Heretic Queen

by Susan Ronald

  In the chill of that February 1560, rumors began to fly of a secret plot against the Guise family in France. Seemingly, the French Protestants wanted to lash out at the grave injustices and hostility of the administration led by the cardinal of Guise. In fact, it was whispered that the French Protestants wanted to seize the cardinal and his brother, put them on trial before a kangaroo court, and liberate the young king and queen from their nefarious influence. Catherine de’ Medici herself could not have written a better script.

  The only problem was, who could lead such an insurrection against the omnipotent Guise brothers? The king of Navarre, Antoine, was seemingly unable or unwilling to decide which side of the fence he was on, despite being a Protestant and the Bourbon heir to the French throne after Catherine de’ Medici’s three sons.23 So the rebels turned to Antoine’s younger brother Louis de Condé as their putative leader.

  Of course, Condé could not be seen to rebel personally against the House of Guise, so he in turn intrusted the role of leader to a local nobleman, the Seigneur de la Renaudie. Condé could not have made a worse choice. La Renaudie held a grudge against the Guise brothers and had, in fact, once been a client of theirs. He had converted to Calvinism in Geneva after fleeing the employ of the Guise, but even John Calvin wanted nothing to do with him. Nonetheless, La Renaudie met with the plotters at the port of Hugues on the evening of February 1, 1560, and it was agreed that their leader would secretly send out five hundred agents to recruit mercenaries.24 Even Queen Elizabeth was approached for money and arms. The date for the insurrection was set for March 16, some six weeks later.

  * * *

  With one of the worst-kept secrets of its day whispered on every street corner, it is little wonder that the plot failed. When the English Catholics teaching in Louvain heard of it, a letter was hastily penned to the cardinal of Lorraine, Louis of Guise. La Renaudie boasted what he intended to do to a Paris lawyer. A German prince wrote to the bishop of Arras about the audacious plot. Everyone, it seemed, had this fabulous secret he was simply dying to tell. In the event, it was La Renaudie’s Paris lawyer, fearful of being implicated, who revealed the ringleader’s identity. Still, La Renaudie was a small fry, and it did not suit the cardinal of Guise to expose some harebrained scheme hatched by a local Frenchman. No, instead it should be a grand plot on a grand scale. The cardinal would establish the rumor that this plot was the doing of the heretic English queen. Of course, Catherine de’ Medici became alarmed, writing to her daughter, “We have been warned that from all directions men are marching towards Blois.”25

  Three weeks after this first “Huguenot” meeting, the cardinal of Guise ordered the king, the queen, and their entire court to be removed to the medieval Angevin stronghold at Amboise. The spectacular château, built in the thirteenth century, rises steeply above the town just at a bend in the Loire River, jutting out on a high promontory. Amboise was where Francis’s grandfather had been born and where Leonardo da Vinci had died. Catherine’s children had spent much of their childhood here, as it was deemed impenetrable. It seemed a perfect place to avert disaster.

  Slowly Catherine became convinced that it was not Elizabeth behind the plot but rather the enemies of the current French regime. She insisted that Admiral Gaspard de Coligny—a Protestant—be brought in to provide the young king and queen with advice, and perhaps also act in extremis as a hostage. Meanwhile the cardinal sent out scouts to comb the countryside for the insurgents. Catherine, looking more to protect her son than anything else, redoubled her efforts to placate the French rebels, eventually resulting in the Edict of Amboise. This gave an amnesty for all past religious crimes but failed to offer religious freedom. Some religious dissenters were released from prison, but no one came forward with further information against the rebels or proof that Elizabeth had been involved.

  The next weeks passed in a nerve-racking calm. Some foreign informant warned that the leader of the insurgents was “a great prince.” Catherine now suspected Louis de Condé, who had suddenly arrived to join the beleaguered court. Condé’s Protestant sympathies were known to everyone, making him the most likely ringleader. In a truly Machiavellian maneuver, Catherine appointed Condé to be her son’s chief bodyguard, thus forcing the unlucky prince to remain at the castle by the king’s side and unable to instruct his rebels when to strike. It had the other added benefit of seeming to convey great honor on Condé while effectively holding him prisoner.

