The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

by Kate Williams

  In December 1574, the Cardinal of Lorraine died and the great era of Guise influence was over. One of the final letters he received was from Mary, begging him to help her win over Catherine de’ Medici.14 With his death, all of Mary’s hopes of Guise assistance died too. She was irrelevant to the new generation and they owed her nothing. Her health began to decline further. Her legs and heels were so swollen and inflamed that she could barely walk and burst into tears when she took a step. The jolly days of dinners and receptions were no more. Mary was only thirty-two, sick, in pain and slowly wasting away. Elizabeth cut Mary’s weekly allowance from £52 to £30 and ignored Talbot’s protests. Talbot grew frustrated with his once-beautiful captive. He longed to be at court, not arguing over tiny sums and dinner menus.

  It was a panoply of unhappy events. Dudley, who had been one of the few at court who supported Mary and had encouraged the Norfolk marriage, was exposed as having pursued a long affair with Douglas, Lady Sheffield, a beautiful widow and Elizabeth’s gentlewoman. She had pushed for marriage but he knew Elizabeth would never allow it and their child had been born in 1574. Elizabeth was furious with him over the affair and her old favour for him was crumbling. He attempted to seize it back with a huge pageant in her honour at Kenilworth Palace, building a 600-feet bridge covered in rich fruits and an artificial floating island in the lake. When Elizabeth arrived, the great clock on the turret stopped to imply that time halted during the magical visit of the queen. There was dancing, feasting and dazzling entertainments. Unfortunately, it was all brought to an abrupt end when Elizabeth was told that Dudley had also been having an affair with one of her former gentlewomen and her cousin, the married Lettice Knollys. She left in a whirl and Dudley’s chance to regain her patronage disappeared.

  There was no chance that he could argue for Mary now that he had fallen in Elizabeth’s estimation. Instead, Dudley moved to keenly supporting the group who feared that Elizabeth might die at any minute and stepped up the anti-Catholic enthusiasm. As he wrote, ‘There is no right papist in England who wishes Queen Elizabeth to live long.’15

  Things got worse. Mary’s Master of the Household, Andrew Beaton, who had fallen in love with Mary Seton, had travelled to France to obtain permission to marry her, but he died on his return, casting poor Mary Seton into despair. In 1575, Agnes Keith was forced to give up Mary’s jewels that she had been holding in Scotland (including the ‘great H’ diamond) to Regent Morton, after a lengthy court case in which Agnes had even appealed to Elizabeth for help. Mary would never receive them – and then two years later, the few jewels that she had left were stolen from her treasurer at Sheffield Castle.

  As her little boy grew up, Mary was hopeful that he might be able to request to see her. She sent Claude Nau to take a present of golden toy guns to her eleven-year-old son in Edinburgh but Nau was forbidden to see the prince and give messages to him from his mother. Elizabeth confiscated Mary’s letters and gifts to James, and so it remained impossible to get a present or even a message to her son. All the evidence suggested he was being brought up to hate her, for he was surrounded by her enemies. And yet Mary dreamed and convinced herself that he must still love her, romanticising the blood connection, believing, like so many parents, that a child owes gratitude for simply being born. When so many suitors had proved hopeless, violent, cruel and unfaithful, James became her one true love. She dreamed of taking the throne, with him at her side. She believed he must truly be a Catholic and expressed her wish he should marry a Spanish princess. She became obsessed with him, relying on the reports of supporters who sent comforting descriptions of his affection for her that betrayed more about their hopes for the future than the truth. Mary imagined herself and her son ruling together.16

  She had no idea of his true character. A lonely child, who had been constantly watched, growing up without love or kindness, James had taken solace in a Protestantism as enthusiastic as his mother’s Catholicism. And like so many children mistreated in youth, he invested all his hopes in coming of age. Then, he believed, he would have the power he deserved. Then, he would govern as a king. As he saw it, he was destined to be king and he didn’t need the help of any of his manipulative advisors or ministers. He certainly did not want the help of his mother.

