by Lisa Hilton
The close relationship between Lennox and James provoked accusations that their relationship was sexual, and while James had been raised a strict Protestant under the precepts of his reformist tutor, the brilliant humanist George Buchanan, Guise believed that Lennox’s influence might return James to the Catholic fold. At the meeting in May, Crichton delivered a report condemning those English Protestants, including Leicester, who were denying the Stuarts their lawful right to succeed in England. According to Crichton, Lennox believed that he could muster eight thousand troops, to be equaled by a French force (led, Guise insisted, by himself, though some Jesuitical wrangling was required to absolve him of his oath to Henri III). With Scotland tamed, Guise planned to invade England.
Crichton was dispatched to Spain, while his fellow priest, the erstwhile companion of the Catholic martyr Campion, Robert Persons, travelled to Rome to present the plan to the new Guise allies, the Spanish. It was estimated that the venture would require 400,000 crowns. Meanwhile, Guise was on the Normandy coast, procuring ships and supplies. But the plan began to unravel even at this early stage. Rome offered just 50,000 crowns of the required funds, while in Spain, Philip proposed only 10,000. It did not suit Spanish interests to fund a Guise coup in England—they were more use to him in France as a counter to Henri, who had been sending funds to his brother Anjou in the Netherlands, supported by Elizabeth. Philip was, however, prepared to be generous to Guise personally, pensioning him to the sum of 40,000 crowns, “not yet a formal alliance, but the first steps had been made in a commitment that would inevitably grow as the Anglo-French entente strengthened.”3 While Guise profited personally from inaction, his manipulation of James’s crush on Lennox achieved the opposite of his aims. The Protestant lords in Scotland were sufficiently alarmed by the king’s flirtations with both Lennox and Catholicism to kidnap him (with Elizabeth’s covert support) at Ruthven in 1582. The invasion of England was put off, while Scotland was once more in the hands of the reformers.
The web of espionage was growing impossibly tangled—Henri was receiving information from the English, while Walsingham was on the trail of Guise’s agents on both sides of the Channel. As ever, it was almost impossible to know who was actually working for whom. The official English version of the Throckmorton plot is explained in a pamphlet (possibly authored by Walsingham or Cecil himself), A Discovery of the Treasons Practised and Attempted Against the Queen’s Majesty. Francis Throckmorton and his two brothers had been brought up as Catholics, and in 1581, Francis had joined the London household of the French ambassador, where he was soon selected to manage the secret correspondence between Mary Stuart and her French allies. In June 1583, he was contacted by Charles Paget, a member of the Guise household in Paris, who had been spying for Walsingham for two years. Paget, known deliciously as “Mope,” a slippery creature, “a most dangerous instrument” in Walsingham’s words, was in England in September to survey the most likely point on the Sussex coast for the landing of a Guisard force. To achieve this, he was courting the Earls of Arundel and Northumberland, the latter of whom was arrested in London on 15 December. Walsingham’s investigations, which involved the questioning of hundreds of witnesses in Sussex, compromised Northumberland beyond his statement that his meeting with Charles Paget had merely been concerned with the affairs of the latter’s elder brother. Throckmorton, though, had been in the Tower since early in the month and had already confessed under torture to meeting the Spanish ambassador and providing him with a list of potential harbors in Sussex.
If Philip of Spain had hoped that the Guise might undermine the more cordial relations obtaining between England and France, Spanish involvement in the plot had the opposite effect. In January 1584, Mendoza was unceremoniously ejected from England, shuffled on to the Scout, and borne to Calais. In London, there was a mood of paranoid anxiety. The Earl of Northumberland committed suicide in the Tower in June; on 10 July, Throckmorton faced the horrific traitor’s death at Tyburn.
