ABSTRACT
The accessions of Mary Tudor, her sister Elizabeth and their cousin Mary Queen of Scots, raised questions in the mid-sixteenth century amongst contemporaries about the rights of women to inherit and exercise public office. This issue is of considerable interest to historians, but we should not overlook the fact that most of their opponents were concerned primarily with these queens’ religious policies rather than their sex. The contention that as women they could not rule was ancillary to the wider political and confessional debate between Protestants and Catholics. Furthermore, these disputes should not eclipse the significance of more informal political networks in which women had always played a part. Barbara Harris has emphasized that political historians have traditionally concentrated on institutions which excluded women, such as the privy council, Parliament, the law courts and administrative bodies. They have thus created the impression that high politics were an exclusively male concern.