  For the next ten days—between March 6 and 16—a number of rebels and insurgents were captured in the woods surrounding Amboise. Then finally, the captain of the guard came to confess to the queen mother that his role had been to seal off the king’s apartments to separate Charles from the Guises. La Renaudie wasn’t discovered until March 19, again in the woods surrounding Amboise. He was killed by a single shot, summarily executed. The so-called Tumult of Amboise, allegedly financed by Elizabeth, was over before it had begun.

  Not, however, for Francis, Duke of Guise. Summary justice would be meted out. Any rebel found would be killed on the spot. Shooting was reserved only for rebels of “standing.” Their followers would be bound and sewn into sacks before being dumped into the Loire River to drown. Still others were hung from high in the towers of the château in full view of the town. Before long, the battlements, acting as makeshift gibbets, became heavily festooned with body parts for all to see.

  Condé witnessed the carnage and smelled the decaying bodies on the wind. When a large crowd gathered in one of the château’s courtyards, Condé sat with the royal family as they watched fifty-two nobles executed by decapitation on the block. Francis of Guise directed the gruesome proceedings on horseback, unflinchingly enjoying himself. He ordered the condemned to sing psalms while they awaited their fate. Unable to avert her gaze, Catherine remained erect and transfixed. Condé’s only comment seems to have been “If the French know how to mount a rebellion, they also know how to die.”26

  * * *

  Mary Queen of Scots and France was at Amboise during the bloodletting, yet her whereabouts are not recorded. She had a healthy dislike for carnage, and chances are she excused herself from the “entertainment” on the grounds of ill health. Still, with a large body count and her uncles directly implicated in the bloodbath, Mary cannot have failed to know about the events.

  It was against this background that Mary received word of the death of her beloved mother at Leith. By the time Admiral Coligny had undertaken an enquiry into why these “Huguenots” had rebelled, peace between Scotland and England was agreed. The Treaty of Edinburgh provided for the withdrawal of all but a minimal French force in Scotland, bringing France’s active role in Scottish politics to an abrupt end. Mary and Francis were to abandon quartering the English arms, though Francis—and later Mary—refused to give in. To do so would be to admit that Mary was not the legal heir to Elizabeth’s throne, they claimed.

  Within months, two deaths and a pregnancy further changed the course of English and French history. On September 8, Robert Dudley’s long-suffering wife, Amy, was found dead in suspicious circumstances at the foot of the stairs in their Cumnor home near Oxford. Dudley was immediately exiled from court, awaiting the outcome of the legal inquiry. Only Cecil—Dudley’s longtime adversary—extended the hand of friendship, which Dudley grabbed on to willingly. Whether it was an accident, suicide, or even murder, we shall never know for certain, but Amy’s death of a broken neck was highly significant in English affairs. Despite Elizabeth’s evident affection and love for Lord Robert, even she recognized that this “stain” on his character could never be erased. Dudley had become unmarriageable. Cecil would write the English ambassador Throckmorton that he was certain that the queen would never be disposed to marry.

  While Dudley was exiled from court awaiting the outcome of the inquest into his wife’s death, Francis II, king of France, breathed his last on December 5, 1560. He died of an abscess on the brain. Mary Queen of France was now merely Mary Queen of Scots, dowager queen of France. H
er little brother-in-law, Maximilien-Charles, became Charles IX. Catherine de’ Medici proclaimed herself regent with the blessing of the king of Navarre, since she had agreed to return Navarre’s younger brother Condé to him unharmed. The reign of terror of the Guise brothers was, so Catherine believed, at an end.

  Mary was just eighteen, a former queen of the only country she could remember and the unwanted queen of the Protestant country of her birth. She had two obvious choices ahead of her: to remain in quiet retreat in France for the rest of her days or return to Scotland. Despite trying to create a third choice—marrying the imbecile and dangerous son and heir of Philip II—Scotland beckoned loudly. Mary’s natural half brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, had come to France ostensibly on behalf of the Protestant Lords to discuss what might happen if Mary chose to return to Scotland.

