey's sons were. They stayed quite in the background. But we know that they had support both among the people at large. That was. It's well attested in the. In the correspondence, the chronicles of the time. But most crucially, they had support at the heart of Elizabeth's government. So several members of her Privy Council argued for the Grays. And we first see this in the year 1562, when a hugely significant event took place at one of my places of work, Hounton Corps palace, where Elizabeth was staying. So she'd only been queen for four years when she fell very dangerously ill with smallpox and everybody thought she was dying. And why wouldn't they? Because she's had these three very short reigning predecessors, so they thought, elizabeth's not going to hang around for very long either. And her council called an urgent meeting at Hampton Court to discuss who should come to the throne next. And they were divided between the supporters of Lady Catherine Grey and the supporters of Mary Queen of Scots. So Mary Queen of Scots really had the strongest blood claim because she's descended from the elder sister of Henry viii, Margaret. But as I said, Henry had kind of outlawed those, but blood seems to have been a bit thicker than water. So a lot of people backed Mary, but she was a Catholic, so of course, Elizabeth was never going to agree to that. But she couldn't enter this debate because she was too ill. She was almost dying. She recovered, and then, gosh, her counselors were in trouble when she found that they'd been busy just discussing who was going to come to this room next. But otherwise it was really tricky because Elizabeth actually introduced a law banning all talk of the succession on pain of death. So people had to be careful. I think the person who was least careful Was Mary, Queen of Scots, because, you know, from her point of view, well, you know, I don't owe any fealty to the Queen of England. I'm queen of my own kingdom, thank you very much, so I can say what I like. And the very day after Elizabeth came to the throne, Mary declared her right to that throne. So it didn't get their relationship off to a particularly good start. But, yeah, mostly claimants had to be quite discreet, as did Elizabeth's counsel in terms of who they backed. But Elizabeth never quite succeeded in silencing her subjects and certainly not in silencing her Parliaments. The question of the succession dominated about 80% of the debates in Parliament throughout Elizabeth's reign.
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B
Okay, so she's making very clear what she wants, which is don't talk about it, but is not getting that. So it was clearly known at court kind of who the different options were. So let's run through them a little bit, kind of who were the main contenders and what were Elizabeth's reasons against them. Obviously, it wasn't just as simple as, I don't. I'm never going to die. Right. Like, she, she was pretty blunt, but did understand that that was going to happen at some point. So was it religious reasons, political reasons, personal reasons, kind of who, what, what was the list and what were the problems with them?
- [18:05]
C
Yeah, I'd say all of the above. And of course, religion played a huge part, as it did with so much else in this period. So, you know, the number one contender, slash threat to Elizabeth was Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary, Queen of scots was Henry VII's great granddaughter and Elizabeth was his granddaughter. So you can see how close she was to the throne. But she was Catholic, so for Protestant Elizabeth, that was an issue. And also there was intense personal rivalry between these two women. And I think, you know, the personal and the political definitely were interlinked very, very closely in this issue. You can't separate them out. And you certainly see this with the rivalry between the Queen of Scots and the Queen of England. The other contenders, of course, later included Mary, Queen of Scots son James, although Elizabeth was a bit more favorable towards him because he at least was Protestant. He was sort of one step removed from the woman who had been her greatest rival, who plotted against her. So Elizabeth actually seemed quite in favor of James, although she never named him. She hated the Grey sisters. She never trusted the sisters of Lady Jane Grey. Catherine and Mary persecuted them relentlessly, imprisoned them. They ended their lives fairly miserable, miserably, thanks to their royal blood. But she didn't really persecute their Catherine's sons. And I think she knew that they had a very strong claim. Other contenders include one who I always feel so sorry for. He was called Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon. Now, he didn't have Tudor blood, he had Plantagenet blood, so he can trace his descent further back. And arguably his