Tudors (History of England Vol 2)

by Ackroyd, Peter

  The parliament of November 1584 met in a state of some excitement. The members confirmed the details of the Bond of Association by passing an Act for the Queen’s Safety. The arrangements for the ‘interreyne’ were never discussed, and it is likely that Elizabeth’s severe displeasure prevented their being taken any further. The importance of the Bond of Association, however, was immediately emphasized at the beginning of 1585 in a further conspiracy against the queen’s life that was engineered by a curious double agent, William Parry, who was supposed to act as a spy against English Catholics. Instead he turned against his mistress and lay in wait in her garden at Richmond; eventually, when she appeared, he was so daunted by her majesty that he gave up the attempt. That is one story. Another records that he had gained an audience with the queen and came into her presence with a knife concealed in his shirt. Once more his nerve failed him.

  Nevertheless he was seized before being questioned by Walsingham. He was dispatched to the Tower and afterwards sent to the gallows. ‘It makes all my joints to tremble,’ one member of parliament wrote after his arrest, ‘when I consider the loss of such a jewel [Elizabeth].’ Parry himself wrote a confession to the queen that ended on a tender note. ‘And so farewell, most gracious and the best natured and qualified Queen that ever lived in England. Remember your unfortunate Parry, overthrown by your hard hand. Amend that in the rest of your servants, for it is past with me if your grace be not greater than I look for. And last and ever, good madam, be good to your obedient Catholic servants. For the bad I speak not.’

  Parliament had made one significant change to the Bond of Association; on the orders of Elizabeth herself, they had expressly exempted Mary’s son, James, from the threat of reprisals. At the same time the queen opened negotiations with the young man, with the prospect of her recognizing him as James VI of Scotland. This also implied that he might have some claim to the English throne in the event of her death. Of course James had already inherited the crown of Scotland, since at the age of thirteen months he had ascended the throne after the forced abdication of his mother. Yet the formal acceptance of his position by Elizabeth would immensely strengthen his rule. The queen herself would appreciate the support of the Protestant monarch in the event of Spanish intrigue or invasion.

  James now wrote to his mother, assuring her that she would always be honoured with the title of ‘queen mother’. She fell into a rage. ‘I pray you to note,’ she wrote in reply, ‘I am your true and only queen. Do not insult me further with this title of queen mother . . . there is neither king nor queen in Scotland except me.’ She threatened to disinherit and to curse him if he signed any separate agreement with England, but that was precisely the decision he took. Mary herself was removed to the stricter confinement of Tutbury, where she might be able to reflect upon her diminished sovereignty. Soon after this a young Catholic priest was also confined in the castle, where after three weeks he managed to hang himself in his cell. The next morning Mary found him suspended in front of her own windows. She believed this to be a presage of her own death, and wrote once more to Elizabeth with a desperate plea for her life and liberty.

  Her Catholic allies were meanwhile in retreat. Philip Howard, the earl of Arundel, had for a long time been suspected of recusancy; when finally he was privately reconciled to the Catholic Church he wrote a long letter to the queen in which he enumerated his woes and his failure to gain friends at court. He knew well enough the fate of his father, the fourth duke of Norfolk, who had been executed as a traitor. He had now come to that point where he must ‘consent either to the certain destruction of my body or the manifest endangering of my soul’. He had therefore decided to leave the realm without royal licence.

  He gave the letter to a messenger and then proceeded to embark on a boat off the coast of Sussex. He did not know that his servants had been in the pay of the privy council, or that the master of the ship in which he travelled was also a spy of the government. He was followed by two ships and was obliged to surrender after a short fight. He was then taken to the Tower, where he remained for the rest of his life.

  The arrest of Howard was followed by the death of Henry Percy, eighth earl of Northumberland; he had been consigned to the Tower after being implicated in the plot of Francis Throgmorton against the queen, and had remained for a year in his cell without trial. On the evening of 20 June 1585 he was found dead in his bed with three pellets in his heart. It was concluded that, in fear of the shame of public execution, he had determined to kill himself. If he did not suffer the death of a traitor, then at least his inheritance would be preserved. He was supposed to have cried out that ‘the bitch shall not have my estate’. Others believed, however, that he had been assassinated for want of evidence against him.

  In the summer of 1585 Elizabeth finally signed a treaty with the Netherlands, pledging her support for their cause against the Spanish. She agreed to send 4,000 men, their wages paid for three months, on the understanding that she would eventually be recompensed. In return she had been given possession of the sea towns of Ostend and Sluys, Brielle and Flushing. A long declaration announced that ‘our next neighbours, the natural people of the Low Countries, being by long wars, and persecution of strange [foreign] nations there, lamentably afflicted, and in present danger to be brought into a perpetual servitude’ had to be assisted.

  The agreement came too late, however, to save Antwerp; the city had fallen to the duke of Parma three days before. In the previous months the duke had occupied Flanders and much of Brabant, while Bruges and Ghent had surrendered to him. The queen had finally come out into the open, however, after years of covert negotiation and secret alliances. Yet she did not wish to become queen of the Low Countries; that would open her to fresh dangers and fresh expense. She merely wished to uphold their liberties under Spanish rule. She would be their protector rather than their sovereign.

