Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  It is possible that under these circumstances of three years’ onerous English captivity, Mary did allow herself to be persuaded to write the incriminating instructions and letters to Ridolfi quoted against her at Norfolk’s trial. The original of the credentials said to be given to Ridolfi by Mary and Norfolk have mysteriously disappeared.* In these instructions Mary wrote wildly concerning the miserable state of England, the cruelty of her own position, the persecutions of the Catholics, the fact that Huntingdon and Hertford (Catherine Grey’s son) were threatening her rights to the English throne, the need for the Pope to press ahead with her nullity suit, and how she intended to send James to Spain to marry him to a Spanish princess. Norfolk was described as being the head of the enterprise, and a keen guardian of the rights of the Catholics. All practical details were to be left to him; furthermore Mary castigated the French who had, she said, done absolutely nothing to help her.31 However, the evidence of Mary’s other letters, written at the same time to Mothe de la Fénelon, the French ambassador, show that she was, to say the least of it, trying to keep all the options open. She had, for example, far from given up all hopes of French assistance and in October twice approached the ambassador begging him to continue to help her and to interest the king and queen of France in her cause ‘because she had no means to help herself’.32 Nor had Mary in any way despaired of Elizabeth’s assistance: for at the same moment as her approaches to Mothe de la Fénelon, Mary was writing to the English queen, stating the full confidence she felt in Elizabeth, and her desire to have her (Mary’s) succession rights discussed in the English Parliament.33 Subsequently Mary did admit to having given some sort of financial commission to Ridolfi, but she always denied that it had been anything so specific and dangerous to England as Cecil suggested.

  The main architect of this unrealistic conspiracy, on Mary’s side, other than the serpentine Ridolfi and the irresolute Norfolk, was Mary’s envoy Leslie. Mary Stuart like most human beings was inclined to trust increasingly those whom she had trusted for a long time. Since the bishop of Ross first came to France in the spring of 1561 – when he incidentally propounded the foolish scheme for a northern Scottish invasion which Mary wisely rejected – Leslie had been an assiduous if not especially tactful servant of the queen; although he had managed to have good relations with both Darnley and Bothwell. As Mary’s ambassador in England after her imprisonment, he was certainly in a position of enormous difficulty: the point has been well made that he was expected to act as the ‘representative of a foreign ruler powerless to protect her servants but strong enough to attract discontented elements’,34 but Leslie was endowed with an unfortunate combination of energy and application – unfortunate in the sense that he lacked the essential finesse which would have enabled him to judge not only the right action to take on Mary’s behalf but also the right time to do it. His anonymous publication in London in 1569 of the Defence of the Honour of Queen Mary, which asserted her old rights to the succession, was scarcely diplomatic when the favour of Elizabeth, so famously touchy on this particular subject, was all-important to Mary.

  For all his erudition, which enabled him to write his long history of Scotland during this vital period of his stay in England, as Mary’s ambassador, Leslie never quite appreciated the point which Alva quickly perceived: a plot in favour of Mary which miscarried could be far more dangerous than no plot at all. He was also, like his mistress in certain moods, a man of impulse with a quick rash temper. Yet Mary had perforce to put enormous faith in the bishop and his summing-up of situations, as well as in his capacity to amplify her own written communications by personal interviews. Many of Mary’s letters at this period ended by promising that the bishop of Ross will further enlighten the recipient. It was unfortunate under the circumstances that by March 1571 Leslie, Mary and Norfolk were all cut off from each other, with the dubious Ridolfi acting as a go-between. Mary deeply regretted the loss of Leslie’s news bulletins, which she regarded as her window on the outside world: by the summer, the lack of ‘the daily intelligence she was wont to receive from the bishop’ was mentioned as being the thing which troubled her most.35

  If the incriminating documents are genuine, it is possible that Mary gained such a falsely rosy picture of the situation that she allowed herself to be committed on paper to an extremely hazardous venture. Such a false picture would not necessarily have been painted on purpose by Leslie to confuse Mary: it is more than likely that Leslie himself was also bewildered and muddled in his intrigues. He was not after all able to confront Mary face to face to discuss the situation verbally; dependence had to be made on letters, and letters could all too easily be intercepted. Although Maitland’s son later made harsh comments on Leslie’s character, and accused him of aiming at his own glory, and the enrichment of his bastard offspring, the situation was wide open for Cecil if he wished to lure the intriguers to their downfall by misrepresenting what each had said to the other; with Mary in prison, cut off from her servant, Leslie showed himself at first to be impetuous and later cowardly; but these qualities did not necessarily make him a villain.

  News of what was afoot began to trickle through to the English government in the late spring. Elizabeth received a private warning from the grand duke of Tuscany, who had learnt only too easily of Ridolfi’s hazardous plans. Finally and most disastrously, a certain Charles Bailly was arrested at Dover with a whole packet of books and letters sent from Ridolfi to Leslie. The connection of Leslie and Ridolfi was a fatal one for Mary, because Leslie in turn led directly to the Scottish queen, whose official envoy he was. The next step was to uncover Norfolk’s association with the whole plot, which proved easy enough when Norfolk was found to be sending money to Queen Mary’s supporters in Scotland. On 7th September Norfolk was arrested once more and placed in the Tower. More harmful still was the arrest of Leslie himself, for he produced a series of most damaging confessions, under threat of torture, which mentioned not only the foreign troops which were going to be imported into England, but also the use of papal money in the affair, some of which had been sent to the Marians in Scotland.

