by Jane Dunn
However pleased Cecil and the other lords might be that a crestfallen Leicester had accepted rustication, no one had considered Elizabeth’s feelings. On his way to his Warwickshire estates at Kenilworth on a cold February day in 1566, Leicester stayed the night at the Earl of Pembroke’s house. Having just said farewell to him, Elizabeth travelled from Greenwich in disguise to join him for dinner that first night. The queen returned to Greenwich and Leicester continued on his way, expecting to be absent for at least ten days. Elizabeth, however, missed him too much and ‘sent immediately for him to come back’.40
Her fundamental solitariness and need of familial company had been made more poignant by the death in July 1565 of Catherine Ashley, her old governess and the woman who had come closest to showing Elizabeth maternal concern and unconditional love. Mrs Ashley had shared with her every vicissitude of her youth: the excitement and then danger of Seymour’s courtship; her more deadly imprisonment when she was still Princess Elizabeth and her interrogation in the aftermath of the Wyatt Rebellion, the scandal of her flirtation with Leicester and the sinister implications of the death of his wife. She had been the one person who could admonish Elizabeth without fear of her flaring temper, and was never shy of reminding her imperious monarch of the times she had fed her, cleaned her up and dandled her on her knee. She had been one of the keenest advocates for the marriage of her mistress, pointing out it was her duty to save her country from civil war by securing the succession with a son. Never one to be afraid of speaking her mind, Catherine Ashley had been rewarded with loyal affection and care from Elizabeth throughout her life. As she lay dying, the queen visited her and grieved so much at her death that she postponed her official business for some days.
At the beginning of 1566 the old certainties seemed to be slipping from Elizabeth’s grasp. She was harried with increased urgency to expedite her marriage, preferably to the Archduke Charles, but there was talk again of Charles IX of France who, at fifteen, was less than half her age and, she demurred, made her feel in comparison an absurd old woman. Although Leicester had been summoned back to her side, she was less intimate with him than she had been before the upset of their mutual infidelities. In a facetious party game of questions and answers, Heneage had demanded a reluctant Leicester to ask a predetermined question of Elizabeth in front of her courtiers: it being a game, the earl could not refuse. The question, ‘which was the most difficult to erase from the mind, an evil opinion created by a wicked informer, or jealousy?’, was pondered seriously by the queen. Her courteous reply was that neither was easy to overcome ‘but that, in her opinion, it was much more difficult to remove jealousy’.41 This sentiment embarrassed Leicester but it echoed the genuine feeling of the poem Elizabeth had written expressing her own struggle with that emotion.
If her private life was beleaguered, there were worries of greater import abroad. Ireland, whose warring chieftains were endlessly troublesome, offered a particular threat to English security and supremacy in the unyielding form of Shane O’Neill, self-styled ‘King of Ulster’. Cecil had sourly commented that he hoped his head would be separated from his body before it had a chance to wear that crown. This wish was to be unexpectedly fulfilled when he was hacked to pieces by a rival clan in 1567, and his head was sent to Elizabeth’s governor, Sir Henry Sidney, who stuck it on a pole over Dublin Castle. A succession of English governors had become obsessed with the turbulent Irishman who was wild, cruel and cunning and, as they were to find to their cost, completely ungovernable. Sidney wrote to Leicester, ‘I believe Lucifer was never puft up with more pryde nor ambytyon than that Onele ys.’ For a while he was supported by Mary Queen of Scots, and it was rumoured even that he had offered Ireland to Scotland, seeking alliance with France to drive the English out. Cecil and Elizabeth were alarmed by the connection: ‘We have cause to feare that O’Neyle’s boldness is fedd out of Scotland,’42 Cecil confided to a friend.
