The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  It was not enough. Sadler was too decent and considerate a man to be Mary’s keeper. Although a devout Protestant and unswerving in his allegiance to Elizabeth, he was unable to square his political and religious obligations with his feelings as a human being. He accepted an honorable discharge, clearing the way for the appointment of a man better equipped to be a jailer—for this is what the menacing international threat made necessary.

  His successor was Sir Amyas Paulet. He was a fluent French speaker, formerly an ambassador to France, where he had colluded with Catherine de Medici to blacken Mary’s name. A Calvinist and close ally of Walsingham, he was the sworn enemy of Spain and the Catholic League, a fervent supporter of the Huguenots and the Dutch Protestants. His work in Paris had brought him into contact with several of Mary’s agents, about whose malice he never had the slightest doubt. He arrived at Tutbury in April 1585, assuming full responsibility for his prisoner on the 19th, when Sadler returned home to Hertfordshire.

  Paulet was not a man likely to allow Mary to ride out hawking. He made no distinction between his private and public duties. “Others,” he said, “shall excuse their foolish pity as they may.” For his part, as he once bragged, he would rather renounce his claim to a share in the joys of heaven than put any feelings of compassion above his obligations to Elizabeth. He was Mary’s sole keeper until November 1586, when his friend Sir Drue Drury—a minor courtier from a prominent legal family, whom Mary described as “most modest and gracious in all things”—was sent to assist him.

  Mary found Paulet “one of the most zealous and pitiless men I have ever known; and, in a word, fitter for a gaol of criminals than for the custody of one of my rank and birth.” She had quickly gotten the measure of her man.

  To begin with, Paulet tore down her cloth of state whenever he had occasion to enter her presence chamber, saying such regalia had no place in her household as there could be only one queen in England. This led to a battle of wills in which he would dismantle the offending canopy and a tearful Mary would have it put back. He opened her letters and packets looking for evidence of a conspiracy, treating anything sent to or from the French embassy with the utmost suspicion. His intrusions extended to random searches of her cabinets, and as a last resort he was willing to break down Mary’s bedroom door. All the documents he impounded were instantly forwarded to Walsingham for examination.

  Paulet suspected everyone and everything. To avoid being overheard by anyone in the household, he would sometimes confer with messengers sent from London in the open fields. He put Mary’s domestic staff into quarantine. They were not allowed to mix with the other servants or to enter or leave the castle unless searched. No one, however menial, was spared the new procedures. Mary’s coachmen and laundresses were singled out for special attention. They were to be watched at all times, particularly three women who lodged in a little house in the park adjoining the castle. They had outside contacts as well as access to Mary’s rooms. Paulet ordered that they were not just to be searched, but stripped down to their smocks whenever they entered or left the building.

  Mary’s health continued to deteriorate. She put out a bulletin denying she had dropsy or cancer, but her legs were more swollen than ever. She was allowed to ride out once or twice a month, her coach surrounded by a small infantry detachment bearing loaded muskets and a lighted fuse. At other times, she was carried into the garden in a chair. When she did succeed in walking, two of her secretaries had to support her. Her legs needed poultices and bandages, which had to be applied every day. “Her legs,” said Paulet, “are yet weak, and indeed are wrapped in gross manner, as hath appeared to my wife.”

  Paulet’s harsh treatment aroused protests from the French. On Christmas Eve 1585, Mary was moved from spartan Tutbury, notorious for its dark, damp rooms and stinking latrines, to Chartley, a manor house almost palatial in comparison that was chosen because it was surrounded by a large moat.

  Mary’s mood was changing to one of defiance. She had never made any secret of her aim to be restored as queen in Scotland, if necessary as co-ruler with her son. All her attempts to reach a political accord with Elizabeth foundered over her desire for liberty and to return home. She never gave up on her dynastic claim to the English throne, and talked passionately about it, causing Paulet to protest at her “tediousness” and her “superfluous and idle speeches.” When Mary was in full flood, he simply walked away.

