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‘any meaningful discussion of the Elizabethan Court as an institution must begin by recognising its unique features. These were derived less from Elizabeth’s sex, for the precedents for the Court of a queen regnant had been provided by her sister’s brief reign, than from her virginity. Of direct relevance to the present theme is the basic fact that Elizabeth’s Court was peculiarly economical.‘

‘the Leicesterian monopoly of the Elizabethan Court was a mirage, for it reflected the hegemony of a broader political élite of which both Burghley and Leicester were part... in the decades that preceded the accession of Elizabeth a major reshaping of the English political élite in which religious allegiances clearly played a part. This in turn created the social and political basis of the Elizabethan Court.‘

‘The existence of a stable inner ring deprived the council as a body of decisive influence, as was revealed by the failure of attempts to play the council off against the Queen (most notably by Mr Secretary Davison over the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587). Conciliar voted counted for little: policy was made by the Queen in consultation with her intimates.’

‘So, in the autumn of 1570, negotiations were set on foot for a marriage between Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou. Apparently, there were no dregs of Elizabeth’s old passion for Leicester left to disturb her resolution. The romance had sobered down into a sentimental friendship - a sweet memory of the past, and no more. She was entirely the Queen in this wooing. She was probably sincere in her resolve to marry’

‘No doubt her kingdom was to be Protestant, and in times of danger Cecil and her keener councillors were allowed to harry disobedient Catholics. But she wanted no inquisitorial practices, opening windows into men’s souls. Outward conformity was enough; a man’s conscience should be his own, not the State’s concern.‘

‘The Duke of Norfolk and his brother-in-law, the Earl of Sussex, were the leaders of the anti-Leicester party. Fortune and influence, possibly life itself in addition to the sweets of it, might be endangered if Leicester became King; their opposition was therefore sleepless and bitter. In June, 1565, and again a year later, Sussex and Leicester were at open feud’

‘The previous midnight Cecil had been hastily summoned from London to Hampton Court, and there the Council, faced as they imagined with Elizabeth’s impending death, anxiously discussed who should succeed her. All that emerged was a conflict of opinion. Some were for Lady Catherine Grey, some for the Earl of Huntingdon, apparently none - or none openly - for Mary Queen of Scots.’

‘by the feeling that a foreign match would be unpopular. Her doubts might have disappeared if Court and Council had given a unanimous lead; but some were for one candidate, some for another. The result was that she kept on hesitating, ever ready to dilate on the attractions of a maiden life, baffling everyone with her art and wit and coquetry.‘

‘The country had already made its first experiment of a woman ruler; it was anything but a happy augury for the second. ‘I am assured’ wrote John Knox in his notorious First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, ‘that God hath revealed to some in this our age that it is more than a monster in nature that a woman should reign and bear empire above man.’‘

‘Elizabeth was Protestant and in her Englishry was no foreign strain. If Mary died childless she would be their ruler, and the more rash were tempted to make such a future certain and speed its coming. It was a position of infinite difficulty. Let Elizabeth’s prudence be divine, she could not keep her name from every hot-head’s lips; and sisterly affection could not live in such an atmosphere.’

‘Crucial was the issue of penalties. Her sister’s religious settlement had been enforced by the terrible penalties of heresy; her father’s by the different but equally horrible tortures of treason. Elizabeth’s acts of supremacy and uniformity, on the other hand, prescribed a sliding scale of fines, imprisonment and deprivation of office for their breach. Heresy was narrowly defined and rarely employed’

‘Far from delaying appointments to office or the council, she made both as rapidly as possible. And far from pretending that Mary’s council was still in existence, she announced its dissolution in the most public fashion possible... When Elizabeth thought it was time for clarity, no one could be blunter. And when she was persuaded that she should be decisive, no one could act faster or more ruthlessly.’

‘She owed, he now explained at length, the acknowledgement of her right to the throne neither to the dying Queen nor to the council, but solely to the King of Spain. It was the worst thing he could have said. It was fear of seeming to ‘owe’ the English throne to Spain which had made Elizabeth reject the Savoy marriage so vigorously. She was equally vehement in repudiating Philip’s patronage now.’