Elizabeth herself wrote the most enigmatic letter of advice to Sir Henry Sidney, her new Lord Deputy of Ireland, which she asked him to consign immediately to ‘Vulcan’s base keeping [the flames]’. In it she urged action, even if based on imperfect information, ‘if we still advise we shall never do; thus we are ever knitting a knot, never tied’ and called on the enduring myth of Prometheus to urge herself from habitual caution: ‘Prometheus let me be, Epimetheus hath been mine too long.’* In a vivid image of a predatory she-wolf prowling Ireland in sheep’s clothing, ‘her woolly garment upon her wolfy back’,43 Elizabeth could have been referring to either Catherine de Medici or Mary Queen of Scots, both being courted by Shane O’Neill for their support. With or without the worrying of Mary’s wolfish teeth, Ireland continued to be a wound on England’s back that would not heal.
Mary’s continued encouragement of Catholic hopes under Elizabeth’s nose too was detailed in an incriminating conversation, reported to Cecil and Elizabeth by one of their assiduous spies, which had more than a little of the daydream about it:
[The Queen of Scots] sitting down on a little coffer without a cushion, and I kneeling beside, she began to talk of her Father Lascelles, and how she was much beholden to him, for he had travailed to get her a true pedigree of her title to the crown of England; and how she trusted to find many friends in England, whensoever time did serve, and did name [Sir Thomas] Stanley, Herbert, and Darcy, from whom she had received letters; and by means she did make account to win friendship of many of the nobility, as the Duke of Norfolk, the Earls of Derby, Shrewsbury, Northumberland, Westmorland, Cumberland: she had the better hope of these, because she thought them all to be of the old religion, which she meant to restore again with all expedition, and thereby win the hearts of the common people … after she had befriended herself in every shire in England with some of the worshipful, or of the best countenance of the country, she meant to cause war to be stirred in Ireland, whereby England might be kept occupied. Then she would have an army in readiness, and herself with her army to enter England; and the day that she would enter her title would be read, and she proclaimed Queen … For the better furniture of this purpose she had before travailed with Spain, with France, and with the Pope for aid, and had received fair promises with some money from the Pope, and more looked for.44
Mary, however, could not countenance the same subversive support for her dissident lords from Elizabeth and banished Elizabeth’s ambassador Randolph from Scotland, in angry protest at the dispatch of £3000 over the border to aid her rebellious subjects. Elizabeth responded coldly that ‘the like dealing has not been heard of in Christendom between princes’, and threatened tit-for-tat retaliation.
While struggling with renewed pressure to marry, unease at growing Catholic confidence, the continual demand from her council that she settle the succession, with Mary’s insistence that it should be on her, and anxiety at Irish insurgency, Elizabeth succumbed to some disease that left her so thin ‘her bones may be counted’.45 Her doctors muttered about kidney stones and, more seriously, the consumption that had prematurely robbed the country of her brother Edward VI. Rumours and prognostications that the queen was not long for this world were quick to resurface. Mary, meanwhile, was enjoying a period of excessive self-confidence. Her pregnancy was well established. Reputedly she had already felt her child move and her women of the bedchamber had reported that even as early as the new year, ‘she hathe milke in her brestes’.46 There was a sense of triumph for the Queen of Scots and new hope. But there was corruption at the heart of her new order.
Her passion for her husband had receded as fast as it had come and already the court was well aware that the king and queen were barely speaking, let alone conducting a conjugal relationship. Darnley’s violent and boorish treatment of Mary and his fellow nobles, his drunkenness and utter unreliability, had finally dispelled the infatuation that had sprung from her sexual and political need of him. Having at first been so eager to please, lavishing him with titles and privilege, Mary’s first act of defiance was to refuse to grant Darnley t
he crown matrimonial. This would have increased his power dramatically, awarding him the rights of a king independent of his relationship to her as queen. If she was to die before him and without living heirs, for instance, it would be his line that would continue as kings of Scotland. This refusal was humiliating enough for someone as full of pride as the youthful Darnley; just as humiliating and hard for him to bear was Mary’s emotional and sexual withdrawal. Darnley accused her of neglecting her wifely duties: ‘am I failed in any sort in my body? Or what disdain have you of me? Or what offences have I done you that you should coy [scorn] me at all times alike, seeing I am willing to do all things that becometh a good husband?’47
Mary recognized none of the danger signals. She continued to pursue her own interests with some verve, but increasingly isolated she turned more blatantly for company and advice to David Riccio. This was the very person who had become the focus of the growing resentment against her inconsistent and unconciliatory government. Mary’s greatest mistake was her reckless disregard for the support of her nobles, who were not a naturally cohesive or submissive group of men. She alienated them at her peril, and her insistence on openly preferring the counsel of a despised, and papist, foreigner over her council made for lethal resentments.