  Mary’s defection to the Spanish interest would finally be her undoing. She believed that France and her Guise relations had deserted her. She had tentatively approached Philip II after the stalemate at Elizabeth’s tribunal, and her policy gained a fresh impetus when the Cardinal of Lorraine died. By the 1580s, Mary was beginning to talk openly about linking her cause to Philip’s grand European strategy. This was incredibly injudicious, but it put her back in the spotlight. Once again she was about to take center stage in a pan-European drama.

  Cecil had bided his time. The spider was poised to catch the fly. Mary felt irrelevant and disposable, and she reacted in the only way she knew.

  She reinvented herself as a poor Catholic woman persecuted for her religion alone. It was almost entirely a theatrical pose, but she had nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, Walsingham had recruited a mole in the French embassy. He had pulled off this intelligence coup while Mary was still at Sheffield. The mole was active for little more than eighteen months, but it was long enough for Cecil’s spymaster to identify many of her secret agents at home and abroad. It was only a matter of time before Mary’s fate was sealed.

  28

  An Ax or an Act?

  MARY HAD FIRST put out feelers to Philip II in November 1568, in the earliest months of her captivity when she was at Bolton Castle. The timing was propitious, because a new Spanish ambassador, Don Guerau de Spes, had arrived in London. He was inexperienced, but a natural conspirator. Within a few months, he had staked out positions that sparked an Anglo-Spanish trade war and threatened a Spanish invasion of England on Mary’s behalf.

  A fortnight or so after Moray had exhibited the Casket Letters for inspection, de Spes called at the French embassy in London, where he made two proposals. The first was that “he knew of no greater heretic in this world, nor a greater enemy to the Catholic faith, than Master Cecil.” He urged France to cooperate with Spain “to make him lose his office and the favor and credit that he enjoyed with his mistress the queen.” The second proposal was that France and Spain should place a joint embargo on all English trade until the Catholic faith was restored.

  A month later, a Florentine banker, Roberto Ridolfi, who was secretly channeling the funds sent by Pope Pius V to the English Catholics, entered the story. He was a double agent working both for Spain and for Walsingham. In February 1569, he offered to arbitrate between Elizabeth and the Duke of Alba, Philip II’s governor-general in the Netherlands, to end the trade war. The following month, he visited de Spes, bringing an exciting and dangerous message from the Duke of Norfolk and his allies, the Earl of Arundel and Lord Lumley. They had said that they were no longer willing to accept exclusion from their rightful places by the lowborn upstarts of Cecil’s inner caucus. They wished to overthrow Cecil and force Elizabeth to realign her policy closer to Philip II and Rome. Later Ridolfi told the French ambassador that he was commissioned by the pope to help restore the Catholic faith in England.

  Ridolfi contacted Mary through her agent in London, John Lesley, Bishop of Ross, to whom he transferred £3000 from de Spes with Mary’s knowledge. The transaction placed her at the center of two converging conspiracies. One was designed to improve her conditions in exile and displace Cecil as chief minister. The other linked her dynastic claim to a plan to restore Catholicism in England.

  The Duke of Norfolk had conspired to oust Cecil shortly after the first stage of Elizabeth’s tribunal opened at York in October 1568. He had been one of the original English judges and had resented the way Cecil had dictated the proceedings. Cecil had ignored his protests. The tribunal had b
een shifted to Westminster, and Norfolk was sent off on a futile mission to inspect the northern frontiers until Cecil was ready to reopen the hearings.

  But Norfolk was not easily marginalized. He was England’s premier duke, whose family stood at the heart of the Catholic party in England. His talent for making advantageous alliances was unrivaled. He had married three heiresses: Lady Mary Fitzalan, daughter of the Earl of Arundel, who died at sixteen; Margaret, daughter of Lord Audley, who died after bearing five children in as many years; and Elizabeth Leyburne, the widow of Lord Dacre. When his third wife died in 1567, Norfolk became the guardian of the heiresses to whom he would marry his three sons. His sister Jane was the wife of the Earl of Westmorland, one of the two predominant landowning nobles in the north of England. Lastly, a second sister, Margaret, married Lord Scrope of Bolton Castle.