claim to the throne is stronger even than Elizabeth's. But poor Henry, he didn't want anything to do with the throne. And he kept trying to convince Elizabeth of this and saying, look, I'm your faithful subject. I never, ever want to make a bid for your throne. But she never believed him. She was always deeply suspicious of those with a claim to her throne, and perhaps rightly so. There are many, many others, including even the Infanta Isabella of Spain, the daughter of Philip ii. And she, too, had Plantagenet blood, and she had a Spanish army at her disposal, so she was seen as a contender. But for me, one of the most fascinating and tragic claimants to Elizabeth's throne was Arbella Stuart. So, like her closest rival, James vi, James Stuart of Scotland, she was a direct descendant of Henry Tudor, Henry vii, and she actually had a bit of an edge over James because she was born in England. And as I said, England and Scotland were bitter enemies. They'd been at war on and off for centuries. And the people of England saw the Scots as complete foreigners, outsiders. They didn't want them on the throne. But Arbella was more acceptable because although she was a Stuart, she was born in England, so she was seen as one of their own. And she was raised to be very aware of her royal blood, but also was fatally naive politically because she had a very sheltered upbringing and she made some bad decisions, let's just say, and really upset Elizabeth by not least flirting with one of Elizabeth's great favorites, the Earl of Essex. So that soured relations between them and Arbella, you know, without wishing to include too many spoilers. But she wouldn't have too happy an ending either. Not many of the contenders for Elizabeth's throne did, and Arbella's one of the prime examples.
- [21:56]
B
Yeah, her life is really quite miserable in the way that it's described, along with, as you said, a bunch of these other ones, too. So definitely not the nicest thing to be a contender at this point. But I want to pick up then on James, because he, of course, eventually becomes the person who does succeed. But I'm intrigued by what you mentioned around, sort of Elizabeth wasn't as against him as some of these other people, particularly the detail you discuss in the book that they had a long running correspondence, in fact, one of the longest running correspondence between monarchs ever, which is a great fact, isn't it, from 1572 to 1603, which is really quite long. And obviously she wouldn't be doing that if she either completely hated him and wanted to pretend he didn't exist or kind of didn't see any value in the exchange. So what can we learn by looking at the fact of this correspondence and the actual content of it, and how does this factor into your thinking about these calculations she's making around the succession?
- [23:00]
C
This is one of the most intriguing themes really in the whole issue of the Elizabethan succession, as you say, and I'm pleased you love this fact too, that it's one of the longest correspondences ever between two monarchs. You know, James was just six years old when he first wrote his first letter to Elizabeth. Now, for Elizabeth, I think, not just with the succession, but with other things. For example, how she felt about her mother, Anne Boleyn. Actions speak louder than words. So Elizabeth remained tight lipped on the succession forever. You know, as we now know, she never did name her successor, but she showed James favor that she showed none of the other candidates. She tried to give him the advantage. Because this correspondence isn't just full of diplomatic niceties, although on the surface it is when you dig beneath. Actually what you see is Elizabeth is trying to help James. She's trying to counsel him as to what makes a good monarch in England because, you know, things are run very, very differently in Scotland. The king absolutely reigns supreme and particularly over Parliament. Parliament is almost just a rubber stamping institution, whereas with the Tudors, they work in partnership with their parliaments and, and Parliament has much more power. So Elizabeth, that's one of the things that she's trying to sort of guide James on. And there's this also wonderful letter where she tells James, look, you have to play the King, you have to invest in the ceremony of monarchy, you have to give the people what they want in terms of exterior shows, as she puts it, you know, the glamour, the bling, the glitz of being king or queen. Very, very sadly, James disregards every scrap of advice that Elizabeth gives him. And I think he, like most of his subjects, has the misogynistic view that, you know, what does a woman know about ruling? So he pays lip service to this advice and, you know, thanks, Elizabeth profusely. But you can imagine him kind of just crumpling up the letters, throwing them in the wastepaper