Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  In view of the delicate situation of England, perpetually facing the prospect of a Spanish invasion, it was a natural act of public relations on the part of the government to seek to present the Catholics from 1580 onwards as dangerous aliens within the state. The Act of Persuasions, by which it was made high treason to reconcile or be reconciled to the Catholic faith, was passed in 1581. In 1585 it was further made high treason for a Jesuit to set foot in England. Just as the dangers to England from the Catholics were constantly emphasized, so too the personal danger of Queen Elizabeth was underlined in order to boost her popularity with her subjects, as a symbol of national solidarity. Both moves – early exercises in the subtle art of propaganda – augured of course extremely ill for the future of the queen of Scots, who was both a Catholic and a rival queen to Elizabeth. To the forefront of this calculated campaign was the leading secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham. Walsingham was a prominent Puritan; but he drew, as he said himself, a sharp and effective distinction between private and public morality, and had no intention of bringing the strict tenets of the Puritan faith into the latter sphere. He was an experienced diplomatist, with a useful knowledge of Europe, having been employed by Elizabeth on missions to both the Low Countries and France; and in 1583 he was sent on a mission to James in Scotland. Walsingham also combined to a remarkable degree the political abilities of an Italian Renaissance statesman with a very modern conception of the uses of a spy system within the state.*

  Walsingham understood to perfection the art not only of forgery but also of permeating his enemies’ organizations with his own men – an art which often led to such confusion of plotting at the time that the truth is impossible to disentangle at four hundred years’ distance. Walsingham now managed to place at least one and probably more spies in the heart of Mary’s councils in Paris. In view of this fact, it was not surprising that Mary’s reputation became increasingly besmirched in the English mind and in that of Elizabeth, as a result of each of the three plots against her which were uncovered in the 1580s before the final crisis of the Babington plot. The first of these plots, the Throckmorton plot, was apparently Guise-inspired, although right at the centre of it lay one of Walsingham’s most successful agents, Charles Paget. Paget came of a noble family, one of whose houses, Beaudesert, was in Staffordshire. His elder brother Thomas, Lord Paget, was a devout Catholic who refused to take the Oath of Conformity, and was eventually obliged to flee to France in 1583, although up till this time he had been kindly treated by his friends at court who had attempted to persuade him into wiser courses: indeed much of his desire to leave England seems to have arisen not only from his professed religion, but from his troubles with his vociferous wife Nazareth, Lady Paget.28 Charles Paget was, on the other hand, an outright spy, who entered Walsingham’s service secretly in 1581 when he reached Paris, at roughly the same moment that he entered the little Marian embassy of Archbishop Beaton.

  The Throckmorton plot, uncovered by Walsingham’s agents, led in November 1583 to the arrest of Francis Throckmorton, a Catholic cousin of Sir Nicholas, on suspicion of carrying letters to and from Mary; the earl of Northumberland was also placed in the Tower for being implicated. The details of the Throckmorton plot involved once more the invasion of England by Spain, and the release of Mary; Throckmorton, who had acted as messenger throughout, made a very full confession before his execution in which he thoroughly implicated the queen. She was said to have known every detail of the invasion plans. Mary had certainly written encouraging letters to the Spanish ambassador, who was banished for his part in it all; but the true details of this invasion scheme are still obscure, since it seems that Charles Paget in the course of a short visit to England secretly poured cold water on the scheme to Northumberland, having first of all tried in vain to dissuade the duke of Guise from asking for Spanish help.29 In view of the troubles which Paget was also brewing up in France, it is doubtful whether such a scheme penetrated by a double-agent could ever have come to very much; nevertheless, the discovery of the plot gave Walsingham an excellent opportunity to excite a wave of popular indignation against the Catholics, and their figurehead, Mary.