The charges against Throckmorton included the amassing of evidence to prove Mary Stuart’s claim to the throne, listing potentially supportive magnates, and the intention of deposing Elizabeth with the aid of the Guise/Spanish Army whose English coordinator he was. His death did not deter the Duc de Guise, who welcomed the expelled Mendoza in Paris and brazenly continued with his plotting. Guise dynastic pretensions in Britain were heightened by the French king’s adherence to the succession of the reformist Navarrese branch of the house of Valois—pure anathema to the Guise. If Henri of Navarre did succeed, the Savoyard ambassador warned Guise, he should “have no other doubt than that their House would be ruined and that as ancient enemies and Catholics, they would all be killed.”4 The situation in France mirrored that of England—a childless monarch of one confession menaced by the ruler of a minor state of the opposing faith. So there was a curious parity between the situation of Elizabeth and that of Guise—both suspected and feared that while the next claimant lived, their own lives, and the authority of their dynasties, were in danger.
When Elizabeth conferred the Order of the Garter on Henri III the next spring, Guise mounted a propaganda campaign to publicize the danger of a Protestant succession, while expressing his hopes, in a conversation overheard by an English spy, that soon a “pretty game” would be played out in England. But in June 1584, the news reached Paris that the Duke of Anjou had died. For the French, this initiated a war of succession which was to drag on for thirteen destructive years; for Elizabeth in England, it was a poignant personal loss.
Elizabeth had had great fun with Anjou, not least because their play of courtship was a salve to her pride. In September 1578, Leicester had married Lettice Knollys, the widowed Countess of Essex, with whom he had been conducting an affair for some years. The couple had managed to keep their union a secret until 1579, when Elizabeth was informed of the marriage by Jean de Simier, who had arrived in England to conduct the diplomatic romance on his master’s behalf. Elizabeth’s shock and anger at the deception were exacerbated by Leicester’s hypocrisy, since, as a married man himself, he had nonetheless been scheming to prevent the French marriage. Anjou made a brief visit to England in August 1579, returning in October 1581, and Elizabeth pronounced herself delighted and determined to proceed with the marriage. In November, she had created a sensation when she announced at Whitehall that the duke would be her husband, kissing him on the mouth in public and giving him a ring. Elizabeth may have genuinely enjoyed Anjou’s company, his charm and his flattery, yet she never seriously intended to marry him. As ever, the real agenda of their courtship was the leverage England might purchase between France and Spain. Dangling a French alliance before Philip might conceivably keep him out of the Netherlands, and it was therefore in the queen’s interests to protract the negotiations as long as possible.
Elizabeth’s greatest weapon in keeping her suitor at arm’s length was the hostility of her subjects towards a foreign match. The process of annealing her own perpetual virginity to the nation’s security, which was realized a decade later at Tilbury, began in her manipulation of English fears of submission to an alien power as manifested in the reaction to the Anjou courtship. The rhetoric which in 1588 identified English interests indivisibly with the will of God in the aftermath of the Armada—“we, in defense of ourselves, our native country, our anointed prince, our holy religion, our own Jesus Christ … against very antichrist … do withstand the injury done to us”—is present in the language of one of the many anti-Anjou tracts which appeared in the late 1570s, The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf Whereinto England Is Like to Be Swallowed. The author, a devout Norfolk reformist named John Stubbs, asserted in the most vulgar terms that the marriage “must needs draw punishment from God” should Elizabeth take “this odd fellow, by birth a Frenchman, by profession a papist … a fly worker in England for Rome and France in this present affair.” Stubbs had his hand cut off for his pains (managing to lift his hat and call “God Save the Queen” before collapsing on the public scaffold)
, yet the very fury of his language indicated to Elizabeth how profoundly loathed the marriage was, providing her with the ideal excuse to call it off once she had achieved her diplomatic ends.
When the Dutch recruited Anjou as Prince of the Netherlands in the autumn of 1580, the courtship took on a more cynical angle on both sides. Elizabeth was still occupied with preventing Spanish dominion in the Provinces, and on Anjou’s part, continuing the game appeared the best possible means of extracting English funds for his campaign. Given that Anjou’s hopes were now more fiscal than flirtatious, Elizabeth’s announcement of her commitment to the marriage in 1581 was a masterstroke. Since she desired the match, to which her subjects so objected, she herself could not be blamed if the French chose to be disobliging, which they could hardly help being, as the conditions she attached were frankly absurd. No funds would be supplied for the Netherlands, but France must agree to assist England in the event of a Spanish invasion. Anjou saw when he was beaten, and though both parties kept up their lovers’ pose in public, the duke was overheard cursing the lightness of women in general and the perfidy of islanders in particular.
