ABSTRACT
There was at least one feature of Elizabeth's reign that remained constant throughout her reign. Although Elizabeth often invoked the memory of her father, her references to her mother were very few indeed. Yet throughout her reign she consistently promoted her relatives on her mother's side, in marked contrast to her treatment of the descendants of her father's two sisters. That attention was particularly the case for the offspring of her mother's sister, Mary Carey, and, as several examples in Robert Carey's Memoirs illustrate, she also demanded that they always behaved in a manner befitting their connection to the throne. Carey's detailed account of her sustained fury when he married, for love, a woman of little fortune offers a typical account of the treatment Elizabeth meted out to those who had fallen short of their worth as her relations. When she finally agreed to see him again, her interview with him was, he wrote, ‘stormy and terrible, which I passed over in silence’, and he simply refused to get off his knees until he had her pardon. 1 More generally she made good use of her mother's relatives. She always had at least one Carey relative on the Privy Council, and family members were several times entrusted with very secret tasks and communications with other royalty.
