The Lyte Pedigree by Thomas Lyte, The British Library (detail)
‘Scotland's James VI 'stole the English Crown’ ran a recent headline in The Telegraph. (1)
According to historian Tracy Borman, who has a written a biography of James, his accession was suspect as his predecessor Elizabeth I had never formally named him as her heir.
Whatever was the legality of James’s kingship, what was indisputable was that throughout her long reign, the question of the succession was a touchy subject to Elizabeth. She was reluctant to say who should come after her, even when it became clear in her advancing age that she would never marry and bear a child.
Even on her deathbed, Elizabeth evaded the issue. Although a story had circulated that in her last days she had indeed nominated the Scottish James as the next monarch of England – “Who should succeed me but a king... but our cousin of Scotland”? she said, it was almost certainly a fabrication. The statement was attributed to Sir Robert Cecil and his party, who in the queen’s declining years were secretly paving the way for James’s accession. (2)
Although the king was largely greeted with enthusiasm by his new English subjects — the people always looked to the rising than the setting sun, Elizabeth herself had even admitted — his right to rule England had not always been certain.
According to the will of Henry VIII, James’s Stuart line had been barred from the English succession due to Henry’s acrimonious relationship with his nephew — James’s grandfather — James V of Scotland. That left the crown to Henry’s sister Mary Tudor’s descendants. However, Elizabeth I muddied the waters. Mary’s great grandson Edward Seymour was declared illegitimate by the queen who loathed Edward’s mother, Lady Katherine Grey. Katherine had made a clandestine marriage behind her back.
Even with Edward Seymour disbarred, James still had rivals lasting into Elizabeth’s later years. There were other descendants of Mary Tudor to consider, and there was the royally connected Earl of Huntingdon. And there was also the problem of Lady Arbella Stuart, a cousin whom James would later keep under lock and key.
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Isabella Clara Eugenia by Jan Muller after Peter Paul Rubens, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
James was particularly alarmed by the Infanta of Spain, Isabella Clara Eugenia. Like Huntingdon, she was a descendant of King Edward III, and as a Roman Catholic, the hope of those of the old faith in England. In 1594, a tract entitled A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England was published arguing that Isabella, not James, had the strongest claim. (3) To make matters worse, in 1601, Robert Devereux, the hotheaded Earl of Essex, led a rebellion, wrongly claiming that his enemy Robert Cecil was plotting to place Isabella on the throne upon the death of Elizabeth. But all this came to naught. When the old queen finally expired in March 1603, James peacefully assumed the English crown.
To firmly establish his right and to celebrate the new Stuart regime, James used the propaganda of visual imagery. One good example is an early 17th century painting of Elizabeth ripping apart the myth of the eternally youthful Gloriana. It presented her as old and weary accompanied by Time and Death. The public at large would not have seen the painting, but the idea of ‘out with the old and in with the new’ was widely disseminated with prints celebrating the new Stuart Dynasty. Many were in the form of illustrated genealogies showing James’s descent from King Henry VII. The message was loud and clear — he was the rightful successor to the Tudors.
Elizabeth with Time and Death by an Unknown Artist, Corsham Court
The most impressive of these is the Lyte Pedigree created by the antiquarian Thomas Lyte. ‘Written in parchment and set forth in rich colours in a very large table’ (that is a panel), it was presented to the King in 1610. (4) The original has not survived, but a copy, also by Lyte, is the British Library. Unfortunately, of the original nine panels put together, only five remain. The corner pieces are missing.
The top panel is the most significant. At the apex, King James sits enthroned surrounded by portraits, descriptions and escutcheons of his ancestors and relations. On the right, he appears again with his wife Anna of Denmark, with a branch setting forth between them meant to depict their offspring Henry, Elizabeth and Charles (their images are absent in the ovals).
The Lyte Pedigree by Thomas Lyte, The British Library (detail)
Beneath the Stuarts are the Tudors, starting with likenesses of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Emerging from the couple are small circles (with very brief descriptions) of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I among others. These four monarchs are of lesser significance in the chart as James wanted to stress that he was ‘sole monarch of both kingdoms... as next and immediate heir to Henry VII and Elizabeth his queen’ through their daughter Queen Margaret of Scotland.