bin. And thinking, I know how to run the show when I inherit a crown. And that would have really devastating consequences, which will perhaps go on to shortly about, you know, the sort of so what in all of this. So if it was an illegal succession, well, you know, it kind of worked out okay, didn't it? Well, no, it didn't. And the reason it didn't is that James disregarded every scrap of advice that Elizabeth had tried to give him. And it soon became apparent, this clash between the culture of monarchy in Scotland and England. But going back to Elizabeth, I think it is really telling that she gave James the advantage in this way. I think it reveals perhaps the man that she thought would do the best at being King of England. I don't think her favor towards James was unqualified at all. She knew there were issues. She's often kind of reprimanding him for making bad decisions in Scotland. And she probably also. It must have stuck in her throat a bit that he was one of the contenders for her throne because she knew full well what his view of female rulers were was rather. And that he agreed with his countryman John Knox, who had written a book in the year Elizabeth came to the throne, sort of condemning the monstrous regiment of women and saying it was abhorrent to nature to have a woman bear rule over man. So, you know, it must. It must have sort of galled Elizabeth that James was such a front runner for her throne. But when you look at what she does to the other contenders, she tends to persecute them. She never persecutes James and in fact, she tries to help him. So although the title of my book is. Is quite provocative, it's the Stolen Crown. You could say Elizabeth had a hand in that theft.
- [27:18]
B
Very interesting. And we're definitely going to get into kind of what happens when he does take the crown and what he does or doesn't take from her way of doing things. But of course, before we get there, we have to get to the actual succession itself. Given this long correspondence and the advice she was giving him, even if he didn't take it, did that. Is that what made him confident in his succession or make senior courtiers in her court think that he was the front runner or was it really never a frontrunner position, that it was all very chaotic until the last moment? It's sort of. You talk in the books are, from 1595 onwards, was it him that was the likeliest candidate or was that always still very precarious?
- [27:59]
C
I think there was definitely an element of jeopardy in this for James, but by the mid-1590s, he was emerging as one of the lead contenders, not the only one, but one of the lead contenders for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was less a case of who dares wins than a survivor of the fittest. So there was the simple fact that many contenders had simply died out by the mid-1590s. And I'm thinking of the likes of poor old Henry Hastings, who'd never wanted the throne to begin with. Lady Margaret Stanley and her son Ferdinando. They were Catholics. They were descended from Henry VIII's younger sister, Mary. They had a very strong claim. Of course, Mary Queen of Scots was dead by then. She'd been executed in the 1580s. And the second big reason is that James's position in Scotland was becoming a lot stronger. He'd married in 1589, Anne of Denmark, and they had a growing dynasty. Now, crucially, they had a son. He was born in 1594, his name was Henry. In fact, he would die young, so he never came to the throne. But they had a spare. Everybody needs a spare called Charles. He would be the future Charles the First. And they had a daughter, Elizabeth. So the people of England, I think, were coming to appreciate that if James was their new king, there would be no succession crisis. He would come with a ready made dynasty so they wouldn't have to go through the agonies that they had suffered throughout Elizabeth's long reign when there was a very real fear of civil war. People in Elizabeth's reign still spoke about the wars of the Roses, this kind of turbulent period in the history of the English monarchy in the 1400s when the crown had changed hands six times in 30 years and it had been one won and lost on the battlefield. Nobody wanted civil war. And there was a real fear that was what was going to happen unless Elizabeth finally settled the issue of the succession. Whereas, so James, you know, he. There's not going to be that problem. And also, depressingly, I'm afraid, in his favor was the fact that he was a man. And as somebody in Elizabeth's government put it, the people of England are wishing no more Queensland. You know, this is not how it's supposed to be. Women aren't supposed to be in charge. And even though Elizabeth has made admittedly a very good job of it, you know, it's time we had a man on the throne again. And there weren't too many other male contenders by this time.