  Unbeknown to him, one tidbit of gossip he conveyed from the English court would determine that Mary must return home: Catherine Grey, the putative heir from the English Suffolk line to the succession, had married the Earl of Hertford in secret, and she was expecting their first child. Moray elaborated that Elizabeth, outraged that her semiofficial heir should marry without royal consent, had ordered Catherine and Hertford sent to the Tower until further notice.27

  This made any indecision Mary might have felt evaporate. If Mary wanted to claim the throne of England, she would need to visit her cousin Elizabeth and charm her, just as she had done with everyone she met. Mary resolved to come to England to prove that she was not only the rightful heir to the throne but also a most fitting one.

  FIVE

  The Battle for Hearts and Minds

  For this is man’s nature, that where he is persuaded that there is the power to bring prosperity and adversity, there will he worship.

  —George Gifford, A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers

  If Elizabeth understood one thing above all else, it was that both she and England were in mortal danger. The apparently innocent appeal of the young Queen Mary to return to Scotland through England seemed to be the most natural and innocuous of requests, but Elizabeth, despite pressure from nearly all her councillors, was not budging. For her, to have the very queen who refused to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh travel the length and breadth of England with her mostly French royal train was a threat she simply was not prepared to take. To have the Scots queen charm England with her beauty, her youth, her French courtly ways, and her silver tongue rankled in every fiber of Elizabeth’s body. Eventually Cecil was compelled to write that Her Majesty could “in no wise consent … Why should the Queen show any such courtesy considering she [Mary] hath not kept promise in any one thing but always said well and done nothing?”1 Even had Mary not been a serial breaker of promises, to allow a Catholic queen to travel unchecked among an English population who had not necessarily declared itself either in favor of or against the Elizabethan religious settlement was simply too great a risk.

  To make matters worse, Elizabeth saw plots and counterplots within her own nobility and among her councillors. The Suffolk heir to the throne, Lady Catherine Grey, never a favorite of Elizabeth, had been suspected for some while of allowing herself to become embroiled in Spanish plots to overthrow her. In fact, the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip, “I try to keep Lady Catherine very friendly,” as early as November 1559. “And she has promised me,” Ambassador de Feria reported, “not to change her religion, nor marry without my consent.”2

  Alas, Catherine Grey did not keep de Feria and his successor, Alvarez de Quadra, informed of her crucial decisions in matters of either religion or the heart. To compound her offenses when they were discovered, she had even managed to foil Elizabeth’s own plan to marry her off to Scotland’s Earl of Arran in 1560. The queen had opened negotiations with the Scots Lords of the Congregation in the hope of uniting Scotland and England on Elizabeth’s own death by marrying the two rival claimant lines to England’s throne.3 Instead, after a clandestine courtship, Catherine Grey married Edward, Earl of Hertford, son of the disgraced Lord Protector Seymour from the reign of Edward VI. To the Elizabethan mind, “the purpose of the toils and perils of lovers should have as their principal aim the conquest of a woman’s soul rather than her body.”4 As a queen who had declared that her woman’s body was quite separate from the body politic over the Dudley affair, Elizabeth read her own mortal peril into Catherine’s marriage to Hertford.

  Elizabeth was incandescent. Hertford had escaped to France months earlier, most likely in fear of what would happen once it was discovered that his wife was “with child.” When Catherine was eight months pregnant, she was thrown unceremoniously into the Tower of London, where she soon gave birth to her son, Edward, named after his father. However, it would be wrong to think that Elizabeth’s harshness to Catherine was just some petty act of vengeance against her putative heir.

  Nagging uncomfortably at the back of the queen’s mind was whether her nobility—or worse still, Cecil—had had a hand in the match. The Spanish ambassador, de Quadra, was of the opinion that Cecil had been behind Catherine’s clandestine marriage and made no secret of his feelings to Elizabeth. Yet there were so many whispered intrigues surrounding Lady Catherine that the only sensible course of action from Elizabeth’s viewpoint was to have the marriage to Hertford annulled by the archbishop of Canterbury and place Catherine in the Tower indefinitely.

