ABSTRACT
Historians have long recognized that the succession question was a central – maybe even the central – political issue of the early and mid-Elizabethan period. The works of Sir John Neale, Mortimer Levine, Patrick Collinson and Stephen Alford have all in their different ways illuminated our understanding of the issue’s importance in political life before the execution of Mary Stewart.1 Neale examined closely the role of the succession question in parliament, especially the sessions of 1563 and 1566, while Levine investigated the pamphlet debates of the mid-1560s. Alford showed how the succession influenced English policy towards Scotland in the 1560s and also argued that the so-called Norfolk conspiracy was not a plot to topple Cecil but rather a political proposal designed to settle the succession question along lines that happened to be unacceptable to the principal secretary. Professor Collinson, meanwhile, explored the constitutional and political significance of the Bond of Association and the interregnum scheme of 1584-5, coining the phrase ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis’ to categorize the political debates of those years.
