The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

by Kate Williams

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘No One Can Cure This Malady as Well as the Queen of England’

  The Ridolfi plot, wild and impossible as it was, changed everyone’s minds about Mary. Norfolk was a sacrifice: by trying him, Cecil could ensure that the evidence of the plot and Mary’s collusion was brought out into the open. There was an outcry against Mary, casting her as a serpent who wished to kill Elizabeth. More seriously, the nobles in Parliament had begun to demand her execution. Commissioners visited Mary at Sheffield Castle and attempted to extract a confession that she had participated in the Ridolfi plot and tried to seize the crown of England for herself. Mary was strong under pressure and said, as a royal, she could not be questioned or tried by them and wished to speak in front of Parliament and talk privately to Elizabeth. Parliament, too, would have wished to see her speak in front of them. But Cecil would never allow it, too afraid of what the silver-tongued queen might manage. Mary did admit to the commissioners that she had written to the kings of France and Spain to ask for help and said that she had claimed the throne of England, but only in her youth, and had not styled herself as Queen of England and Ireland since the death of her first husband, King Francis. She agreed that she had been in correspondence with Ridolfi, but only over financial matters and she said that although she had discussed marriage with Norfolk, she had thought that any marriage would be approved by England and Elizabeth.

  The plot may all have been a fabrication. When Ridolfi had been put under house arrest by Walsingham after the northern rebellion, it is not impossible that Walsingham persuaded him to set up Mary, Leslie and Norfolk, in order to reveal to the country and the queen how dangerous Mary could be. Ridolfi was in France when the plot was revealed and not arrested, unlike all the others involved, which suggests that he had some favour from government. Certainly, the whole affair had played into Cecil’s hands and his desire to get Mary out of the way. He also used the Ridolfi plot as an excuse to try to push Elizabeth to look once more at the question of marriage – for as long as Elizabeth remained unmarried and without an heir, so the attention of her subjects would always turn to the Queen of Scots. Various suitors were mooted and then rejected. For Cecil, the ‘manifestly uncertain’ state of the Crown could only be corrected by the queen’s marriage. As the English ambassador told Catherine de’ Medici, ‘if she had a child, all these bold and troublesome titles of the Scottish queen, or of the others who make such gapings for her death would be clean choked up’.1 Catherine was quite in accordance, believing that Elizabeth suffered challenges because she was unmarried. As she put it, ‘If she marry into some good house, who shall dare attempt aught against her?’ Even for the power-hungry Catherine, a woman was weak without a husband and always vulnerable to some malicious ‘attempt’.2

  The Ridolfi plot was perfect for Cecil. The inquiry into the Scottish queen’s conduct had been suspended three years ago. Mary’s freedom had been conditional on her being cleared and so there had been pressure from foreign powers that it should resume. There had not been enough evidence to tie her to the northern rebellion. But now, thanks to the Ridolfi plot, he could declare the inquiry no longer necessary. As Cecil could say, Mary was not captive because she may have killed Darnley. She was captive because she had tried to kill the queen.

  Four years previously on 16 May, Mary had arrived in England, rowing over the Solway Firth with her sixteen attendants, hopeful of soon returning to save her throne. What had happened to her had been a swift decline, a step downhill every month or so. First of all, the guards at Carlisle Castle. Then, after only two weeks, Elizabeth’s refusal to meet her until she was cleared of Darnley’s murder. Then the inquiry, the constant back and forth over what was said and what would be shown, her certainty that she would be found innocent because she was, the falsified letters that proved nothing. The inquiry adjourned with no conclusion either way, no political will to start it once more and the Ridolfi plot meant it was no longer necessary. Poor Mary, only four years before, holding the diamond, convinced Elizabeth would give her an army, put her back on the throne. Then, she’d had dreams of glory. Now she just wanted to be free.

  Parliament wanted Mary’s blood. Elizabeth saw Mary with mercy and refused to condemn her. Still, measures were passed against her, notably that she could be tried by English peers if she were found to be plotting again. In January 1572, Elizabeth issued a proclamation about Scotland, declaring she was ‘a Prince who next to quietness of her own Realme doth most earnestly of all desire to procure both onward peace amongst the subjects of the realm of Scotland.’3 The answer was to defer to her.