  Shortly after Elizabeth’s tribunal had ended in a stalemate, Norfolk decided that he would try and marry Mary. He had sneaked up to Bolton Castle to take a look at her, using a visit to his sister as an excuse. In the end, he would conspire to put Mary (and himself) on the English throne.

  That, however, is not how the plot began. As it was first imagined by that arch-conspirator among the Scottish lords, the insinuating Maitland, the aim was very different. His idea was that if Mary could be married off to an English nobleman, she would be neutralized politically.

  She would have been treated honorably, but her power and authority would be vested in her husband. Under English law, she would be a femme couverte.

  The idea was ingenious, because it appealed to those hereditary nobles who always disliked the way Henry VIII had bypassed the strict order of succession in his will. It also resolved the problem of Mary’s dynastic claim in a way that Elizabeth herself had once anticipated: it was analogous to her old scheme to marry her cousin to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

  Mary jumped at the idea. She asked the pope to annul her marriage to Bothwell, which was by Protestant rites and thus canonically invalid. Over the next twelve months, she also wrote Norfolk a series of love letters, despite having seen him only once. “I will live and die with you,” she said. “Neither prison the one way, nor liberty the other, nor all such accidents, good or bad, shall persuade me to depart from that faith and obedience I have promised to you.”

  Norfolk sent Mary a diamond that she was to take with her to Fotheringhay. She described it as something “I have held very dear, having been given to me . . . as a pledge of his troth, and I have always worn it as such.” As she told the duke at the time, “You have promised to be mine and I yours . . . As you please command me; for I will for all the world follow your commandment, so you be not in danger for me . . . Your own faithful to death, Queen of Scots. My Norfolk.”

  We must allow for the conventions of royal marriages in which the custom was to express affection as soon as a betrothal had been arranged in principle. Even so, Mary was once more grasping at straws. If a marriage to Norfolk could enable her to recover her freedom, she would do it without asking any questions. It was a reasonable match, a better dynastic prospect than the old idea of marriage to Leicester. But there was a hopeless catch. No one had dared to tell Elizabeth, without whose consent the plan was worthless and Mary’s hopes were raised in vain.

  At first, however, even the perfidious Moray signed on. In July 1569, he was in favor of the plan. Then, a month later, he had compelling second thoughts. He saw the snag. Mary would use the marriage to seek her restoration as Queen of Scots, and Norfolk would use it to assert his claim in right of his wife to the throne of England with the aim of restoring Catholicism. With Norfolk at Mary’s side, furthermore, Moray would be ousted as regent and forced to seek exile abroad. He would end up changing places again with his sister.

  Moray played a dirty trick, sending Elizabeth, still ignorant of the proposed marriage, a certified copy of Norfolk’s letter announcing his intention to marry Mary even if Moray objected.

  Elizabeth had rarely been so angry. She perhaps disliked the marriage plan less than the fact that it had been devised behind her back. Everyone involved was sent for except Mary, and those like Leicester and Throckmorton, who were agile in a crisis, made their excuses. Badly caught out in this game of musical chairs were the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland. When these Catholic lords were abandoned by their allies and left to face Elizabeth and possible execution alone, they decided to rebel. Their revolt, the so-called Northern Rising, erupted in November 1569 and was crushed by overwhelming southern forces within six weeks.

  The two earls and the Countess of Northumberland took refuge in Liddesdale, but were denounced by Bothwell’s old adversary, the Laird of Ormiston. Westmorland and the Countess of Northumberland fled to the Netherlands, where they remained in exile. Northumberland was seized by Moray and executed by Elizabeth after the Scots sold him back to England for £2000. The Countess of Westmorland retreated to her brother’s estates in Norfolk, where she lived out her remaining days in obscurity.

