The Assassination of Shakespeare's Patron: Investigating the Deat ...

Why? The underlying reason is simple. If you were an atheist or a practicing Catholic, you did not believe that God had placed Queen Elizabeth on the throne. You did not, that is, believe in the doctrine of divine right – for her, anyway. If you were an atheist, you held that there was no divinity, and if there was no divinity, there was no divine right. If you were a Catholic, you believed in divine right—but only for a Catholic.¹ Depending on the exact year and your exact location in the kingdom, you might be able to get away with being a privately believing Catholic who agreed to go to the state church—and who regularly did so. (People were watching to see if you went to church or not, and they reported what they observed.) Even so, you were always under government suspicion and always being watched.

One good reason for the government’s suspicion was the “Deposition Ruling” that was issued by Pope Pius V in 1570 when he excommunicated Elizabeth. That ruling—much like the ayatollah’s of the late twentieth century when he issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie—called on Catholics to depose the Queen, killing her if necessary, and replace her with a Catholic and only a Catholic. The hit order was essential in the pope’s eyes because it would be a necessary if not sufficient condition to help ensure that a Catholic actually succeeded Elizabeth, rather than waiting for her to die and then trying to have a voice in the succession. With the latter option, the Catholics knew they might well lose—as, with the ascent of James in 1603, with no deposition attempt on Elizabeth’s life having succeeded, they did.

This state of affairs meant, for Elizabeth’s chief minister Lord Burghley, that Job One was to keep the Queen alive and on the throne for as long as her natural life should last. Elizabeth was terribly (and famously) paranoid about all of this, and she had excellent reason to be. From the late 1580s until her death in 1603, she was the subject of virtually countless assassination plots and other deposition threats—and the danger continued for two years into James’ reign, when the Gunpowder Plot failed in 1605 because Burghley’s son, Sir Robert Cecil, the heir to his father’s former job, found out about it and foiled it. So obsessed with the matter was Elizabeth that she got passed, or greatly strengthened, two important laws that were relevant to the succession.