by Lisa Hilton
15
THE THREAT POSED by Protestantism to the hierarchical social order of sixteenth-century Europe was not only an anxiety for the King of Spain. One of the many objections to Elizabeth from Rome was that she had dismissed a number of noblemen from her council and replaced them with “obscure” nobodies, an objection also felt by some of her most powerful subjects. To the Nevilles and the Percys, the great families of the Northern March who had patrolled the Scots border for centuries, enjoying what was, in effect, princely privilege within their own fiefdoms, government policy in London had for some years appeared both confusing and insulting. The Earl of Northumberland, Thomas Percy, and the Earl of Westmorland, Charles Neville, felt marginalized by Cecil’s regime and threatened by the religious settlement and apparent lack of resolution over the status of Mary Stuart. Their disaffection, however, may not have taken radical form were it not for the incendiary provocations of a group of anti-Cecil activists: Richard Norton (who had been involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the uprising against Henry VIII three decades earlier), Thomas Hussey, and Robert Tempest. Norton, Hussey, and Tempest claimed that they had the support of the Duke of Alba, who ;would land troops at Hartlepool to aid them in rebellion. They played upon the wounded pride of the great northern families by vociferously deriding the “new men” who were in power under Cecil in London, berating them as parvenus who were misadvising the queen. Details of these men’s mood of insurrection were sufficiently alarming for Elizabeth’s lieutenant in the north, the Earl of Sussex, to summon the two earls to court in late October 1569 to explain the persistent rumors of sedition. The earls refused, instead responding by calling out their troops in one of the moments of fission that characterized Elizabeth’s reign—the summoning of what was to all intents and purposes a feudal host to confront the new order. Sussex had the earls declared traitors on 13 November, his reaction serving to coalesce what had been an incoherent reaction to general discontent into a specifically focused conflict.
Grumbling became rebellion. The earls had a cause—the release of Mary from Tutbury—though they did not announce an intention to push her to the throne. While they hoped to effect change, their cause was not specifically Mary’s. They were conservatives who wanted to slow what they saw as the alarmingly radical absorption of Church by state while remaining theoretically loyal to the crown. Yet once the earls’ affinities were mobilized, they were effectively in open rebellion and there could be no turning back. By the 24th, ten thousand men had reached Bramham Moor, about fifty miles from Tutbury, having celebrated Mass and burned English Bibles in Durham Cathedral en route. Emergency musters were held to provide an army of fifteen thousand men to protect Elizabeth, should the rebels succeed in attaining the capital, but even as the queen’s troops moved north and Mary was removed to Coventry for greater security, the rising, which had never enjoyed much support beyond that of the immediate Neville and Percy affinities, began to peter out. After a last stand at Barnard’s Castle, which they took but quickly realized they could not hold, the rebels scattered and by 15 December, they were in flight to Scotland.
In January 1570, Leonard Dacre, a member of another significant northern family who was engaged in a wardship dispute over inheritance with the Duke of Norfolk, gathered about three thousand men at his seat at Naworth. He had been received by Elizabeth at Windsor as the rebellion was fomenting, and had returned to the north apparently as a loyal subject, but he had been in correspondence with Mary Stuart since 1566 and now attempted to attract her Scots supporters to his side. Elizabeth dispatched her first cousin, Henry Carey, from Berwick to confront Dacre, and in the Battle of Gelt Bridge on 20 February, Dacre was defeated and about three hundred of his men killed. Dacre himself escaped, fleeing first to Scotland and then to the Continent, where he died in Brussels, a pensioner of Philip of Spain, in 1573. Other rebels were less fortunate. Both Westmorland and Northumberland were attainted for their treason; Westmorland and his wife eventually escaped to the Netherlands, but Northumberland was executed in 1572. Tudor propaganda was not only a celebration of dynastic magnificence; it could also serve in creating gruesome folk memories. The north could not be allowed to forget that royal justice held sway throughout the realm, so every bell tower which had sounded in favor of the rising was stripped of its carillon, leaving just one bell to remind the people of their disobedience. Many rebels were publicly hanged and their rotting bodies displayed “for terror.” In Cecil’s view, “The Queen’s Majesty hath had a notable trial of her whole realm and subjects in this time,” and Elizabeth was as keen as her Secretary that the country should be horrified into remembrance.1
It is hardly surprising that the government in London believed that a storm was coming. In February 1570, the prediction Cecil had made in his “Device” eventually came true. Pope Pius V promulgated the bull Regnans in excelsis, the most literally damning Catholic challenge Elizabeth had yet faced. “The number of the ungodly,” the pope declared, “has so much grown in power that there is no place left in the world which they have not tried to corrupt with their most wicked doctrines; and among others Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England, and the servant of crime, has assisted in this.” The bull listed the offences of Elizabeth and her ministers, which included the oppression of followers of the Catholic faith, the institution of false preachers, the abolition of the sacrifice of the Mass, the promotion of heretical books, the ejection of bishops and priests, the forbidding of the acknowledgement of canonical sanction, and the forced abjuration of the authority of Rome. Consequently, Pius declared Elizabeth a heretic, excommunicated her, and deprived her of her “pretended title to the aforesaid crown and of all lordship, privilege and dignity whatsoever.” Her subjects, the bull went on, were formally absolved of their oaths of loyalty to the queen.