  In summer 1578, while Elizabeth was on her summer progress, the authorities had a tip-off about witchcraft and investigators dug up a dunghill in Islington and found three wax figures, one with ‘Elizabeth’ scratched on its forehead and two dressed as her ministers. They had been buried so that the heat of the dunghill as it decomposed in the sweltering summer would melt the wax and so the queen would die. According to the Spanish ambassador, the queen feared it meant there was a Catholic assassination plot ranged against her. John Dee, the queen’s philosopher, was sent to meet Elizabeth and cast some magic as an antidote and then promptly set off back to London, to hunt out the Islington witches. Within a fortnight, two Catholic men were being tortured on the rack at the Tower for information, and one blamed Thomas Harding, vicar of Islington, for making the figures. We might argue that the local vicar was simply the only person who the tormented souls could think of on the rack, but Harding had been arrested in the previous year for witchery. He was taken in again, tortured and sentenced to death for treason.

  But, then, in the following year, a well-known conjurer, Thomas Elkes, confessed that he had made the wax figures on behalf of a rich young man who wanted a lady of his acquaintance to fall in love with him. The melting intended was not death but sexual ecstasy. The council and ministers had tortured and sentenced innocent men. One of the men originally arrested was released and the poor vicar of Islington (who had been waiting to die) was spared execution but condemned to life in the Tower.

  Catholics across Europe mocked the credulous English for their panic over a few harmless dolls. But the fear of witchcraft and Catholic trickery did not dissipate, and Mary, cut off in her ivory prison, was still more detested. Elizabeth was ill with terrible pains in her face – probably as a result of gum disease – and Cecil gloomily put them down to her ‘lack of marriage’, a view shared by contemporary doctors. But even though Cecil optimistically declared she could still have a child and had five or so fertile years remaining, the queen was in her forty-sixth year and showing no more enthusiasm to be married than she ever had. The French Duke of Anjou was entertained but nothing was ever decided.

  In 1578, Bothwell died in his horrific solitary confinement in Dragsholm Castle, after suffering terribly in his final years. Some even reported he was chained to a pillar. Of course, it was all the better for the Scottish lords’ case that Bothwell had gone mad, for they could claim it was due to a mind affrighted by its terrible crimes. But his final years were so squalid that death was a release.17 The man who had brought Mary to the brink of death and destruction was finally gone. What ruined her in the eyes of monarchs across the world was the marriage. Bothwell had forced her into submission and taken everything from her.

  Mary was now finally free to marry. But Philip seemed to have lost faith in sponsoring a marriage since the failure of the Ridolfi plot, and six months after Bothwell, Don John, in whom Mary had invested so much thought, fell ill and died. It was the death of another hope.

  Elizabeth, meanwhile, was trailing beauty and glory. Explorer Francis Drake was travelling the world, chasing and conquering Spanish treasure ships, and she knighted him on the Golden Hinde in 1581. She was the queen of a new empire: outward-looking, adventurous, her pirates spreading across the seas. Gold was pouring in. She wished to ignore her cousin. Mary was an annoying house guest, desperate and miserable, always pulling at the bottom of her gown.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘That Devilish Woman’

  Mary was wasting away in a gilded cage. The pains in her body grew so bad that she could barely move. She had a bad fall from her horse and her spine and legs took a permanent blow. She then fell prey to gastric flu and in 1582 the doctors thought she was dying. Much of it was due
to her restrained state and her misery, the damp conditions of some of her prisons, lack of exercise and, as one observer judged, ‘the painful, importunate and almost constant workings of her mind’, but she probably had a genuinely debilitating condition. As historian Antonia Fraser has explored, this could very well have been a form of porphyria, suffering as Mary did with severe stomach pain, vomiting and general distress.1 But even the strongest of constitutions would wilt under the mental misery of unending captivity.

  At the end of 1580, a collection of Scottish lords, including Balfour, had moved to challenge Morton in his position as regent. His high-handed and violent behaviour had won him many enemies and the young king resented his oppressive governance. Balfour had been in exile in Denmark and had asked the king’s and Morton’s enemies to negotiate permission to return, offering evidence to implicate Morton in the murder of Darnley in exchange. He said he owned a copy of the by-now close to mythical Craigmillar bond agreeing the despatch of Darnley, signed by Morton.2 On New Year’s Eve, Morton was accused of the murder of Darnley and swept off to Edinburgh Castle in the presence of the king. Elizabeth panicked and sent her spies to attempt to save him – because she feared what might come out at the trial. His relations and associations, including Archibald Douglas, who may have been Darnley’s killer and might also have been involved in forging the casket letters, were commanded to appear. But Douglas had already fled to England and Elizabeth refused to give him up.