- [30:41]
B
And so that gave him then very much an advantage. And in fact, he does take the throne. Let's Talk then about what you were mentioning earlier, about the extent to which he does so successfully, because I think that's often the story that we hear is, as you said, many of contenders are gone by then. You know, James might have been feared because of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, but she's been taken care of. And we usually talk about the problems of James as King of England later, not necessarily this point, but can you take us to the kind of moment of succession in the first few years? Were there still concerns about potential rivals or alternatives? You mentioned earlier that kind of. Elizabeth gave him advice that he ignored and maybe he shouldn't have. So what's happening once he kind of succeeds, it's not all shiny.
- [31:29]
C
It's not all shiny. Although James did a healthy amount of rewriting history, as we'll hear. So you're quite right, we tend to hear about maybe the difficulties later on, but actually it was pretty turbulent beginning to his reign. Initially, it seems most people were pretty pleased that it was James. I think there was a sense of relief that at least somebody had been proclaimed king peacefully and, as I said, you know, of the right gender. And then James came south to his new kingdom and pretty soon upset just about everybody. He wasn't what they were expecting. If only he had taken Elizabeth's advice to to play the king, things might have turned out differently. But as it was, James didn't really see the need for all the elaborate ceremony of the Tudor court. He lived mostly in private and he courted a lot of scandal and unease by spending all his time behind closed doors with his male favourites. So even though he's a married man, of course there was gossip and as we now know, rightly so, he neglected state business to go hunting. He clashed with Parliament very quickly and the main clash in his very first Parliament was because James just assumed that because I'm King of England and Scotland, we can now just formally unite the two kingdoms. What he hadn't realized is that neither kingdom wanted this and in particular, the English Parliament did not want to be united with Scotland. So they opposed him and James. It was a real shock to the system, I think, and he sort of upbraided them because this wasn't how things were done in Scotland. The Scottish Parliament knew their place and they would fall in with the wishes of the King, but the English Parliament didn't. So there was a real clash of cultures there. And very soon, we're talking a matter of months after James's accession, there were plots against him and the most notorious plot took shape in 1605 and of course was the Gunpowder Plot, where a group of Catholic gentlemen, that's significant because James persecuted Catholics far more than Elizabeth ever did. They gathered together and they came up with this audacious plan to, as they put it, blow the Scottish King to the heavens. They wanted rid of James and his entire government. So they amassed a huge amount of gunpowder, placed it in a cellar underneath Parliament, and when James was due to arrive for the state opening, their plan was to light the fuse and blow the King and his government smithereens. They came so close to success, actually, just a few hours before Parliament was due to open, Guy Fawkes was found with that huge amount of gunpowder and the whole thing was foiled. But it had been a close run thing and it really rattled James and there were other signs that he wasn't popular. Arbela Stewart, his. His great rival for the English throne, she was starting to make trouble pretty quickly. She was plotting a secret marriage to somebody else who had a claim, the grandson of Lady Catherine Grey, a man called William Seymour. So she was seen as a threat and she was still very popular in England. So actually, the early years of James were very, very dicey indeed. They were precarious. And I think a real sign of this is that whereas in Elizabeth's later years, people had started turn their gaze from her and it was said that the people of England were weary of an old woman's government. Suddenly it was come back. Elizabeth and all things. Elizabeth were celebrated every year. They would mark her accession day well into James's reign. And I do think it's quite telling that, you know what the popular ballads of the time were. And one of the most popular ballads went like this. A Tudor. A Tudor. We've had Stuarts enough. None ever reigned like Queen Bess in her wrath. So, you know, it's kind of suddenly the rose tinted glasses come on and everybody loves Elizabeth, wish that she was back in the land of the living and they really don't like the man who has succeeded her.
- [35:50]
B
Huh. That is very interesting indeed, especially given the sorts of things that were said when she wasn't making a decision about succession. You know how much public opinion changes. But of course, this isn't, as we've both mentioned, the story that we usually tell. So why not?