Since Elizabeth’s accession, English Catholics had endured an uneasy truce with the religious settlement, but the bull rendered this untenable. “The harsh reality was that the Pope had made it impossible to be a good Catholic and a good Englishman.”2 As the Catholic priest John Hart, interrogated in 1580, was subsequently to express it, “If they obey her [Elizabeth] they be in the Pope’s curse, and if they disobey her, they are in the Queen’s danger.”3
Knowledge of the bull was well current at court by the end of the month, but attempts were made to suppress it as far as possible, until on 25 May, a young man named John Felton nailed a copy of it to the Bishop of London’s garden gate. Writing later from the Catholic college at Rome, the English writer and spy Anthony Munday claimed the existence of a special book of martyrs from which inspiring stories were read to the students in the evenings. Felton, who was executed for his action and had refused to give the traditional speech of submission to royal authority from the scaffold, was according to Munday celebrated in the book. Regnans in excelsis had articulated what had previously been incoherent; it had given men such as Felton a clearly defined cause and the glorious prospect of dying for their faith to which they could aspire.
Elizabeth was now an official, legitimate target for prospective Catholic revolutionaries. Cecil had feared this since the beginning of her reign, and in the late 1560s, he began to work closely with Francis Walsingham, who was to become his strongest ally in matters of security. Walsingham was familiar with Cecil’s circle as a member of the Italian group of exiles under Mary Tudor, and on his return to England had been elected as a Member of Parliament in 1559. An active supporter of French reformists, known as Huguenots, in 1570, Walsingham became ambassador to Paris. He joined the Privy Council on his return three years later, eventually becoming Secretary in 1587. His involvement in what became known as the Ridolfi conspiracy is the first significant example of the close partnership he created with Cecil with the aim of protecting the queen from what both men perceived as the principal threat to her person and to the Protestant regime to which they were passionately committed.
The Ridolfi conspiracy was finally exposed in 1571, but it formed the background of A
nglo-Scots relations from 1569. There are two ways to read the plot as it was ultimately revealed. One is that Elizabeth and Cecil had made a potentially calamitous misjudgment and permitted a dangerous conspirator to go free. The other is that Elizabeth herself was involved almost from its genesis in a scheme which would have efficiently compromised the Scots queen without Elizabeth apparently getting her own hands dirty.