  Mary was not blamed by Elizabeth for causing this, the most serious rebellion of her reign—at least not yet. But all along there had been two separate conspiracies. The plan to marry Mary to Norfolk had failed and the duke was a prisoner in the Tower. Ridolfi, meanwhile, was still plotting. In May 1569, he drew up a plan to depose Elizabeth, called the Enterprise of England, and took it to the Spanish embassy. Philip II was tentatively listening. These were plans that fit his grand strategy for Europe and the domination of world trade. He wondered if they could possibly succeed.

  Ridolfi then visited Walsingham. As long as he was careful and the two sides did not meet and compare notes, he could hope to get away with his double-dealing and claim rewards from both sides. He had information to sell, because his banking services provided the only link among de Spes, Norfolk and Mary’s agent in London. He had also supplied the cipher used to encode the communications between de Spes, Mary and the English lords. Whoever had a copy of this cipher could read all their intercepted letters.

  Ridolfi was arrested on the eve of the Northern Rising. Yet he was released after six weeks. And he was not detained in the Tower, the usual place for political prisoners, but at Walsingham’s house. Ridolfi had been “turned” by Walsingham. It was a stroke of luck for Cecil, because in February 1570 Pope Pius V spurred on by the prospect of reversing the English Reformation, did what his predecessors had always refused to do. He published a decree, Regnans in Excelsis, depriving Elizabeth of her “pretended title” to the English throne and releasing her subjects from their allegiance. This was Mary’s golden opportunity and what she had sought in her youth, when she had first been married to the Dauphin Francis.

  Cecil’s reaction was immediate, his logic as inexorable as ever. Protestants were now loyalists and Catholics traitors. By his definition, Catholics agreed with the pope that Elizabeth should be deposed. When Parliament met in April 1571, he introduced an oath to ensure that all Catholic members were excluded. He then drafted a government bill to disqualify any candidate for the succession—principally Mary—who at any time for the rest of Elizabeth’s life might claim the throne or usurp its insignia. In debating this bill, he would never let Parliament forget that Mary’s heraldic arms in France had been quartered with the royal arms of England and that her ushers had cried “Make way for the queen of England” as she walked to chapel.

  During 1571, Cecil and Walsingham closely monitored the Enterprise of England. In an attempt to put the main conspirators off their guard, Norfolk was released from the Tower on parole. Mary’s correspondence was more rigorously vetted, and by April, Walsingham—temporarily appointed the English ambassador to Paris, where most of the plotting was centered—had acquired with suspicious ease a copy of the cipher supplied by Ridolfi to the conspirators. There was no need to struggle to crack the code: Walsingham was given the solution on a plate.

  On August 4, Philip sent Alba his detailed instructions. The plan was to capture Elizabeth in the final phase of her summe
r progress to Hertfordshire and Essex. This would unleash a general rising of English Catholics, who would liberate Mary and marry her to Norfolk. A Spanish fleet vould then sail with six thousand crack troops from Alba’s forces in the Netherlands to secure the country. Mary and Norfolk would then ascend the throne. To meet the costs of the expedition, Philip II was sending 20,000 ducats to replenish Alba’s treasury.

  The plan leaked when one of Philip’s councilors disclosed it to a merchant in the Anglo-Iberian trade who was another of Walsingham’s double agents. The man returned at once to England. He arrived on or about September 4 and was sent directly to Cecil. The next day, Cecil issued a warrant to put Norfolk back in the Tower. He also wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Mary’s custodian. The letter was endorsed “sent from the court, the 5th of September 1571 at 9 in the night.” No Elizabethan document had a higher priority. It was marked “haste, post haste, haste, haste, for life, life, life, life.”

  Shrewsbury was warned of the plot and of Elizabeth’s reaction to it. She knew, Cecil said, that Mary was planning to escape and wished to go to Spain rather than to France or Scotland. She knew Mary had offered her son, James VI, in marriage to one of Philip II’s daughters by Elizabeth of Valois, Mary’s recently deceased childhood friend and playmate whom she greatly mourned.