  * * *

  Though the “Hertford Affair” had happened months earlier, in Elizabeth’s meeting with the Scots ambassador Maitland in September 1561 in London, she reiterated her fears about naming a successor: “So long as I live, I shall be Queen of England. When I am dead, they shall succeed me that have the most right … I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed. Plures adorant solem orientalem quam occidentalem.”5

  The Latin text holds the key to her thinking. It translates as More worship the rising than the setting sun. In this one phrase is encompassed all the scheming and plotting that surrounds a hopeful heir, whose youth, vigor, and vitality pose a threat to the reigning monarch. Elizabeth would never waver from this viewpoint and actually made it illegal to mention the succession in 1571. It seems incredible that her council and nobility refused to take her at her word on this absolutely fixed point.

  Still, the succession mattered, not only to those at court but also to the people at large. They were being asked to accept rapid changes thrust upon them by the Act of Settlement and Uniformity in religious matters, where the monarch reigned supreme over church as well as state. This meant, of course, that the monarch affected each and every life with her whims and fancies and demanded her subjects’ utter loyalty. Loyalty, however, depended in large part on the individual’s religious convictions, status in society, and geographical location.

  * * *

  The nobles were fairly easy for Elizabeth to comprehend, just as it was reasonable to expect them to accept whatever the queen decided. It was, after all, the way of life at court. Though the Tudors were noted for their recognition of service by merit—often rewarding the Tudor “new men”—their nobility represented only a very small fraction of society. Many followed Elizabeth’s itinerant court between her palaces. The queen knew full well that they all sought preferment and that their oaths of allegiance tripped as easily off the tongue as silent conspiracies could be hatched. They simply needed watching, and Cecil had already made a start on what would become the longest surviving of the Elizabethan secret services, with many eyes and ears strategically placed to pick up the slightest whiff of a plot against her.

  The English merchant classes were another matter entirely. Most of the royal palaces were situated in and around London, which increased trade significantly in the capital and helped maintain it as the realm’s largest city, with the Thames as its major thoroughfare.6 City life created new opportunities for advancement either at court or in trade, but Londo
n remained rife with disease and criminality. Even the Puritan “godly” worshipping at St. Paul’s were not immune from the sacrilegious goings-on within its walls. In 1561, “the south alley” so scandalized a provincial bishop that he wrote home that it “is used for popery and usury, the north for simony, and the horse fair in the midst for all kinds of bargains, meetings, brawling, murders, conspiracies, and the font for ordinary payment of money, as well known to all men as the beggar knows his bush.”7 The foremost house of prayer in the City was a house of worship as much as it was a den of iniquity and home to booksellers touting clandestine censored books as well as ballads, pamphlets, and holy hymn sheets licensed by the Stationer’s Register.

  Though still a walled city, London had long before spilled out beyond its protective gates: to the north, east, and west were Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Moorgate, Bishopsgate, and Aldgate, with the royal palace of the Tower of London to the south, bordering the Thames. When the Bow Bell sounded, the gates creaked shut and the bellmen set out on their patrol, calling out the hour with the warning:

  Remember the clocks,

  Look well to your locks,

  Fire and your light,

  And God give you good night

  For now the bell ringeth.8

  Yet most English men and women lived in the countryside, the bulk of them yeomanry or peasants. Most of them were removed from much of the hurly-burly of England’s larger regional cities. They lived according to the agrarian calendar, often buffeted by the winds. Their country traditions had long been muddled between pagan ritual and ecclesiastical rite, with saints’ days rather than the day and the month holding more meaning to the average Elizabethan. “St. Hilarytide” meant January 13, just as “St. Georgetide” indicated April 23. “Whitsuntide” was both a pagan holiday and the festival commemorating the mystery of Pentecost and the descent of the Holy Ghost, and while it remained a solemn celebration for the religious, Whit Sunday, fifty days after Easter, was also a time of community merrymaking and feasts for reveling, with Whitsun church cakes and ales served.