Since the late 1560s, Elizabeth’s intelligence network had been keeping an eye on Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine businessman who was also a suspected papal agent. In December 1568, Francis Walsingham wrote to Cecil to report on a disturbing communication he had received from Paris, which claimed that the French and Spanish governments were considering an alliance for the overthrow of Cecil, “the great heretic,” and the imposition of a total trade embargo on Elizabeth if she resisted a return to the Catholic fold. Within days of Walsingham’s letter, the Spanish ambassador de Spes met with his French counterpart, Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, to discuss the scheme. De Spes was in touch with Ridolfi, and in September 1569, as the first stirrings of the Northern Rising were heard in London, it was discovered that Ridolfi had made bills of exchange for the vast sum of £3,000 available to the Bishop of Ross, Mary Stuart’s envoy. This was sufficiently alarming for Ridolfi to be detained on the advice of Cecil and the Earl of Leicester for questioning at Walsingham’s London home in Seething Lane, near the Aldgate, a former medieval hospital known as the Papey. Ridolfi remained there from November until late January 1570 (that is, for the duration of the rising), during which time he admitted his acquaintance with Ross and his knowledge of the plan to marry Mary to the Duke of Norfolk. His revelations were prompted by intervention from the queen, who suggested that some of his responses were “far otherwise than the truth is” and added threateningly that “a harsher examination would reveal more.” So, was Ridolfi “turned” during his residence at Walsingham’s home, possibly under threat of torture? Elizabeth certainly seems to have displayed a curious degree of friendliness towards such a dangerous character.
After Ridolfi’s release, on a promise to meddle no more in affairs which were beyond him, Elizabeth actually received him for an audience, in her garden at Greenwich Palace on 25 March. Ridolfi swore loyalty to her: “He did in like sort make profession of great affection to serve Her Majesty and this crown.”4 Shortly afterwards, he was on his way to Rome, with a passport signed by Elizabeth herself. His journey also encompassed the Spanish Netherlands and Philip of Spain’s court, apparently with a view of promoting an invasion by the Duke of Alba to set Mary on the throne, supported by an internal coup led by English Catholics. Alba himself termed Ridolfi un gran parlaquina—a chatterbox—and dismissed his capacity to organize any sort of insurrection, yet the view that
Ridolfi … was a man with an Italian love of intrigue, but … with little of the Italian Renaissance skill at diplomacy; he understood little of the workings of the English mind, or indeed the workings of England itself must be disputed. It is almost inconceivable that this supposed political lightweight should have successfully deceived Walsingham, Cecil and Elizabeth at such a delicate moment, while it is a fact that Ridolfi eventually died a respected senator in Florence, neatly avoiding the consequences of his revolutionary plotting. So there is another way to look at Ridolfi’s career … that Ridolfi was a plant; that the whole conspiracy was a set-up from the start, a plot manufactured by [Cecil] to expose Mary Stuart and the danger he knew her to be and to reveal those in England and abroad with whom she had been plotting.5
Walsingham assured Cecil that Ridolfi “would deal both discreetly and uprightly, as one both wise and who standeth on terms of honesty and reputation,” an assessment which hardly fits with the clumsy blabbermouth of Alba’s opinion. Unless, of course, Ridolfi’s indiscretion and incompetence were part of his cover. That Elizabeth should have chosen this moment to promote Walsingham to the French embassy implies that she trusted his views. Moreover, Elizabeth’s resistance to French pressure to make a definitive statement about Mary can be read in this light as a tactic to postpone action until the plot had worked itself out. Ridolfi was a man whose “manoeuvring was so deft that we still cannot be sure whose side he was on.”6 Was he indeed working for Elizabeth, or fooling her into thinking he was a double agent, while in fact remaining loyal to the Catholic cause? Recent historians have strongly inclined to the former view, but whatever Ridolfi believed himself to be doing, his activities indeed confirmed Cecil’s worst fears for the security of Elizabeth and her state.
On 12 April 1571, a man named Charles Bailly, newly arrived from the Netherlands, was arrested at Dover and sent to Lord Cobham in London. Bailly’s luggage had excited the suspicions of the port authorities when it was found to contain copies of A Treatise Concerning the Defence of the Honour of … Mary Queen of Scotland, as well as coded letters to the Bishop of Ross. Lord Cobham immediately sent Bailly to the Marshalsea Prison, obviously having alerted Cecil, for Bailly’s cellmate proved to be William Herle, a skilled informant who worked for the Secretary. Bailly discovered that his cell also possessed a convenient hole in the wall, through which he was able to communicate with an Irish priest, a secretary of the Spanish ambassador, and two servants of the bishop. Herle wrote daily letters to Cecil, who appeared to interrogate Bailly himself, and after several weeks of threats and a dose of the rack (the use of which Ross protested, though Cecil and Leicester denied it), Bailly confessed to knowledge of Ridolfi’s discussions with Alba in the Netherlands and claimed that Ridolfi had requested Bailly write two letters to be passed to Ross for delivery. Bailly knew only that the letters were intended for English noblemen, marked as “30” and “40.” On 13 May, Cecil, accompanied by Sir Ralph Sadler, the Earl of Sussex, and Sir Walter Mildmay, visited Ross at his lodgings, and after lengthy questioning obtained the information that Ridolfi had in his possession letters from Mary to Alba, Philip of Spain, and the pope, and letters from Ross to Alba, all concerning plans for funds and troops to come to Mary’s assistance.