‘First there was the protracted humiliation of Mary’s bogus pregnancy. Then came her husband’s desertion, which was soon compounded by rumours of Philip’s promiscuous womanising... There was, in short, a paradox. A woman could take power. But the greatest risks to her holding it would come from the fulfilment of her ordinary, womanly functions of wife and mother.‘

‘We can (and should) imagine the Queen’s dismissive pity as she thought of her sister. Elizabeth was doubtfully legitimate, unreliable in her faith, unmarried, and likely to remain so. She was the sterile issue of an abortive union, while she, Mary, was heavy with destiny and the child who would guarantee the Catholic future of England.’

‘But, despite the shadow of treason, Elizabeth remained royal and whenever Bedingfield spoke with her indoors, even to reprove her or deny her wishes, he did so kneeling. Kneeling is not a strong negotiating position. Elizabeth exploited her advantage shamelessly and vindictively.’

‘But Wyatt’s public testimony against Elizabeth - innocent though it was - provided the pretext for a sudden escalation in the pressure on her. On Friday, 16 March, the day after Wyatt’s trial, the council came in a body to Elizabeth and formally charged her with involvement in both Wyatt’s and the Carews’ conspiracies. Elizabeth vehemently denied the charges.‘

‘Protestant and she was ‘the second inheritor of the crown’. But she was also passionately loyal to her father’s memory and wishes. And she had an unshakeable sense of dynastic legitimacy. Probably without asking - which would anyway have been dangerous - the King knew that she would refuse to have any share in his scheme. Elizabeth would not agree to be the usurper of Mary’s claim. So Elizabeth had to go as well.‘

‘But then Thomas Seymour had no mean opinion of himself. He was not unintelligent. But his heart ruled his head and his ambition ruled his heart. And his ambition was insatiable. He was physically impressive, too... Inevitably, Elizabeth fell for him. She did not quite sacrifice her prudence. But her prudishness and protestations of virtue were exposed as a sham.’

‘the sort of thing which an alert three-year-old would notice and question. It also had a practical impact as the child quickly outgrew her now static wardrobe. Within a few weeks, she had literally nothing to wear. We can imagine her bitter, childish humiliation; we can also speculate that it was to avoid its repetition that the adult queen was to fill her wardrobes to overflowing with hundreds of dresses.’

‘how inconceivable, how monstrous even, was the notion of an unmarried and childless queen. For a queen was a breeding machine, or, as the Spanish ambassador put it only a little more elegantly, ‘the entire future turns on the accouchement of the queen’. Elizabeth’s career was to mount a magnificent challenge to this received wisdom; her mother’s, on the other hand, was to be an awful example of its truth.’

‘It darted through her with the speed of an arrow that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!’

Reading this again for university, although I am not sure if I would really count it the first time as it was an audiobook and so I couldn't take proper notes.

‘The crisis of 1482-3 had shown that violent protest, no matter how well supported, could not succeed unless the king were coerced indefinitely or eliminated, and at that time few could have considered going so far. By 1488, however, King James had shown that he had not altered his policies of the previous decade, his unpopularity had spread even into the ranks of his own council’

‘James III’s recovery of power in January 1483 brought to an end a period of complex political manoeuvring unique in fifteenth century Scottish history. The king had been brutally humiliated by his kin; his brother had proposed to take his place and, in the early stages of the crisis, his uncles may have considered murdering him. The men in whom he had reposed his trust in the ‘70s had proved to be broken reeds’

‘James started to introduce black money about 1480, the year that the Anglo-Scottish war broke out. Thus, by the summer of 1482, the debased money had been in circulation long enough for the king to have lost the support, not so much of the nobility, but rather of the merchant class and those lower in the social scale. As a result of the money, the chronicler reminds us, ‘many pure folk deit of hunger’.‘

‘From July 1475 the English king ceased to be Louis XI’s enemy and became his pensioner; and the death of Charles the Bold of Burgundy in January 1477 upset the power structure in northern Europe and made James III’s pretensions to act as mediator between France and Burgundy - a policy originally urged by parliament in 1473 - impractical if not absurd.‘

‘Provided that Prince James and Cecilia were married within six months of their reaching marriageable age, the treaty was intended to bind England and Scotland together in everlasting friendship. During James III’s lifetime, Cecilia was to be endowed with all the lands, rents and revenues of the ‘olde heritage of the prince sone and heire of Scotland’’

‘the price which he paid was the creation of specific enemies without at the same time adding to the number of his friends. In the last analysis, the issues of Coldingham, the Lennox and the Stewarty of Strathearn remained unresolved until the following reign; for James III himself, they constituted a nagging political ulcer which finally burst in the spring of 1488.’