  Despite Throckmorton’s revelations, and despite the fact that Mary had clearly the details of the intended plot, Mary herself was in fact at this point no longer in complete sympathy with her Guise relations or indeed with her ambassador of so many years, James Beaton. One of the cruellest aspects of Mary’s last years from her own point of view was that while Walsingham was engaged in building up her image as this dangerous conspirator, the spider at the centre of a network of plans with agents at every foreign Catholic court, Mary herself was actually becoming increasingly alienated from her own organization abroad. She was accused increasingly in the popular imagination of crimes in which she was decreasingly involved. From 1583 onwards her relations with her ambassador Beaton were distinctly cool, and by the autumn of 1584 she actually accused him openly of mishandling her finances, regretting that such an old servant should choose this opportunity to treat her so shabbily.30 She believed that in France Beaton’s wishes rather than hers were being considered and that her other servants were being mistreated.

  Such complaints were not merely the querulous imaginings of a middle-aged woman who had been too long in captivity. It was true that the handling of Mary’s organization in France, and her finances in particular, left much to be desired. Much of the muddle and maladministration was due to the earlier actions of Mary’s uncle, the cardinal of Lorraine, who appears to have had little grasp of finance. This dowry, so vital to Mary’s existence, since it represented her only income, was further impaired by the actions of the king of France, who obliged her to exchange the profitable estates in Touraine, granted to her under her marriage settlement, for others much less profitable, in favour of his brother, the duke of Anjou. The income itself of 2000 crowns which she took yearly for personal expenses in England does not always seem to have been paid regularly: at Mary’s death the king of France still owed her money. French officials battened upon the estates, an easy enough action to perform without speedy retribution, since their owner was both abroad and in prison. In 1580 the foolish or knavish Dolin was replaced as Mary’s treasurer by Chérelles’s brother, but even so by this time the French estates had a mortgage of 33,000 crowns upon them. Although it was believed that if Mary put her dowry out to farm she would be able to get 30,000 crowns yearly, the encumbrance of the mortgage was a fatal obstacle to this scheme. Mary was compelled to raise loans in London to pay for her necessities in captivity: she borrowed money from de Mauvissière on credit, and another loan was later arranged from Arundel, which was only repaid after Mary’s death by the king of Spain, out of respect for her memory. Financial shortages, the humiliation of not being able to pay for small luxuries to be brought to her from London as well as not being able to grant baillages from her French estates to repay creditors freely, owing to the interference of the French court, were naturally all exacerbating to Mary, who could do little in prison except fire off anguished letters. But although she came to blame Beaton, he seems to have been the least of the offenders in this respect. Furthermore, the evidence points to the fact that there was a distinct campaign to create trouble between Mary and Beaton, a campaign once more all the more dangerous because it was directed from within rather than without her organization.

  Into Beaton’s service had come in the late 1570s a certain Thomas Morgan, who had once been Shrewsbury’s secretary in the early days of Mary’s imprisonment: he was a friend of Walsingham’s chief agent Phelippes and his Catholicism was doubtful; most of the English Catholic exiles seem to have regarded him as a spy and the fact that it was he who introduced the arch spy Gilbert Gifford into Mary’s service certainly tells against him.31 Nevertheless, he managed to capitalize on the friendliness he had once shown to Mary – perhaps he convinced her he had been dismissed from Shrewsbury’s service for helping her – to enlist her sympathy, and she regarded him as ‘poor Morgan’.
Although she did not recommend him to Beaton personally, she endorsed his application and, at different times, with her habitual sympathy for the financial plight of her servants, made him grants of money. Morgan became Beaton’s chief cipher clerk, a position of enormous trust, since it put him in virtual control of the French correspondence with Mary. But Morgan, although trusted by Mary, was soon regarded as suspect in France. According to the later testimony of Father Robert Persons, neither Morgan nor Paget was fully trusted with the invasion plans of 1583, ‘fearing lest they might hold secret correspondence with some of the Council in England, although the said Queen trusted in them contrary to the wish and opinion of the said Duke of [Guise] and Archbishop ambassadors’.*32

