In Collinson’s view, ‘the most telling implication of the memorials and debates of 1572 is that monarchy is taken to be not an indelible and sacred anointing but a public and localised office, like any other form of magistracy’. Among the evidence for this claim, Collinson notes that the bishops voiced their approval of the deposition of Mary by describing her as the ‘late Queene of Scottes’. At the very least these debates reveal a curious cognitive dissonance among the advocates of Mary’s execution, who could claim to be defenders of ‘Gode’s monarchie and his annoynted iurisdiction’ but could also claim, in the same breath, that Mary was 'nowe iustely no queene’ because of her unrighteous acts; and they may even illustrate, as Collinson suggests, ‘a kind of double-distilled resistance theory’. And yet, the debates concerned the proposed execution, on the authority of an anointed sovereign, of Mary as an enemy who deserved punishment, in the bishops’ words, whether she ‘be queene or subiecte, be stranger or cittizen, be kinne or no kinne’; and the Lords did not really engage with the thornier questions of divine-right kingship and the holy anointing of sovereigns. After she was eventually executed, Mary was carried to her burial in Peterborough cathedral in a hearse with an escutcheon bearing the ‘Crowne imperiall’. After all, the decision to execute her was made not by critics of monarchy but by men whose outlook was pragmatic and whose arguments were driven by the predetermined conviction that she must die. The Lords’ approval of the deposition of Mary and their recommendation of her execution did not indicate a baronial view of monarchy in general, since their understanding of Scottish kingship was informed by the principle, formulated in the thirteenth century, that the English monarch exercised overlordship over the Scottish.
McGovern, Jonathan. “Was Elizabethan England Really a Monarchical Republic?” Historical Research, vol. 92, no. 257, Aug. 2019, pp. 515–528.
@bunniesandbeheadings The quote I was talking about.