  Morton was put on trial in June 1581 for being part of the conspiracy of Darnley’s murder and although Balfour never produced the bond as evidence, Morton was found guilty and sentenced to death. He confessed that he and others had known of the murder plot in advance but did nothing because they believed the queen required it, and he also admitted to having received Archibald after the murder. The king spared him hanging and requested that he be beheaded. Young James was beginning to assert his power. It was thus near impossible for Mary to still be accused of the killing of Darnley. This would have been a moment to demand the casket letters and agree to a trial, simply to see what Elizabeth would do. But Mary had given up asking Elizabeth to clear her name. Instead, she had started to accuse the queen of attempting to undermine her from the very start. ‘By the agents, spies and secret messengers sent in your name into Scotland while I was there, my subjects were corrupted and encouraged to rebel against me, and to speak, do, enterprise and execute that which has come to the said country during my troubles.’3 She was right. If Morton, the former regent, had now been found guilty of the murder, then surely Mary could be set free? As the Casket letters and the trial had come to nothing, it might seem to naturally follow that she could be released. But the Ridolfi plot had blocked all that and Cecil was looking for another charge that might get rid of her for ever. The terrible mistake of crossing the river to England rather than staying in Scotland condemned her again and again. Her only chance now lay with the new powers in her country – and whether her son James might take it upon himself to care for her.

  James, now fourteen, had been deeply resentful of the close eye kept on him by the lords, most of all Buchanan, his tutor and erstwhile guard. James was infuriated, for he was supposed to be the king but was seemingly kept under restrictions not so dissimilar to those of his mother, and he was allowed no say in ruling. Later in 1581, he announced that he would rule as monarch and courtiers saw the growth of influence of Esmé Stewart, Lord Aubigny, his father’s first cousin. The young king was very fond of the thirty-nine-year-old father of five and made him Duke of Lennox. There was talk they were lovers – and even more dangerously, his new friend suggested he band with Guise and they invade England from both ends, with the backing of Philip of Spain. Unfortunately for the plan, the lords hated Lennox and (probably paid for partly with English funds) lured him to a castle, where they imprisoned him and forced James to send him back to France (Lennox died not long after and left James his embalmed heart). James was also kidnapped by the lords but escaped in 1583 and again declared himself king. As he immediately began allying with France on his release, Elizabeth sprang into action, holding out the possibility that Mary could take the throne jointly with her son. Walsingham was sent to Scotland to discuss the idea, complaining as he did so. And yet, at the same time, it seemed as if Mary was still investigating and supporting plots against the queen, and when Walsingham presented this evidence to Elizabeth, her enthusiasm for a joint monarchy faded. For after all, James and Mary together would have a rock-solid claim to the English throne and Mary could stir up much resentment against Elizabeth and support from English Catholics.

  Mary wished her son to demand her release as a condition for negotiating with Elizabeth, rather than Spain. Unfortunately Francis Gray, the secretary she sent to pursue it, turned to the English cause almost as soon as he left her chamber and did nothing to promote the relationship between mother and son. Perhaps he was wise. For James, newly on the throne, constantly threatened by rebel lords, his very person menaced, bringing his mother back would have been very dangerous and would have most likely undermined his position. He wrote politely to his mother talking of Elizabeth ‘ma bonne soeur’ and wishing his mother ‘good health and good prosperity.’ He could give her nothing but fine words.4 With the death of Maitland and the capture of Edinburgh Castle in 1573, the Marian side had been much reduced, Protestantism was established and now the teenaged king could be forgiven for thinking that the arrival of his mother might set everything on fire once more. Nothing showed his pragmatic movement towards Elizabeth better than when Archibald Douglas was captured and tried in 1586 for Darnley’s murder. He was almost certainly guilty and many Scots were hoping that James would allow a trial like that of Morton’s in which doubt was thrown on all the lords. But Elizabeth pressed James to make it into a whitewash, so ten jurors declined to appear and were replaced with supporters, the evidence was paltry, and Douglas was summarily cleared – and later made ambassador to England. Elizabeth and James worked together to stop the truth about how many of the lords had participated in the murder of the king. It now suited both of them that Mary be suspended in ambiguity, neither innocent nor guilty, in her gilded prisons. Mary had grown desperate. In the British Library are preserved ten beautifully handwritten pages of her pleas to Elizabeth from November 1582.