  In the early autumn of the same year she also helped to finance Sir Francis Drake in a voyage to the West Indies, with the purpose of rifling Spanish vessels and Spanish-held towns of the region. His force numbered twenty-nine ships and 2,300 men. He captured St Domingo on the island of Hispaniola, with the pillage from that town filling the holds of his vessels. He then went on to Cartagena, on the Spanish Main, and held it to ransom for 107,000 ducats. He was about to set sail for Panama, when an epidemic of yellow fever among his men prevented him.

  The conflicts of the Old World had therefore been transferred to the New and, although it would be anachronistic to speak of a global strategy, there is no doubt that Drake and his fellow adventurers knew that Philip might be seriously weakened in the Netherlands by the capture of his shipments of gold. It was said by Philip’s secretary, at the time of the Armada, that the object of the invasion was ‘no less the security of the Indies than the recovery of the Netherlands’. Open warfare with Spain, therefore, could not now be indefinitely delayed. The new pope, Sixtus V, declared that Elizabeth ‘is certainly a great queen, and were she only a Catholic she would be our dearly beloved. Just look how well she governs! She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the empire, by all.’ In this year Burghley commissioned a painting of the queen, known as the ‘Ermine’ portrait, which displays a sword placed beside her on a table. As lord treasurer, he was in charge of the finances of war.

  On 17 November 1585, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the proclamation of her sovereignty, the queen rode in a gold coach through London; it was an open coach but it carried a canopy embroidered with gold and pearls. She was dressed entirely in white, and at frequent intervals she would call out ‘God save my people!’ The people knelt as she passed and replied ‘God save your Grace’. Behind the coach rode the earl of Leicester, while it was preceded by Burghley and Walsingham. Leicester and Burghley had been with Elizabeth from the beginning of her reign, while Walsingham had joined them eleven years later. She exemplified her motto ‘semper eadem’ – ‘always the same’.

>   In the following month the earl of Leicester was sent to the Low Countries as her lieutenant general. He was eagerly awaited as the ‘new messiah’, one of the leaders of the international Protestant cause, and so great were the expectations that he was offered the post of governor-general; much to the queen’s fury and consternation, he accepted the title. When at the beginning of 1586 he was confirmed as ‘absolute governor’ she became incandescent with rage. It would seem to the world that she was indeed queen and that Leicester was her viceroy; her ‘storms’ and ‘great oaths’ alarmed her councillors, some of whom she accused of being part of the plot to undermine her purposes. She threatened to make peace with the duke of Parma, thus emasculating Leicester in turn.

  When her choler had subsided she left Leicester in command of the English forces, in alliance with those of the Netherlands; but his campaign did not prosper. He found it hard to co-ordinate the counsels of the allies, and was obliged to request more money and more men. One commander wrote to Burghley that ‘the havoc which has been made of the soldiers is lamentable, which must be supplied and enlarged presently before my Lord can do anything’. He could not contain the quarrels between the various states, such as Holland and Zeeland, nor could he satisfy their suspicions of his actions. Although he had been warned by Walsingham to beware ‘charges’, he increased the pay of his officers (including his own) and overlooked the problems of bribery and general corruption. The war had led also to a marked diminution of English exports, with the consequent loss of employment; the situation was exacerbated by a disastrous harvest in 1586 that led directly to malnutrition, disease and death. When we turn from the affairs of the great to the smaller lives of England, we often find misery and discontent.

  It was no wonder, in any case, that the queen had grown alarmed at the costs of conflict. She was fundamentally averse to war; she had no skill or interest in it. It was rumoured now that she would make peace with Spain, and recall Leicester from the ill-starred enterprise; it was also reported that one of the conditions of that peace was her surrender of the sea-towns to Philip II. Religion was not to be a difficulty. If Spain could guarantee the Low Countries their ‘ancient liberties’, it would be enough. Burghley believed that any peace granted on these terms would be a lasting dishonour. He told her that he wished to resign his office and retire into private life; she was for the moment moved by him, but then continued on the course which he described as ‘very absurd and perilous’. Walsingham agreed with him, fearing that everyone would say that ‘there is no court in the world so odious and uncertain in its dealings as ours’. So with the council at variance, and Elizabeth herself uncertain, the war in the Low Countries continued. The whole ill-starred enterprise was rendered more dramatic by the death of Sir Philip Sidney after a skirmish at the siege of Zutphen. He had taken off his leg armour, in heroic emulation of a fellow soldier, but then received the arrow wound that killed him; it was an example of the romance and bravado that characterized him. ‘I am weary,’ Leicester wrote to Walsingham, ‘indeed I am weary, Mr Secretary.’

  By the summer of 1586, however, the queen was once more on intimate terms with her favourite. In one letter she reveals her affection for him with ‘Rob: I am afraid you will suppose from my wandering writings that midsummer moon hath taken possession of my brains this month.’ She concluded with ‘now I will end that do imagine I talk still with you and therefore loathly say ô ô [her symbol for Eyes, his nickname] though ever I pray God bless you from all harm and save you from all foes with my million and legion of thanks for all your pains and cares. As you know, ever the same, E.R.’ Her moods were as always mercurial and mysterious.