  In the battle for the sovereignty of England, the figure of Mary was vital. During Elizabeth’s reign, parliament had encroached further on what had previously been royal prerogative – but one thing Elizabeth was resistant on was Mary. Parliament repeatedly tried to force Elizabeth to treat her as a common subject and she refused. Various examples of kings who had been killed by kings were dredged up from history to persuade Elizabeth that it would be perfectly legal. Mary was the crucible for the question of who was supreme: Parliament or the queen. For Elizabeth, to allow that Mary was a subject, liable to be judged by her peers, was to undermine her own authority. The battle over Ridolfi could be termed a draw. Elizabeth had refused to allow Mary to be put on trial. But the new measures provided that Mary, even though she was a queen appointed by God, could be tried by a set of nobles; and so ushered in the real possibility of this happening.

  Elizabeth demanded that the queen be kept under closer attention. Cecil saw that if he wished to convince Elizabeth that Mary should be executed, he would have to find something indisputably terrible. He needed the queen to be part of a murder plot against Elizabeth, and for the evidence to be damning.

  Although forbidden to write letters, Mary was engaging with international affairs, constantly writing to the embassies in France and Spain and demanding their protection for English Catholics who had fled after supporting her. She used secret messengers, hid letters in convoys of goods and wrote in code. Talbot was too much of a gentleman to search her chambers, restrict her secretaries or indeed stop visitors to his own house – and so Mary wrote on, against Elizabeth’s rules. A plan sprung up that Mary should marry Don John of Austria, Philip of Spain’s illegitimate half-brother. The glorious marriage would be the cherry on top of a marvellous Spanish invasion and Mary and Don John would be the Catholic king and queen of both realms. But Mary was still married to Bothwell and even though there was papal enthusiasm for the invasion and Don John, her marriage had not been annulled. Mary was frustrated by the Pope’s painful failure to complete the paperwork. But Rome suspected that if the Pope annulled the marriage, then Elizabeth would be instantly on alert and suspect a plot was afoot to marry Mary to a Catholic ally.

  Mary was a burning problem who nobody wanted, tossed between the rulers of Europe. There were endless discussions about the problem of what to do with her. Elizabeth had her ministers suggest that Mary be sent back to Scotland for trial. The lords were equally nervous about executing a sovereign and still feared too much information might come out in a trial. When Morton became regent in 1572 after the death of the Earl of Mar (probably of natural causes but Melville declared he had been poisoned), Mary’s situation looked even bleaker as he detested her obsessively. Morton told Cecil that he would agree to a trial if Elizabeth sent her troops to guard the scaffold on which Mary would die.4 This was too much for Elizabeth, for it would look like an English execution, and the plan was dropped.

  At the end of August 1572, Huguenot leaders came to Paris for the wedding of Marguerite de Valois and Henry of Navarre. On 24 August, St Bartholomew’s Day, they were killed at the behest of the king. Over the following weeks, Protestants were murdered without compunction and by the autumn, 10,000 were dead. The Pope and Philip of Spain congratulated France on its work. When Elizabeth heard the news, she put the court in immediate mourning and she and the council readied for war. Towns on the coast
were told to expect invasion. Cecil was convinced the Catholic powers would now move for England. More guards were sent to stop anyone getting to Mary, Queen of Scots.

  Mary was hated all over again. The massacre was seen as a Guise conspiracy – and the assumption was that they would then come to rescue her and kill Elizabeth. ‘Forthwith to cut off the Scottish queen’s head’,5 wrote the Bishop of London. Elizabeth resented her cousin and felt besieged by the constant demands from her ministers to have her executed. Cecil told her that either Mary died, or she did. Beale, the secretary to the council and brother-in-law to Walsingham, expressed the views of many when he said that ‘all wise men generally throughout Europe cannot sufficiently marvel at Her Majesty’s over-mild dealing with her, in nourishing in her own bosom so pestiferous a viper’. When Elizabeth fell ill, first with stomach aches and then with a severe malady described as smallpox, her ministers panicked and prayers were given in churches for her safe recovery.

