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Scottish Mary’s indisputable legitimacy, allied to her Tudor blood, made her, if not, as many thought, the rightful inheritor to Mary Tudor, at least the heir presumptive to the English crown.
    In a 1559 “Report concerning King Philip of Spain” for the Signory, the Venetian ambassador Michele Suriano declared that the
    only hope [the Spanish king] has of remaining friendly with [Elizabeth]...is her distrust of the French, who have pretensions to her kingdom through the Queen of Scotland, as a descendant from a sister of King Henry, and the nearest to him in legitimate succession, should [Elizabeth] be adjudged ineligible by reason of having been born while the legitimate wife of her father was still alive.
    He concluded, erroneously, that England would likely always remain in alliance with Spain because it represented the lesser of two evils compared to France—“which already possesses Calais and Boulogne this side of England, and the kingdom of Scotland on the other,” through Mary’s marriage to Francis II. 30 He was not to know that this expectation would be confounded by Francis II’s death in 1560 and the political implosion that resulted from the French religious wars, endemic from 1560 onward. The first returned Mary Stuart to her Scottish kingdom as sole ruler and, at least, reduced the extent of French influence there; the long-term effect of the second was to make Spain once again appear, as it had in the days of Wyatt’s rebellion, as England’s more determined and powerful enemy.
    Thus, at Elizabeth’s accession, from the point of view of what Patrick Collinson has memorably dubbed the “Protestant ascendancy,” England confronted a Catholic hydra whose chief heads were the pope, and his sons the French and Spanish kings. 31 To mobilize support for Protestantism and English national autonomy, as well as Elizabeth’s queenship, English polemicists and councilors of state began to depict Elizabeth as Mary Tudor’s antithesis, personally and politically, in order to instantiate a “good queen, bad queen” opposition. In pursuing this strategy they could draw on anti-Marian polemic written during Mary Tudor’s reign by Marian exiles, especially the “resistance theorists” Christopher Goodman and John Knox. In  How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd of their Subjects  Goodman attacked Mary’s legitimacy as a means of denying that she was or could ever be a lawful queen. She was “bastard by birth,” begotten by Henry’s VIII’s “adulterous incest” with Catherine of Aragon—bastard by birth, bastard by nature. What surprise then that once exalted to the throne Mary “joined herself to adulterous Philip, the Spanish king: to whom she hath, and doth continually labour to betray the whole kingdom”? Men who regarded God’s strictures should have known that, once in power, the “ungodly serpent” would turn against Christ, the law, and the nation. (Elizabeth, by contrast—the “lawful begotten daughter” of Henry VIII and the supremely virtuous Anne Boleyn—appears as “that godly lady, and meek lamb, void of all Spanish pride, and strange blood.”) 32
    There was, however, one major drawback to this anti-Marian critique. Protestants of Goodman’s and Knox’s ilk set their faces against female rule  tout court , regardless of the religious conviction or personal credentials of the queen in question. For Goodman, Englishmen’s pusillanimous willingness to promote Mary Tudor to the throne defrauded the country of a “lawful king”—but in a kingdom conducted in accordance with God’s revealed will that title would not have devolved to Elizabeth in any event. Even if the next blood right heir had been, as he claimed that Elizabeth was, impeccably born and bred, at Edward VI’s death the task of godly men should have been to seek out the man “from amongst your brethren,” who was “meetest...to have had the government over you,” not under any circumstances to have