  On 3rd November Leslie attributed the rising in the north to continuous communication between Mary and Norfolk, and between Norfolk and the northern earls – an injurious if inaccurate diagnosis. On 8th November his interrogator, Dr Wilson, the Master of Requests, described to Cecil how Leslie had said that Mary was not fit for any husband, for she had first poisoned Francis, then consented to the murder of Darnley, and thirdly matched with the murderer Bothwell, and after that she had brought Bothwell to Carberry Hill in the hopes that he would be killed in his turn; now she was pretending marriage with the duke of Norfolk, whom Leslie believed would not have survived long in the embraces of this female Bluebeard. Such confessions, however much promoted by physical fear, hardly pointed to Leslie as a stable and loyal servant. Even Wilson, shocked at this manifestation of what he took to be Scottish ingratitude, exclaimed: ‘Lord what a people are these, what a Queen, what an Ambassador.’36 But Leslie through all his tribulations did not lack self-confidence. On 8th November, the very day on which Leslie had outlined Queen Mary’s marital career in such amazing terms, he wrote to her himself and said that he had been forced to confess everything since her letters had been produced in front of the Privy Council; nevertheless he could not help discerning the hand of providence in the discovery of the ‘design’, since Mary and her friends would be taught a sharp lesson against seeking relief by such means in the future!37 This egregious commentary on the outcome of the Ridolfi plot did not prevent Leslie from urging Mary to use all means in her power to get him released, and at the least to help him financially.

  In January 1572 the duke of Norfolk was tried for high treason. Shrewsbury was specially imported from the Midlands to take part in the trial as one of the judges, leaving Sir Ralph Sadler temporarily in charge of Queen Mary. Norfolk was condemned, and finally executed in the following June. When Queen Mary heard of the execution of ‘her Norfolk’, she crie
d bitterly and kept to her room. Bess, finding her prisoner ‘all bewept and mourning’, asked her rather tactlessly what ailed her. Mary replied with some dignity that she was sure Bess knew what the cause of her grief was, and would sympathize with her in it; as for herself, she feared lest anything she herself had written to Norfolk might have brought him to such a pass. To these modest apprehensions, Bess replied ungraciously that nothing Mary had written could have done either good or harm, since Norfolk had been tried by a fair committee of his peers – including, of course, Shrewsbury.

  Despite the snub administered by Bess, Mary had by her mere existence led Norfolk to conspiracy and death; in the same way Norfolk’s trial and execution, and the revelations of the Ridolfi plot, were of acute relevance to Mary’s position in England. It was not so much that she had lost a suitor – for there were many suitors in Europe of varying eligibility – as that her character in the eyes of the English nobility and the English Parliament now underwent a change. Popular opinion has a loud voice but a short memory. The circumstances of her arrival, now four years away, were quite forgotten in the tide of popular hatred which spread against her – this ‘monstrous dragon’ as one Member of Parliament termed her. Mary was now seen as a foreign-born Catholic spider, sitting in the centre of England spinning her webs in order to depose the English Protestant queen. The fact that she was an isolated prisoner with very little money was ignored in the light of the dangerous possibilities which the Ridolfi plot seemed to expose. It was at this point that Elizabeth herself seized her pen and wrote the famous lines on the subject of Mary, the ‘daughter of debate’, which ended:

  No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port;

  Our realm it brooks no stranger’s force,

  let them elsewhere resort

  Our rusty sword, with rest, shall first his edge employ

  To poll their tops that seek such change,

  and gape for joy.

  But although Elizabeth’s sword, rusty or otherwise, did eventually and reluctantly poll the top of Norfolk in June, despite the most ferocious baying for blood on the part of her faithful Commons, Elizabeth refused to consider the execution of Mary. In mid-June the English commissioners Shrewsbury, Delawarr and Sadler visited Mary at Sheffield and solemnly accused her of her heinous part in the Ridolfi plot as well as a list of other crimes: of having taken up arms against England, approving the papal bull of ex-communication of Elizabeth (Regnans in Excelsis), and actually claiming the crown of England. To all these charges Mary replied firmly that as a sovereign princess she could not recognize their jurisdiction over her; she requested to appear before the English Parliament to justify herself, and once more demanded to be taken into the presence of Elizabeth. In detailed answer to the charges, the queen freely admitted that she had written to the king of France, the king of Spain and the pope and others asking for help, in order to be set at liberty and restored to her own country. She admitted the original offence of bearing the English title, when she had been a girl of seventeen, but denied ever bearing it since the death of Francis, over eleven years ago, which was correct. Over the Norfolk marriage, she reiterated her genuine belief that the match had been to the general liking of England. She admitted having given a commission to Ridolfi but said that it had been of a financial nature, and strongly denied any more compromising schemes with the Italian.’38