  In 1573, Edinburgh Castle, so long a Marian stronghold, fell to the Protestant lords, with the assistance of the English army, and William Kirkcaldy, who had held it bravely, was executed. Maitland was imprisoned and died, possibly of illness, perhaps through suicide, and his devoted wife, Mary Fleming, wrote to Cecil begging that her husband be buried as he had died and not cut up on accusation of treason. Elizabeth wrote firmly to Morton that ‘It is not our manner in this country to show cruelty on the dead bodies so unconvicted.’6 Thanks to Mary’s flight, Elizabeth had such power over Scotland that she could direct how they buried the bodies of those they considered traitors. The death of Maitland, so long loyal, was a great blow to Mary.

  In France, Charles IX, already fragile, had been in a spiral of decline since St Bartholomew’s Day. He chastised himself, begging for forgiveness, crying out for mercy, declaring he was lost and blamed his mother, saying ‘you are the cause’. His body was engulfed in tuberculosis and on 30 May 1574, he died and his younger brother became Henry III. He had been only six when Mary married his brother, barely ­remembered her – and this would not help her case.

  Mary was depressed and weary, unable to see an end to her torments, missing her son and watched on all sides. Her body began to express her pain, crying out the words that she wrote but to which no one would listen. Mary’s superb auburn hair was growing brittle and grey, and it was cut off in an attempt to alleviate her headaches. Mary Seton dressed it as well as she could but it was thin and weak, all the glory lost. She had terrible sickness, gas and stomach pains, possibly from a gastric ulcer, suffered from fainting fits, terrible headaches and fatigue. Still only thirty, she had fallen prey to a vicious rheumatism in her legs, which were painful and swollen. In Scotland, she had been used to riding and walking for miles, but now she was still only allowed to walk on the roof or in the dining room and courtyard and her muscles were wasting away. Her legs became so sore and painful they made her cry out. She begged Talbot to allow her exercise but he refused, too afraid of Cecil to give in. Once, on an icy January day when the snow was thick on the ground, he suggested she might take some exercise, expecting she would decline, but in an instant she was in her thick winter wraps and hurrying through the snow. Such moments were few and far between. She tried to pass the time, building up something of a menagerie of pets, as she tried to keep turtle doves and barbary fowls and asked if she might have dogs: ‘besides knitting and sewing, my only pleasure is in getting all the little beasts I can find’.7

  She gained comfort from food, as well as using it to display her regal splendour, and she put on weight due to eating more than she needed and her rich diet exacerbated the stomach problems that have similar­ities to what we would now call stress-related irritable bowel syndrome. Mary had terrible insomnia, sometimes for weeks at a time, and complained that she threw up tough and vile phlegm. She took pills and had the constant attendance of two doctors, wore an amethyst ring ‘contre la maladie’, as she put it, and begged her ambassador in Paris for ‘a piece of fine unicorn’s horn for I am in want of it’ – a prized remedy (it was in reality a walrus tusk). Nothing seemed to work. She believed her illness was all due to her broken heart. ‘No one can cure this malady as well as the Queen of England’, she said.8

  Mary tried everything to win over Elizabeth. She showered her with sweets that she ordered from Paris, sugared almonds and marzipan and sweetmeats. Cecil and Walsingham fussed that they might be poisoned but Elizabeth, always fond of sweet foods, received them gratefully. Mary ordered the finest silks from Paris and embroidered a beautiful design of English flowers next to a Scottish thistle on an exquisite skirt of crimson satin. She sent it to her cousin who thought it most handsome, but it brought Mary no kindness or loosening of her bonds.