Elizabeth played her regrets at the impossibility of the marriage perfectly. Since she no longer had to marry Anjou, she declared herself prepared to offer him £60,000 in two payments and kiss him goodbye. The Spanish ambassador Mendoza claimed that she danced with glee in her chamber at the success of her strategy, but Anjou persisted in lurking around, playing the heartbroken swain, until he had obtained an advance of £10,000.
The queen may never seriously have intended to have Anjou, nor was she so foolish as to believe a blissful domestic life had truly been in prospect, but he had nonetheless represented the last chance at matrimony she could expect, and she grieved, if not for “Monsieur” personally, then for the loss of a romantic dream. There is a certain melancholy pleasure to be had in mourning for things we never really wanted, and Elizabeth indulged it. The French ambassador described her as tearful and regretful, declaring herself “a widow woman who has lost her husband.”
Anjou’s loss was all the more cruel because Elizabeth was well aware that the Parisians had been sniggering over her last, failed courtship since the winter. In November, a “foul picture” of Elizabeth had been pinned up about the city, depicting the queen on horseback, exposing herself by raising her dress with her right hand, accompanied by a caricature of Anjou with a hawk on his wrist, “which continually baited and could never make her still.” The engraver was Richard Verstegen, a Catholic exile and propagandist for the Guise, who had previously produced works such as A Brief Description of the Diverse Cruelties Which the Catholics Endure for Their Faith in England. When Elizabeth’s ambassador complained, a set of Verstegen’s plates were discovered at the Hôtel de Guise.
ON 10 JULY 1584, William of Orange walked downstairs after dinner at his home, the Prinsenhof at Delft, to keep an appointment with a Frenchman, Balthasar Gerard. As the leader of the Netherlandish States General approached him, Gerard produced a pistol and shot William in the chest. For Gerard, this was the culmination of a three-year project. He had been pursuing William ever since 1581, when Philip of Spain had formally declared the prince an outlaw and placed a huge bounty on his head. Gerard was apprehended and died a particularly gruesome death, even by the standards of the time, so Philip kept his 25,000 crowns while achieving his objective. Spanish involvement in the Guise invasion plot marked a change in Philip’s policy. He may not have been prepared to countenance a Guiseruled puppet state in England, but, in a reversal of his position for the preceding twenty years, he was now contemplating war against Elizabeth.
The vehemence of the anti-Protestant campaign in France, coupled with the Spanish-inspired assassination of William of Orange, prompted William Cecil to believe that the law needed to take further measures to protect Elizabeth. As a preliminary step, he and Walsingham devised the “Instrument of an Association,” signed at Hampton Court by the Privy Council in October. This lengthy document asserted that Elizabeth’s murder had been “most traitorously and devilishly sought” and swore those entering into the Association to solemnly defend her from any such future conspiracy: “We shall never desist from all manner of forcible pursuit against such persons to the uttermost extermination of them, their counselors, aiders and abettors.”
Elizabeth, as usual, preferred to dismiss the necessity of protective legislation, at least in public. As the Instrument of Association began its travels across the nation, she appeared especially splendid at that year’s Accession Day Tilt. An eyewitness account of the celebrations on 17 November describes the competitors entering the tiltyard at Whitehall to the sound of trumpets, accompanied by brightly dressed retinues who assembled behind the long barriers on either side of the course. Some wore horses’ manes, others were disguised as “wild Irishmen,” others entered in a carriage drawn by horses themselves dressed up as elephants. Elizabeth stood in her canopied “room” to greet the tilters, who approached to the bottom of the connecting staircase—their armor being too heavy to allow them to mount it—and heard an address from each, some in verse, at which she was noted to laugh appreciatively, studying with her ladies the devices of each knight’s impresa (the emblem painted on a pasteboard shield). This image of the queen, gay, courted, secure, could not have been in greater contrast to the privations being inflicted on Mary Stuart.
