The succession to the throne after the death of the last Tudor was an issue which hung over the entire Elizabethan period. It was at the centre of the crisis of 1569-72, the various debates over the queen’s marriage (most notably in recent historiography the Anjou match), the fate of Mary Stuart, the ‘monarchical republican’ interregnum plan of the mid 1580s, and much else. Recently, as historians have explored the complexities of the ‘long English Reformation’, the elements of continuity within Catholicism, and the febrile debates between and within various religious persuasions, this uncertainty over the fate of the religious settlement has added a further dimension to the tendency to see the reign as dominated by anxiety for the future.

This volume reflects these concerns, and also draws on the close interest recently paid to the tensions within and beyond the regime during the 1590s. Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes must be congratulated for bringing together a very strong lineup of authors in this volume of fifteen contributions. The editors themselves contribute two jointly-written initial chapters: an historiographical introduction of the issue and a substantial chapter revisiting the succession in the period up to the Armada; both are very useful surveys. Furthermore, each contributes a solo essay. Kewes’s fine essay discusses the attitudes of puritans to James VI, illuminating the close attention to events, the manoeuvres of activists and the wheels within wheels all set off by the incomplete and contested religious settlement, while Doran’s discusses the consequences of James’s Scottishness.

Catholic themes recur throughout the book; an illustration of just how far Catholic history has become part of the mainstream of early modern British historiography. One of the most interesting features on the political scene in Elizabeth’s last decade, the Archpriest controversy and its ramifications, receives extensive treatment in two essays. Peter Lake and Michael Questier revisit the controversy in the context of the succession, pointing out that one of the effects of the Appellants’ espousal of James’s claims, and of the Elizabethan regime’s support for the Appellants, was that the regime was ‘sending very public ... reassurances northwards that James was indeed now the man’ (p. 85). At the same time the Appellants were making their pitches as good, obedient subjects of the state to both the outgoing and incoming monarchs. The dedicatee of the volume, Patrick Collinson, in his last published work, deals with the role of Richard Bancroft, bishop of London and hammer of the puritans, in the Archpriest controversy, and the relevance of the succession to that involvement. This is something of a companion piece to his book on Richard Bancroft, and, in contrast to Lake and Questier, Collinson prefers to draw the most straightforward available conclusion: that Bancroft was seeking to divide the English Catholics, and that the significance of this for the succession was probably only a secondary concern. This of course leaves open the question of whether other elements in the regime had wider objectives, as Lake and Questier argue.

Both Alexandra Gajda and Thomas McCoog consider the claims that Robert Cecil and his allies, Lords Buckhurst and Howard of Effingham, considered a Spanish successor, though neither is wholly conclusive. McCoog also shows how indecision on the part of Spain and the papacy led to the failure to mount a serious effort on behalf of a Catholic candidate against James. Furthermore, as Alexander Courtney shows, the crypto-Catholic Lord Henry Howard played a key role alongside Sir Robert Cecil in the correspondence with James which made a smooth succession possible. Again, these were all signs of the continued influence of Catholics in public life, a reminder of the salience of Catholic ideas, Catholic critiques and the potential of Catholic action even at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Indeed, the role of Robert Persons, recurs in virtually every chapter, showing how far his notorious Conference about the Next Succession set many of the terms of debate.

Broader archipelagic and European contexts are also covered. Rory Rapple considers the neglected topic of the impact of the uncertainty over the succession on the ongoing wars in Ireland. His thought-provoking essay finds several suggestive implications of succession-oriented thinking on the complex web of motives among the participants in Ireland. He suggests that the rebel earl of Tyrone’s motive was ultimately to secure himself a bargaining position when the crucial moment arrived, and demonstrates how thoroughly the succession permeated political life, with the likes of Tyrone, Essex, James and others setting themselves up as brokers to help solve the problems they had often created themselves.

This volume’s achievement is not so much to radically revise the major elements of our understanding of the transition between monarchs in 1603. Probably its greatest contribution in this regard is to stress the uncertainty—the doubtfulness—of the matter, and how late in the reign that persisted. In that respect it is slightly regrettable that no author chose to essay a counterfactual—what other candidate might realistically have succeeded? What it does most enjoyably, however, is to offer a wonderful cross-section of the complexities of the political universe of Elizabethan England: monarchical, religious, aristocratic, urban, British, Irish and European ideas and motives pulling in different directions as individuals and groups sought to defend their interests. This is mostly practical politics; there is little abstract political thinking, as Blair Worden points out in his Afterword; Malcolm Smuts’s analysis of John Hayward’s political thought is the major exception. Essays by Arnold Hunt, Richard McCabe and Richard Dutton on the ways the succession crept in to (and crept out of) sermons, rumour and literature reinforce this. This close, detailed attention to political conjunctions and their implications for different sections of society shows very clearly how divisive and dangerous the succession and the religious and political future of England remained in Elizabeth’s later years.