  Despite the Scottish queen’s dignity, it was the will of Queen Elizabeth, not the answers of Queen Mary, which stayed the hand of the Commons against her in the summer of 1572. Elizabeth personally prevented the Commons from passing a bill of attainder on the Scottish queen; instead a bill was passed merely depriving Mary of her right to succeed to the English throne, and declaring her liable to a trial by peers (peers of the English realm, rather than her own peers, or equals, who would be sovereigns), should she be discovered plotting again. Most unfortunately the publication of the papal bull, Regnans in Excelsis, although not sought by Mary, and not even intended by Pius V to assist her personally, since he disapproved of her marriage to Bothwell, had begun the process of presenting her as a foreign traitor in their midst to English patriots. The massacre of the Huguenots on St Bartholomew’s Day, 24th August, 1572, at the hands of the French Catholics, led by the Guises, although once again hardly any fault of the prisoner of Sheffield Castle, only increased Mary’s unpopularity in England. ‘All men now cry out of [against] your prisoner,’ wrote Cecil ominously to Shrewsbury. But Elizabeth would not allow this tide of xenophobia to sweep away her ‘good sister and cousin’, in spite of all the revelations of Ridolfi.

  In the strange tortuous map of Mary’s relations with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s with Mary, Mary’s feelings are much better charted than those of Elizabeth, since she gave many open declarations on the subject. But just as Elizabeth’s incarceration of Mary on evidence she herself declared to be insufficient is greatly to her discredit, her preservation of Mary Stuart’s life in 1572 by personal intervention must be allowed to be to her credit. Elizabeth, like Mary, had a constitutional dislike of spilling blood. Perhaps both of them were reacting against their blood-thirsty Tudor ancestors. Elizabeth was also conscious that Mary was by now by far her closest adult relation, since the sons of the dead Catherine Grey were still boys, and James was not only a mere child, but a child in control of the Scots; Elizabeth may have had some reluctance to abandon her kingdom to the care of young children (which had proved so fatal in the case of Scotland) if the assassin should find her as he had found Moray. Most of all, however, she was aware that Mary like herself was a sovereign princess: the death of one princess might strike at them all.

  Too little is known of Elizabeth’s inner feelings for Mary, since the English queen had learnt in childhood to hide all inner feelings, those dangerous traitors, within the breast. That closeness which two queens and near cousins should feel for each other, so often chanted by Mary, may have found more echoes in Elizabeth’s heart than she ever admitted. In the meantime this merciful strain, this sneaking affection, could not fail to be noticed by Elizabeth’s advisers: the point was taken that if ever the execution of Mary Stuart was to be secured,

  Elizabeth would have to be thoroughly convinced that her good sister had repaid her clemency with flagrant and harmful ingratitude.

  * A letter from Bess in the unpublished Bagot papers illustrates her attitude to those who stood in the way of her schemes: an elderly widow who is failing to agree to some project which is to Bess’s advantage (but not her own) is described as ‘behaving very badly’.7

  * See Embroideries by Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Talbot at Oxburgh Hall, by Francis de Zulueta, for a discussion of the authenticity of these tapestries. Also English Secular Embroidery, by M. S. Jourdain, for a further discussion of Queen Mary’s embroideries. † These famous words have always been taken to refer to Queen Mary’s religious beliefs and the victory of the soul after death; but if Drummond is correct in reporting that they were attached to the emblem of Mary of Guise, they originally had the more philo-progenitive meaning that in the end of the mother was the beginning of the child.

  * White may have been deceived by false hair in this instance. Mary in youth had light red-golden hair. Although hair darkens with age, it could never have reached a really black tint naturally.

  * These ships, however, continued to be held, and were not in fact released till 1572.

  * It is sometimes suggested that Mary and Norfolk did meet briefly while she was at Carlisle, staying with his sister. But there is no proof of this, and if so, it is strange that neither of them ever referred to the incident in their correspondence. Certainly, Norfolk himself was always emphatic that he had never met Mary.

  * It is difficult to believe that Moray ever really countenanced the match, which would have been dangerous to his prospects. Moray’s biographer, Lee, suggests that all along Moray relied on Elizabeth to prevent the marriage once she heard of it – as indeed she did.21

  † Local legends suggest that
she was kept in the upper room of the building known as ‘Caesar’s Tower’ (now rebuilt) which adjoined St Mary’s Hall.22

  * A popular rhyme current at the time of the conference of Westminster suggested that Moray was a traitor trying to seize the Scottish crown on the pretence of his mother’s lawful marriage.24

  * See Francis Edwards, Dangerous Queen, London 1964, and The Marvellous Chance, London 1968, for a detailed consideration of the validity of the various documents in these intrigues.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Uses of Adversity

  ‘Tribulation has been to them as a furnace to fine gold – a means of proving their virtue, of opening their so-long-blinded eyes, and of teaching them to know themselves and their own failings.’