Mary had been removed from the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury by an edict of September 1584 and, after a brief period with Sir Ralph Sadler as her custodian, was returned once more to Tutbury in early 1585. Her latest jailer was Sir Amyas Paulet, Elizabeth’s former ambassador to France. Paulet’s instructions from Walsingham are interesting in light of the legislative developments progressing in London. Mary was to be kept in far stricter isolation than before, forbidden to walk out or ride, deprived of her custom of giving charity—lest she communicate with local people—and forbidden any letters except from the French ambassador. Even her servants were forbidden to take the air on the castle walls, while her coachman could only leave the castle under guard. In a gesture reminiscent of the humiliations practiced on Mary Tudor after Elizabeth’s birth, Paulet removed Mary Stuart’s precious cloth of state, one of the last visual symbols of her queenly status. Although Mary eventually succeeded in having it restored, its symbolic significance was poor comfort in the freezing conditions of Tutbury, which were ameliorated by the summer weather only to be replaced by the noisome stink of the castle’s middens.
As Mary endured further privation, Parliament met in late November, to debate an act which was designed to protect Elizabeth from “anything [that] shall be compassed or imagined tending to the hurt of Her Majesty’s person.” Although her name was not explicitly mentioned, the object of the “Act for the Queen’s Surety,” as it became known, was Mary Stuart. Offences against the queen’s surety were to be judged as such under the Great Seal of England by “any person with or without the knowledge of anyone who pretended title to the English crown.” In affirming the Instrument of Association in conjunction with the act, any English subject now had the right
by all forcible and possible means to pursue to death every one of such wicked persons, by whom or by whose means assent or privity or any such invasion or rebellion shall be in form aforesaid denounced to have been made or such wicked act attempted, or other thing compassed or imagined against Her Majesty’s person.5
That is, the act provided for Mary’s prosecution should anyone conspire against Elizabeth in her name, with or without her knowledge or consent. The anti-Catholic fear stoked by the Guisard invasion plot produced plenty of willing signatories to the Instrument when it was sent out through the provinces; even loyal subjects who were unable to write proudly set their mark to the document. At York, where the Northern Rising was still remembered, so many seals were appended that the commissioners were unable to post it. Elizabeth viewed the collated signatures at Hampton Court and declared herself pleased with this show of eager comm
itment on the part of her people. The signatories included Mary Stuart, who never lacked style, if not sense. Thus Mary slipped a noose around her own neck, and it was left to Cecil and Walsingham when to choose to draw it tight. They did not wait long.
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THE DEATHS OF Anjou and William of Orange presented Spain with complementary strategic advantages. Anjou’s loss meant that the French royal house of Valois was effectively extinct, and the next heir apparent was the Protestant Henri of Navarre. This prompted Philip to formalize his alliance with the Guisard Catholic League, in order to prevent Navarre from inheriting, which in turn augmented his strength in the Netherlands. By declaring his intention to support the Leaguers against Navarre, Philip was able to assimilate their military power, which could now be deployed against the Dutch. With Orange gone and the Netherlandish rebels in disarray, Philip could proceed without fear that France would intervene against him. With the Spanish seizure of the majority of ports on the Flemish coast, the balance of power on the Continent seemed to be tilting inevitably towards the Hapsburgs. Philip’s ambition appeared terrifying. The French ambassador in London reported Catherine de Medici’s opinion that once Philip had definitively crushed the Netherlands, he would turn his attentions to France, and thence to England.
With the expulsion of Mendoza in the wake of the Throckmorton conspiracy, the anti-Spanish position of Elizabeth’s government was annealed. Psychologically, both sides were ready for conflict. On 10 October 1584, Elizabeth summoned her councilors to discuss plans for resisting the King of Spain’s “malice and forces.” Philip agreed to his alliance with the Guise in the Treaty of Joinville at the end of 1584, while at Nonsuch in August 1585, Elizabeth finally agreed to openly provide more than seven thousand men to come to the aid of the Netherlands. A month later, Drake departed on another raiding mission, with a fleet of twenty-five ships, two of which belonged to Elizabeth. This time, he had his sovereign’s express permission to attack both Spanish ships and the settlements of the Caribbean. After the long, fluid drift towards conflict, where both sides had been influenced as much by circumstance as specific policy, Drake’s departure was an overt gesture of enmity.