Of the many heraldic devices in the Lyte Pedigree, a curious one is of a crowned falcon on a stump with the legend Mihi et Mea. It is the emblem of Anne Boleyn during her brief time as queen. She appears in the chart not as an especial mark of honour, but simply for genealogical value as the mother of Elizabeth I. Jane Seymour similarly shows up as the mother of Edward VI.
The Lyte Pedigree by Thomas Lyte, The British Library (detail)
The crowned falcon is on the right
Thus the inclusion of the falcon badge seems puzzling. Given Anne’s insignificance to James, not to mention her lingering infamy — the inscription ‘Queen Anne Bullein, Marchioness of Pembroke, and eldest daughter of Thomas Bullein, Earl of Wiltshire, she was put to death 1536 in the Tower’ alludes to her execution — why was her emblem depicted in the pedigree at all? Lyte was known to be friends with fellow antiquarian William Camden and most likely read his Remains of A Greater Work. Camden had included a description of the royal bird: 'His wife Queen Anne, a happy mother of England's happiness by her most happy daughter, bare a white crowned falcon, holding a sceptre in her right talon, standing upon a golden trunk, out of the which sprouted both white and red roses, with MIHI ET MEA’. (6)
Despite Lyte’s almost certain awareness of the falcon’s association with Anne Boleyn, as a researching historian, he would also have known of its other significance — it represented her daughter Elizabeth. Despite Anne’s notoriety and what little memories she had of her mother, Elizabeth was not adverse to her memory. At the start of herreign, Anne’s image was included in a tableau at her coronation, and at the end of it, a banner of Anne’s coat-of-arms, combined with Henry VIII’s, was carried at her funeral (7). Elizabeth had even adopted her mother’s crowned falcon as her own. It appears on her virginals, on napkins at her court, and upon a book banner in combination with Elizabeth’s device of the phoenix. (8)
In spite of James's dynastic intentions to elevate the Stuarts, the presence of the falcon in the Lyte Pedigree gave acknowledgement to Elizabeth as his predecessor. But it was not only the falcon that served this purpose, to the right of it is a missing panel which would have contained verses paying tribute to the late queen. These would have been comparable to the epitaphs for Henry VII and Henry VIII (beneath a pillar surmounted by a seated female figure, probably Concordia). The falcon, as one of Elizabeth’s devices, would have been placed as a ‘supporting beast’ upon her missing epitaph, similar to that of Henry VIII’s, which had an English lion and a Welsh dragon on either side.
The Lyte Pedigree by Thomas Lyte, The British Library (detail)
At Anne Boleyn’s fall in 1536, Henry VIII had taken pains to erase traces of her. Her heraldic emblems were largely destroyed, though some have survived. (9) How interesting it is that some remnant can still be found in a document made decades after her death in the new century.
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1. The Telegraph, Aug 22, 2025.
2. Paul Johnson, Elizabeth I – A Study in Power and Intellect, Omega - Futura Publications, London, 1976, p. 436.
3. A Jacobean Antiquary Reassessed: Thomas Lyte, The Lyte Genealogy And The Lyte Jewel by Arnold Hunt, Dora Thornton, and George Dalgleish. The Antiquaries Journal, 96, 2016, p. 183.
4. Ibid., p. 174.
5. Anne Boleyn is generally considered to be the younger daughter, though some modern historians, like Retha Warnicke (The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), propose that Anne’s sister Mary was the younger.
6. A Jacobean Antiquary Reassessed, p. 173. William Camden, Remains of A Greater Work, printed by G.E. for Simon Waterson, London, 1605, pp. 163-164.
7. Roland Hui, Anne Boleyn: An Illustrated Life of Henry VIII's Queen, Barnsley, Pen and Sword Books, 2023, pp. 180-181.
8. ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Napkin’, Tudorfaces blog: https://tudorfaces.blogspot.com/2013/06/queen-elizabeths-napkin.html. Elizabeth’s regard for her mother was also evident in a locket-ring which included miniature portraits of the two women together: ‘The Chequers Locket Ring: A Mother and Daughter Reunited?’, Tudorfaces blog: https://tudorfaces.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-chequers-locket-ring-mother-and.html.
9. For example, the falcon badge in the choir screen in King's College Chapel, Cambridge.