After spending the summer on progress with the queen, Cecil wrote an extraordinary letter on Elizabeth’s behalf to the Earl of Shrewsbury, adding directions to the courier that it should go direct to Sheffield Castle, “haste post haste, haste, haste, for life for life for life for life.” It is a rare and evocative little piece of poetry; one can hear the urgent gallop of the post horse’s hooves in the repeated injunction. Shrewsbury was instructed to press Mary to further revelations and to prevent her from sending or receiving any communication, for if Cecil had set a trap, he was very close to springing it. On 29 August, one Thomas Browne of Shrewsbury had been given a purse of silver by two of the Duke of Norfolk’s clerks for delivery to another Norfolk servant, Laurence Bannister. Browne took the precaution of looking into the purse and discovered £600 in gold and two notes written in code. Within days, Norfolk’s men were being interrogated in the Tower, and Elizabeth claimed she was “very inquisitive” to hear the news. The Duke of Norfolk was taken into custody at Howard House on 4 September, but not before he had had time to dispose of the key to the code. Norfolk refused to sign a statement put together by Sir Ralph Sadler, whom Cecil had employed to question him, and Elizabeth then instructed that Norfolk be sent to the Tower for further examination. Elizabeth sat next to Cecil at his desk as together they combed through the report. The queen proposed that William Barker, one of the two Norfolk servants who had been given charge of the gold, should be questioned again, and she authorized the use of “some extremity” against him. She was no longer prepared to listen to Norfolk’s pleas for clemency, though he pleaded that “when I considered with myself how far I have transgressed in my duty to your most excellent Majesty I dare not now presume to look up or hope for your grace’s favor.” By mid-September, with the warrant for the torture of Norfolk’s servants arrived at the Tower, Cecil was insisting on answers. A month later, he was sufficiently convinced of Norfolk’s guilt to release a tract, Salutem in Christo, detai
ling the conspiracy to the public. In a method familiar to modern-day manipulators of the press, this was a “private” letter from one “RG” which “accidentally” found its way into the public domain. Although the plot it detailed has become known by Ridolfi’s name, his identity was concealed, referred to only as “the messenger” (which again lends support to the notion that Ridolfi had been working for the English government all along).
The charges were as follows: that Mary was responsible for the Northern Rising, that she had conspired to marry Norfolk and with him orchestrate a plan to take London and receive troops from the Netherlands, a scheme enabled by Ross, that “instrument of all the duke’s calamity.”7 Mary was to be proclaimed Queen of England and Scotland, and her son James kidnapped. It was an incendiary piece of propaganda, “a sensational revelation from the heart of Elizabeth’s government.”8
A week later, Ross was questioned again, in an investigation which stretched over days. Over and over again the bishop was asked about Ridolfi—and when he cracked it was clear that Norfolk was a dead man. Yes, Norfolk had “discoursed” with Alba; yes, he had conspired with Philip and Mary, even proposing Harwich as the ideal port at which to land troops; yes, he had been in communication with the pope; yes, the duke was “40” and his ally, Lord Lumley, “30.” Further evidence of Ridolfi’s agency came from the cipher he had prepared from Italian for Norfolk’s use after his release from Walsingham’s custody and kept in Norfolk’s Bible. With only one code, it would be pathetically easy for Cecil to crack, and, as Cecil’s biographer notes, “Who but an English agent would have made such an obvious mistake?”9 In November, Norfolk wrote a long letter to Cecil asking him to intercede with Elizabeth, but some days later the queen herself charged her kinsman with six counts of treason drawn from his own confessions.