  With Elizabeth braving the wrath of Spain, however, this was a time of maximum peril. She feared the machinations of Mary, and in February 1586 it was reported in the French court that she had fainted; it was said that she had remained unconscious for two hours. In the early summer of that year she had been walking to the royal chapel in stately progress when suddenly she was ‘overcome by a shock of fear’; she went back to her apartments, according to a Spanish agent, ‘greatly to the wonder of those present’.

  She was perhaps wiser than they knew. A conspiracy was even then being formed against her, guided by a Jesuit priest, John Ballard, and by Mary’s agent in Paris. They had courted a rich young Catholic, Anthony Babington, and he had in turn recruited six courtiers who at the appropriate moment would rise up and assassinate Elizabeth. Walsingham was, meanwhile, closely watching Mary. The queen of Scots was moved to another house, Chartley Manor. It can be said with some certainty that Cecil was happy to allow the conspiracy to develop, disorganized and chaotic as it was. It was to be hoped that Mary would enter a traitorous correspondence that would end her life. And so it proved. On 12 July Babington wrote to Mary Stuart outlining the plan for her liberation and for her ascension to the throne. They must choose a landing place for the invading Spanish troops. The ‘usurping competitor’ would then have to be ‘dispatched’, and he had nominated the men to undertake ‘that tragical execution’.

  The letter had of course been diverted to Walsingham before it was sent on to Mary; he employed a code-breaker to help him decipher the clandestine correspondence. An elaborate scheme had been set up by the spymaster, by means of which a double agent had persuaded Mary to smuggle out letters concealed at the bottom of beer barrels. Mary pondered on her response to Babington. Her guard, Sir Amyas Paulet, wrote to Walsingham that ‘she could see plainly that her destruction was sought, and that her life would be taken from her, and then it would be said that she had died of sickness’. What, then, had she left to lose?

  A few days later Mary replied to Babington’s message. She went through his plan in detail and wrote that ‘when all is ready, the six gentlemen must be set to work, and you will provide that on their design being accomplished, I may be myself rescued from this place’. Walsingham received this epistle, also, but before sending it on to its intended recipients his code-breaker forged a postscript in Mary’s hand asking for the names of the six assassins.

  And then they waited, wanting to test the Scottish queen to destruction. Elizabeth now knew of the plot and had been told that ‘the beast was to be removed that troubled the world’. It is said that Babington was so sanguine of his chances that he commissioned a portrait of himself in the company of the six courtiers. They and their supporters were seen drinking and eating in taverns, quite unaware that they were being followed. In August 1586, Walsingham ordered that John Ballard be arrested on the charge of being a covert priest. The others, taking fright, fled London; yet fourteen were arrested. Babington, his face ‘sullied with the rind of green walnuts’, was found concealed in St John’s Wood; 300 of the most prominent recusants in the north of England were then taken to London under guard.

  One more significant conspirator remained. Mary Stuart was arrested and detained while her rooms at Chartley were searched. A key to sixty different ciphers was discovered, together with the lists of her supporters in England; there was, for example, a record of all the nobles who had pledged allegiance to her. This list was shown to Elizabeth who, after reading it, burned it. ‘Video taceoque,’ she said. ‘I see and I am silent.’

  The conspirators were slaughtered in the usual manner of traitors, Babington being one of the first. But one notable plotter had not yet been brought to the scaffold. It was clear enough now that Mary had been involved in schemes against the queen’s throne, and therefore the queen’s life, for the past eighteen years. In the summer of this year, by the Treaty of Berwick, Elizabeth and James VI of Scotland were bound in a permanent embrace; the two monarchs agreed to maintain the Protestant religion in their separate realms, and to help each other in the event of an invasion. James also received a pension of £4,000 per year and it was clear enough that he was the favourite to succeed to the English throne. His mother was no longer considered. What was to be her fate now?

  35

  The dead cannot bite

  When Ma
ry Stuart was led back to Chartley Manor, after her most secret documents had been taken from her apartment, she was greeted by a crowd of beggars. ‘I have nothing for you,’ she cried out to them, ‘I am a beggar as well as you. All is taken from me.’ She turned to her escort and, weeping, said to them ‘Good gentlemen, I am not witting or privy to anything intended against the queen.’ Many had good reason to doubt that. Her gaoler, Paulet, was asked to keep her in as much isolation as possible. The privy council met each day at Windsor to ponder the situation, but it seemed inevitable that the queen of Scots would be obliged to stand trial for her intrigue against Elizabeth. In the autumn of 1586, in her forty-third year, she was taken from Chartley to Fotheringhay Castle.

  Mary had at first protested against her removal. Since she was not an English subject, she could not be brought before the jurisdiction of an English court. To her protest Elizabeth sent a firm reply that ‘you have in various ways and manners attempted to take my life and to bring my kingdom to destruction by bloodshed. These treasons will be proved to you and all made manifest. It is my will that you answer the nobles and peers of the kingdom as if I myself were present . . . Act plainly without reserve and you will then sooner be able to obtain favour of me.’