- [36:08]
C
Yes, so when James was very sort of new on the throne, just the year 1608, he'd only been King of England for five years, he was already feeling the pressure and he already felt like he was clinging to power by his fingertips, as I said, the Gunpowder Plot in particular had rattled him. And what he was hearing were whispers that actually he wasn't the rightful successor. People were starting to question whether really he should have taken the throne because Elizabeth had died in very private circumstances at Richmond palace, surrounded by just a few of her close advisors. And they were the ones who told everyone that James was the one she wanted as king. And people were starting to express some doubt about this. So James needed Elizabeth's retrospective approval for his accession. He was never going to get that in her own handwriting because, as we now know, she died without naming him. So what he did, he heard about this, this historian called William Camden, who had written an entire history of Elizabeth during her own lifetime. Now, William Camden was actually a very well respected historian, very meticulous in his research. He'd written an acclaimed book, Britannia, all about the British Isles, many years earlier. And in the later years of Elizabeth's reign, Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth's chief minister, had commissioned Camden to write a history of Elizabeth's reign. So the Queen was getting old and I think Burleigh appreciated this is the time to reflect on what an astonishing reign it's been. Camden never wanted the job, can I just say, and I don't blame him, a poison chalice it is to write about somebody still living as Elizabeth was then. But, you know, you don't really disobey Lord Burleigh. So he wrote a very, very well researched history of Elizabeth up to and including her death. And then because she was dead and because a new king was on the throne, he quietly buried his history and hoped it would never see the light of day, it would never be published. But then James heard about this history and he spied an opportunity. And so in 1608, he called a meeting with Camden and he ordered him to go back and rewrite certain sections of his history and so that the whole book could be published. And he wanted full editorial control. This is obvious because we, we have Camden's correspondence and he's, it's full of complaints to his, his close friend and confidant, a fellow historian, saying, look, I'm having to rewrite history here on the King's orders. I'm having to fabricate things, I'm having to tell lies and it clearly tortures Paul Camden, but you can't defy the royal command. And so he does it and he sends each other sort of chapter off to James as he's finished it and it comes back full of crossings out and demands that it be rewritten and, and then eventually the first installment was published in 1615. That only goes up to the year 1587, the execution of James's mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, which by the way, has been written again in Mary's favor, much more complimentary than Camden's first draft. And then the second installment, the second and final installment that covers the succession, what happened on Elizabeth's deathbed, that doesn't appear for another 10 years. And actually by the time it's published, both Camden and James are dead. So it doesn't help James, it will help his reputation for the next 400 years. But Camden has been quite clever. You know, he knows that he can't defy the king, but he takes his merry old time in writing these revisions and so manages to string it out all this time so that actually he doesn't have to live to see these lies being published. But what the British Library did was to do meticulous research with Camden's original manuscript. So most historians, vast majority of them, and I count myself in that number, have used the published version, just thinking it must be pretty close to the manuscript. But the British Library looked at the volumes and volumes of Camden's original notes and text and what they noticed is that many pages, in fact 200 pages, had been pasted over with a new page and new text. And so using very clever new technology with sort of transmitted light is a bit like x raying a document. They were able to see the words underneath. And that's when they got to the truth. And that's when they realized that Elizabeth, contrary to what Camden said, which was I will have none but the King of Scots to succeed me, she said nothing at all. She died, leaving the entire succession, the entire future of England, unresolved, deliberately. And that is the earth shattering discovery. I mean, you know, there's a tendency to, to kind of use sound bites and exaggerate, but honestly, this is the most profound discovery I can remember in, in my sort of 35 years of being a historian. And I just think it's, it is, it changes everything we thought we knew. Because of course then you think of all the what ifs. So, okay, if she didn't name James, then what if his rival Arbella had come to the throne and who would we have on the throne now? And you know, there it, you can carry it to extremes and it is just so important, this discovery and, and that's really why I had to write this book.