  It was tragic that Mary’s service should thus be permeated with spies and trouble-makers at this critical moment in her fortunes. From the tone of her own letters, certainly her relations with Beaton seem to have been temporarily impaired, at the very moment when she had most need to be in complete accord with him. Such discord would have been only too easy for Morgan as cipher clerk to whip up. For example Mary’s outspoken complaint that Beaton had not written to her for six months may easily have been due not to Beaton’s neglect – which was unlike him – but to the suppression of his letters by his clerk. This trouble-making had two effects: as Samerie, the Jesuit chaplain who visited her secretly three times in prison and was devoted to her cause, warned Mary in October 1584, there were dangers in trusting such men as Morgan and Paget: ‘You wish to have too many manners of proceeding,’ he wrote, ‘which clearly they know’, and he advised her to abandon all private ways of dealing and treat of all her affairs through her ambassadors.33 It was excellent advice, based on sound knowledge of Mary’s predilection for intrigue. Unfortunately this advice did not stick. In March 1585 Ragazzini, the nuncio, told the cardinal of Como: ‘This Morgan is considered by many here and particularly the Jesuits, to be a knave; yet the Queen of Scots relies upon him more than on her own ambassador [Beaton] as the ambassador himself has told me many times.’34

  The second result of such disputes within Mary’s organization was that her own feelings towards the Guises and Spain became permeated with distrust: she began to be convinced that the Guises were only intending to seize England in order to hand it over to Spain and had no interest in her release. The prospect of losing touch with reality over the years is one which every long-term prisoner has to face. In Mary’s case, at the exact moment when her struggles to free herself through the Association were crumbling about her, and the need to concentrate on the aid of Spain and the Guises grew more acute, she became the prey of false notions on the subject and grew to rely more on private schemes than on Beaton.

  By January 1585, when the Association was virtually dead as a practical scheme, Mary was murmuring against Spain. She was indeed profoundly shocked by the new plot now uncovered in which a Dr Parry apparently intended to assassinate Elizabeth. Her horror was probably genuine, for she expressed it in a letter not only to Elizabeth herself, but also to her ally, the French ambassador in London.35 When Parry proved to be implicated with her own agent in Paris, the wily Thomas Morgan, Mary could scarcely believe the news. Mary was quite right to be horrified by the news of the Parry plot, for it seems that Parry began his career as an agent provocateur for the Elizabethan government, and was only now sacrificed by his employers for propaganda reasons. Even without this inner knowledge, Mary was quite clever enough to see the dangers of such involvements: the plots of Parry against Elizabeth would always point indirectly at Mary, but the involvement of Parry with Morgan enabled the plot to be laid squarely at her door. In France, Morgan was put in prison for his part in the Parry plot. It was no wonder that Mary hastened to express her indignation. She was sympathetic towards the Jesuit Father Creighton who was captured aboard ship with a whole pile of incriminating letters and documents: she asked the French ambassador to see what could be done for the wretched man, to save him from destruction.36 Parry on the other hand clearly brought her own neck into danger.

