As Queen Elizabeth I lay dying in 1603, the familiar story that she named her Scottish cousin James VI as her successor has been a staple of histories of the Tudor-Stuart transition. New analysis of a foundational chronicle, and a reassessment by historian Tracy Borman, now call that scene into question and underscore how contested the succession actually was.
Curators at the British Library subjected William Camden’s Annales: The True and Royall History of the Famous Empresse Elizabeth to enhanced imaging in 2023. The imaging revealed that significant portions of Camden’s text had been altered after initial composition: pages were pasted over original leaves, additions were written between lines and in a different hand. Some of the later insertions appear to have been made by Camden himself and others by the antiquarian Robert Cotton. Borman says those changes included the dramatic account of Elizabeth’s purported deathbed anointing of James as heir, a passage she describes as a later embellishment intended to present the succession as uncontroversial.
Borman, drawing on the British Library’s forensic findings, argues that the conventional narrative — of a dying Elizabeth declaring "I will have none other" and bequeathing the throne to James — is not a contemporaneous eyewitness record but a later construction. The amended passages, she writes, were designed to smooth the passage of the Scottish king onto the English throne by framing his accession as foreordained rather than the product of behind-the-scenes negotiation and rivalry.
The book challenges the long-held image of a settled succession by emphasising the number and plausibility of alternative claimants to the English crown at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Those potential rivals included Lady Arbella Stuart and Lady Katherine Grey, both of royal blood; Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon; and, historically, Philip II of Spain, who had co-reigned with Mary I and retained claims and ambitions in English affairs. Borman notes that Elizabeth repeatedly refused to name an heir and that her silence was a deliberate political act: naming a successor would have shifted power to a prospective court of a new monarch and left her politically exposed.
Elizabeth’s decisions about challengers and claimants, Borman writes, were shaped by decades of political danger. As the daughter of Anne Boleyn she had been declared illegitimate under Henry VIII before being restored in the line of succession, and many English Catholics continued to see Mary, Queen of Scots, as the rightful sovereign. Elizabeth kept Mary under house arrest for nearly 20 years and authorised her execution in 1587. That act, Borman argues, both removed a claimant and intensified the peril Elizabeth faced, reinforcing her inclination to manage rivals through exile, imprisonment or calculated marital and court appointments rather than by public naming.
Borman recounts several episodes that illustrate the fraught environment: Katherine Grey’s punishment and imprisonment in 1561 for marrying without the queen’s consent; Arbella Stuart’s isolation to prevent the formation of a rival dynasty; and the careful handling of Henry Hastings, who was kept close to court yet never entrusted with an overt endorsement. The historian also points to Elizabeth’s 1580s and 1590s political culture, in which a statute made discussion of the succession treason yet gossip and plotting about heirs continued widely in taverns, courts and private correspondence.
Even after James VI of Scotland was proclaimed James I of England in 1603 and the crowns were united, Borman stresses, stability did not immediately follow. Anti-Scottish sentiment surfaced in England, and Catholic activism revived. The 1605 Gunpowder Plot, in which conspirators led by Guy Fawkes planned to blow up Parliament and to elevate a child member of the royal family as a puppet, demonstrated lingering fractures. Borman links the later political convulsions of the Stuart era to the fact that the Stuarts’ hold on the English throne had, in her view, rested on uneasy foundations.
James’s accession did not settle long-standing dynastic and confessional disputes. His son Charles I was executed in 1649 amid civil war, and England entered an 11-year republican interlude. Borman suggests those outcomes were made more likely by a succession whose legitimacy had been presented as clearer than it actually was.
Borman does not claim to have uncovered previously unknown documentary sources. Rather, she reinterprets existing material in light of the British Library’s imaging work and argues that earlier historians relied heavily on Camden’s Annales — a text now shown to have been subject to later manipulation. Her book thus represents a reassessment of how later editorial choices shaped the historical narrative that generations of scholars and the public have accepted.
Scholars who study early modern England have long debated the politics of Elizabethan succession. The British Library’s technical findings provide fresh evidence that some of the most influential contemporary narratives were not fixed records but malleable documents, altered in ways that had political consequences. Borman’s work invites historians to revisit the late Tudor transition with caution about the provenance and editorial history of key sources and with renewed attention to the range of figures who might have claimed the throne had circumstances differed.
The reassessment underscores the contested nature of monarchical succession in early modern Britain: official silence, private plotting and the reshaping of records all played parts in crafting a story that, for centuries, presented the transfer of power in 1603 as smoother than it may actually have been.