  Mary complains bitterly of her treatment and how, as she writes, she has seen ‘my good intentions misrepresented, the sincerity of my heart calumniated cruelly, the conduct of my affairs delayed or blocked with artifices and finally worse and more insulting treatment’. She tries to draw a parallel between the two queens saying that she wishes for the ‘establishment of a good relationship between us’ and arguing that her enemies with their ‘coded, secret messages’ tried to undermine Elizabeth in Scotland ‘at the same time they were rebelling against me’. She begs for permission to send to her son so he can help with the ‘overtures I have proposed to establish between the two kingdoms a good relationship and perfect intelligence in the future.’ It is an impossible level of delusion. The chances of a ‘perfect intelligence’ between her and Elizabeth were long gone.

  Mary taxes Elizabeth with her promises, declaring that when she’d fled, she sent her gentleman ‘express’ with the ‘diamond ring that I received from you as a token that you would protect me.’ Mary declares that Elizabeth promised to ‘come to the border to assist me yourself’ and she expected to be ‘in your arms’ – but was then ‘arrested on my way to see you’. And now, she says, she is treated poorly with no regard for the ‘diet and exercise necessary for my health’. As she complains, ‘my enemies, with their long tradition of mistreating me, now feel they have the right to say how I am treated, not like a prisoner . . . but like a slave.’

  None of this was likely to win over Elizabeth – least of all Mary’s claim that she was the heir. ‘The worst criminals in your prisons have their justifications . . . their accusers have been declared they see their accusations. Why not me, a royal sovereign, your close
st relation and legitimate heir.’ Mary had a point about her legal treatment but the reference to ‘heir’ was calculated to anger her ‘sister’. Mary then declared that being the heir ‘is at the bottom of what’s happened to me, all their calumnies, to divide us’.

  Little would annoy Elizabeth more. The letter, despite its words from ‘your very sad and very closely confined and affectionate sister’ was hopeless and Mary’s declarations that she would die if it all continued were ignored.5

  The matter had grown more serious, for even Elizabeth’s most optimistic courtiers had accepted that she would never have a child. The marriage negotiations with the French Duke of Anjou finally collapsed in 1582 and Elizabeth turned fifty in 1583. The ‘five or six’ fertile years that Cecil had discussed in 1578 were lost. The question was – who would be her heir? All eyes turned to Mary, and Elizabeth, although her court was expected to keep up the vision that she would never die, preferred the focus to be on James. A great comet appeared over London in the summer and there were fears it indicated the death of a person of significance. Elizabeth’s ladies tried to stop her from looking at it from her palace window in Richmond. She ignored them, looked out at its wild passage across the sky and exclaimed, ‘Alea iacta est’ – the die is cast.6

  With the possibility of a direct heir gone for ever, Elizabeth feared that the plotters were stepping up their efforts. One Catholic gentleman was even put under suspicion for popping into a new perfumery in London to buy gloves and perfume – the investigators jumped to the wild conclusion that he aimed to poison the queen with the gloves, packing them up to her as a lovely present and then rejoicing as she died in agony. At the end of 1583, young Francis Throckmorton was arrested in his house in London, caught in the act of writing a coded letter to the Queen of Scots. His house was searched for papers. The investigators found anti-Elizabeth pamphlets from the continent, a list of safe harbours where foreign forces could land, and names of Catholic nobles who would support an invasion. Walsingham had spotted him calling at the residence of Michel de Castlenau, the French ambassador, in Salisbury Court off Fleet Street, and suspected him of carrying secret letters from Mary to Castlenau. He was taken to the Tower and Cecil’s spies declared he was the focus of a conspiracy between Castlenau, the Duke of Guise and the brother of the late Duke of Norfolk to restore Mary. Throckmorton denied everything and was thrown twice upon the rack before he admitted that he was carrying letters to the Spanish ambassador, Don Bernadino de Mendoza, and was part of a plot to encourage an invasion from Philip of Spain and the Duke of Guise. He was executed for treason and Mendoza was expelled.