And this was the rub. Dudley was a nobleman of Elizabeth’s own creation. He owed everything he possessed to her. He lacked sufficient patrimonial estates of his own and a claim to a throne. In addition, he was the son of a convicted and executed traitor, since his father had been the same Duke of Northumberland who had engineered the Protestant Lady Jane Grey’s failed coup before Mary Tudor’s accession in 1553. Darnley, by comparison, was the genuine article: a scion of the royal house of Tudor whose dynastic pedigree would be unassailable if it was annexed to Mary’s own.