  The point was all the more easy for Mary to appreciate since from June 1584 onwards there had been murmurings in Parliament for a new type of Association – not to be confused with Mary’s Association with James – in this case a bond or pledge of allegiance. But this was a pledge with a difference. It was not enough for the signatories of this new bond to swear to bring about the death of all those who might plot against Elizabeth. In addition they also swore – and the inspiration was Walsingham’s – to bring about the death of all those in whose favour such plots might be instigated, whether they had personally connived at them or not. In short, if it could be proved that a particular conspiracy had been aimed at the elimination of Elizabeth and the placing of Mary on the throne, Mary herself was as much eligible for execution as any of the plotters, even if she had been in complete ignorance of what was afoot. This bond was formally enacted into a statute by the English Parliament in the spring of 1585 when the murder of the prince of Orange brought home still further to the English the constant dangers of assassination to their own queen; in the meantime signatures poured in from loyal subjects, and were presented to Elizabeth in an endless series of documents, from the autumn onwards. Mary, ever conscious of the delicate path she was treading, and the need for Elizabeth’s favour, actually offered to sign the bond herself.37 But her pathetic offer could not gloss over the fact that the enactment of the bond into English law amounted to the drawing up of her own death warrant: it was hardly likely that many years would pass before some conspiracy or other in Mary’s favour, to the detriment of Elizabeth, would be brought to book by Walsingham, and once such a charge should be proved, it was now legal in England to try and execute the Scottish queen. No one was more conscious of the dangers of the bond to Mary than Elizabeth herself, and the possibility of the trial of a crowned queen was one Elizabeth preferred not to contemplate too closely in advance:38 she therefore chose to regard the bond of Association as a spontaneous act of loyalty on the part of her people in the first place, of whose genesis she had been quite ignorant. In the parliamentary proceedings which followed, she began by showing considerable reluctance that the statute for her safety should be enacted at all and went on to take care that James VI should be excepted from the clause which barred even the descendants of the nameless beneficiary of her murder from the succession. Parliament itself, understandably less worried by the problem of regicide, showed no such scruples. To them the bond seemed only too natural, as well as essential. In 1572, when Mary’s life had been in danger, the whys and wherefores of her captivity, her original illegal detention, had seemed already remote; but thirteen years later they appeared positively prehistoric. The ‘monstrous dragon’ was now considered to be part of the English policy – and a singularly unpleasant part.

  By the spring of 1585 there was very little that was encouraging to be discerned in the situation of the queen of Scots. Her son had repudiated and betrayed her; her French organization was in administrative chaos, and penetrated by Walsingham’s spies; the English Catholics were quarrelling among themselves abroad and increasingly persecuted at home; Mary herself no longer felt complete trust for her erstwhile allies abroad and at times suspected the good faith of the Guises and Spain; in the meantime her position in England may be compared to that of someone tied down unwillingly over a powder keg, which may at any moment be exploded by a match held by an over-enthusiastic friend. To add to Mary’s distress her prison was changed for the worse. In September 1584 she had been taken out of the custody of Shrewsbury and handed into that of the upright and elderly Sir Ralph Sadler. The real reason for the change was presumably to free Mary from the imbroglio of the Shrewsbury scandals; but according to Camden, in order not to offend Shrewsbury it was explained to him that Catholic plots now made it essential for Mary to be put in the charge of the Puritans.39 Sadler was a fair and considerate jailer. But in the autumn of 1584 the edict went forth that Mary was to be taken back to the hated Tutbury fo
r greater security. She was once more incarcerated in this loathsome if impregnable fortress in early January 1585. Not only that but at the same time the care of her person was handed over to a new and infinitely more severe jailer, Sir Amyas Paulet, who became in time as odious to her as the masonry of Tutbury itself. Under these doleful circumstances, with very little to cheer her as she surveyed her prospects for the future, Mary Stuart entered on the last and most burdensome phase of her captivity.

  * One version of the Sheffield portrait which was definitely known to the engravers before 1603 is the large double portrait of Mary and James, now at Blair Castle, dated 1583. But although mother and son are here shown tenderly side by side, such a meeting never actually took place outside the realm of the artist’s imagination.2

  * Now created earl of Arran by James despite the continued existence of the wretched, mad, true incumbent of the title, Mary’s former suitor.

  * Despite her royal lineage, and the glorious plans laid for her future, Arbella Stuart never lived to enjoy the splendid destiny which might have been expected for one who combined the genes of the Stuarts with those of Bess of Hardwicke. At the age of thirty, no suitable bridegroom having been found for her, she eloped with William Seymour, grandson of Lady Catherine Grey. For this presumption, she was imprisoned in the Tower by her cousin, King James, where she died in 1615.

  * Even Elizabeth, the virgin queen, was not left free of this sort of imaginative calumny. In November 1575 the Venetian ambassador in Spain reported that Elizabeth had a natural daughter of thirteen in existence, who was about to marry Cecil’s son, and thus cement their relations.23