  When Mary was not writing letters to her supporters or those she wished to help her, she continued to while away her time with embroidery. As Cecil’s man, Nicholas White, reported her saying after his visit to Tutbury, ‘all the day she wrought with her needle and that the diversity of colours made the time seem less tedious’.9 She had been skilled with her needles ever since girlhood and she sewed for herself and to make presents for her supporters. In the flush of romance, Norfolk had received a pillow that she’d embroidered with the arms of Scotland and the motto ‘virescit in vulnere virtus’, ‘Courage grows strong at a wound’.10 Mary and Bess of Hardwick joined together in the creation of quite incredible decorative embroideries, full of Marian emblems and pictures suggestive of Mary’s life, including a lioness with its cub, for Mary and James, and a representation of the endless see-sawing with Elizabeth: two women propped on the wheel of fortune, one bearing a lance and the other a cornucopia noting ‘Fortinae Comites’.

  When they first met, Bess was forty-one and Mary twenty-six. Bess had been Elizabeth’s gentlewoman before the Katherine Grey marriage had caused her fall from favour. Mary knew that Bess would be a valuable source of information on the intimate life of the queen and used their shared endeavour of needlework to encourage her to gossip. It did not take long for Bess to talk of what she had seen while waiting on the Virgin Queen.

  The tapestries are testament to Mary’s skill as a needlewoman and also her brilliance in winning over her captors. She was charming with the men and made a display of attending to what they said. With the women, she listened to them, talked graciously and invited them to embroider with her. Her needle gave her heart right until the end. When she died, the inventory of her belongings included unfinished embroidery: bed hangings and chair covers.11

  Mary was sickening every day and she begged to be allowed to take the spa waters in Buxton, and in late 1573, five years after her imprisonment began, she was allowed to visit for the first time. In summer, Buxton had a high-society feel and courtiers came from London to restore their health – including Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. Mary hoped to make contacts with the great and the good and be part of proper society once more. Talbot himself owned the famous bathhouse at Buxton, where visitors relaxed and enjoyed the hot springs, as well as drinking the restorative water. Mary was generally kept in isolation and closely guarded but she did have conversations with passing courtiers and even received Leicester. It might have helped her cause if she had been able to charm Leicester. But instead she was constantly suspected of exaggerating her symptoms in order to go to Buxton and try to escape. As Talbot put it, ‘I perceived her principal object was and is to have some liberty out of the gates.’12

  By 1573, Bothwell was reported to be mad and he was moved to a yet more horrific jail, Dragsholm Castle on the north-west coast of Denmark, denied access to anyone, seeing only those who passed his ‘scurvy meat and drink’ through a tiny window. There, alone and without resources, the filth in his cell never changed, he fell into a frenzy in this ‘vile and loathsome prison’. Even Buchanan, his implacable enemy, noted that ‘he was driven mad by the filth and other discomforts of his dungeon’. He was now no use to anyone. But Frederick II refused to release him. (Two years later, Mary tried again to
have the marriage annulled and Leslie, who had been released from the Tower, was sent to Rome to enact it. And yet still nothing occurred.)13

  At the end of 1573, Elizabeth gave Sir Francis Walsingham the position of Principal Secretary (later Secretary of State) and Cecil was Lord Treasurer. Walsingham distrusted Mary even more than Cecil had done, and moved to surround her with webs of his spectacularly efficient spies. But Mary’s Guise family had one last attempt at helping her. In mid-1574, they recruited their family lawyer in Paris, Claude Nau de la Boisseliere, to be Mary’s private secretary, along with Gilbert Curle, who had been with Mary since 1557, and his sister, Elizabeth Curle, as an occasional lady-in-waiting. That Elizabeth allowed Mary to employ a French secretary who was closely associated with the Guises is significant. The Guises had sent him to King Henry III of France, who had given him a passport and sent him to Elizabeth I, in a set-up in which he was essentially awarded diplomatic status. Due to his status, no doubt Elizabeth felt that turning him back would be offensive to the King of France and more trouble than it was worth. But Nau’s appointment with Mary marks a sea-change: she had a man who was to a large degree a foreign agent and had networks by which to send letters to France. With him as her secretary, the danger to which she could potentially expose herself with her pen was even greater.