- [41:59]
B
Now that you've explained to us all the context, it does make a Lot more sense. Kind of why I can imagine you getting that email going, wait, hang on a second. What is going on here? And I mean, even just the thing of, wait A second, there's 200 pages that have been pasted over. Like, that's. I mean, again, as a historian, you see something like that, and you're like, okay, well, now investigation must occur, because that's not one page where maybe they scribbled something wrong. Like, that's something systemic going on. So really interesting to understand. Is there anything we haven't talked about yet about this project or the book or what you think of how momentous it is that you want to make sure we cover?
- [42:35]
C
Yeah, well, so there are a couple of other sort of fairly important changes that James made Camden do. The first I mentioned was kind of recasting his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, in a much more positive light. So in the original text, you know, she's the condemned, executed traitor that actually Elizabethans saw her as. But now, of course, in the. You can't have that description of the mother of the reigning monarch. So she's portrayed much more positively in the rewritten version. But the darkest chapter of all of this, pardon the pun, is that there was in 1598, a rather interesting episode involving a man called Valentine Thomas. It was almost certainly a false name, a great name, but he was a man who was arrested on the border with Scotland. And the English authorities arrested him because he'd been stealing horses. And when they questioned him, they couldn't believe it because they. They found out such a shocking tale that they had to take it straight to the Queen, because Valentine Thomas told them that not only had he been stealing horses, but he had been holding secret meetings with the King of Scots, during which he had agreed to ride south to England and assassinate Elizabeth for James. Because James, by now, by 1598, he's probably thinking, look, will this woman ever die? You know, I've given up thinking she's going to name me heir, but she seems to just be living forever. So it seems he lost patience and he commissioned Valentine Thomas to assassinate Elizabeth. Well, this was controversial at the time, but then it was sort of hushed up because in Camden's rewrite, the word assassination was changed to ill affection. So he merely said, in the new version, the King of Scots was accused of ill affection towards the Queen of England, not that he was accused of actually trying to assassinate the Queen of England, which is obviously a very different matter.
- [44:47]
B
Yeah, that's a pretty big rewrite there.
- [44:50]
C
Yes, absolutely. So that's just one of the very, very fascinating, tantalizing things that we now know were completely covered over, literally covered over by William Camden. And actually, when you look at his published book, it is so fun, you know, interesting. Once you know something, it makes you look at the whole thing differently. And in Camden's published book, they're hidden in plain sight for 400 years. But most historians, me included, have just glossed over it. He included a preface, which was an ode to truth. So this was Camden basically pleading with his readers not to believe his account and saying to them, look, you know, there is. There are many mistakes in this book, so beware. And. And he ends this preface by saying, I hope future historians will come along and write a better account than this. So it's almost like, you know, Camden is leaving these clues, which we just didn't see for 400 years. And now I've gone back and reread Camden, of course, I can see he's. He's basically gagged by the king. He can't say what he wants to say, but he's sort of begging his readers not to take his accounts at face value.
- [46:04]
B
Well, that's a pretty great way to end our conversation then, because, of course, you have figured out what was in those pages and explained to us why it's such a big deal. And, of course, the book has way more detail for anyone who wants to know about exactly what happened to Arbella, amongst others. The book is titled the Stolen Treachery, Deceit, and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty, published by Grove Atlantic in 2025. And that leaves me just with a final question of Tracy. What might you be working on now that this book is out in the world?
- [46:33]
C
Well, I'm so happy to say that I'm now allowed to announce it, and I think this is the first time I've announced it to a US audience. So the book that I was sort of halfway through when this discovery came to light, and I then put it to one side, I finished earlier this year, and it's a novel, and it is about the rise and fall of one of the most famous notorious families in Tudor England, the Berlins. It's called the House of Berlin. It's coming out next year, 2026, and it will be published by Grove Atlantic. So I'm hugely excited to, as of today, be able to talk about it.
- [47:14]
B
How wonderful. Well, this has been a whole conversation of all sorts of exciting finds and announcements, so best of luck with that next project. And, of course, thank you for being here to tell us about the stolen crown.
- [47:26]
C
It's been a huge pleasure. Thank you so much again for inviting me, and I've really loved our chat, and I really hope your listeners have too much.