The Importance of a Male Successor

Jane was highly intelligent, well educated and committed to her Protestant faith. Her story got sort of rewritten very quickly after her death as people who had an agenda in relation to her wrote her story for their own purposes. She would have been a much more appealing prospect to the male political actors with on the English political stage if she'd been female. It's impossible to answer with any certainty but I do think it would have made a huge difference to her position. The whole question of whether or not a woman could succeed and could rule in her own right was still,. in a sense, very ambiguous at this point.