Perhaps thinking of Elizabeth, while despairing at the wrongheadedness of Mary’s rule, Randolph wrote that a monarch cannot rule if suspicious of her people and at war with her nobility. Neither can she succeed through favouritism and factionalism: ‘To be ruled by the advice of two or three strangers, neglecting that of her chief councillors, I do not know how it can stand.’48 Ignoring all sage warnings and any previous example set by either her mother or her cousin, Mary appeared to flaunt her favour of the unpopular and indiscreet Riccio, and promote him further. The resentment and aggression against him, and through association towards Mary too, was palpable. It was obvious to every courtier, to each foreign ambassador. Court gossip was full of it. Riccio was suspected by her Protestant nobles of being a papal spy, by anyone at court of being an opportunist on the make through extortion and bribery, and by her husband of being a rival for his wife’s affections, if not her sexual favours. Her wilful flying in the face of this wave of dangerous sentiment against her favourite bordered on madness.
The Queen of Scots’ inflated confidence, encouraged it was believed by Riccio’s counsel, led her to a further show of strength against her intractable lords. Parliament was called for 12 March 1566 to confirm the forfeiture of the banished lords, Moray and his fellow rebels. This sustained confrontation between the queen and her nobility was neither wise nor popular. It made for uneasiness and insecurity, and a further loss of confidence in her government. It also increased anger at her preference for foreign favourites as advisers over the nobles of her council. Her ambassador Sir James Melville urged forgiveness, pointing out that Moray and the banished lords were popular in England, as was their religion. To pardon and reinstate them, he argued, would promote best her own dearest ambition of inheriting Elizabeth’s crown: ‘[the English sympathizers] would admire such princely virtues, as to see Your Majesty to master your own passions and affections, and thereby think you most worthy to reign over kingdoms; finding you ready to forgive, and loath to use vengeance … for extremity frequently brings on desperate enterprises’.49 Sadly, mastery of her passions and affections was not one of Mary’s princely virtues.
Mary’s return to Scotland a mere four and a half years previously had been welcomed with enthusiasm by the vast majority of her people. Her policies of religious tolerance within her newly Protestant kingdom and friendship towards England were thought judicious and far-sighted, and her lords largely rallied to her side. Although her choice of Darnley for her husband was cautiously accepted by most at first, too soon both his behaviour and increasingly hers alienated much of her immediate support. Alarm and dismay spread rapidly through the ranks of Mary’s nobles. This sprang partly from self-interest, with the inevitable clan rivalry and determination not to cede power or position to a new order. More unsettling, however, was the intimation of a shift in Mary’s policy to a more pro-Catholic bias, with an ever-present threat of interference from Spain or France. There were real fears that Mary’s wilfulness and disregard for her council meant the Protestant religion would be undermined and Scotland’s new-found amity with England squandered. Certainly Melville believed that interference from Mary’s uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, who urged her to remain steadfast against the rebel lords, stiffened her resolve.
Conservative Catholic opinion was hardening against Elizabeth too, since she was considered to be actively promoting the Scottish rebels, and the solution was surprisingly bloodthirsty. The new pope Pius V was militant in his wish that a league of the Catholic powers should prosecute war against the English queen or ‘at least prohibit commerce with her kingdom, which would be its total ruin’.50 For good measure the Papal Nuncio suggested Mary execute the six leading rebels (including Moray, Morton, Argyll) but this was less enthusiastically embraced by the Queen of Scots.
Encouraged by the hardline Catholic Riccio, Mary was loath to alienate the pope, her Guise family and the new confederation of Catholic princes. Her Protestant nobles felt increasingly marginalized and fearful of these foreign influences. The Scots were proud and even more chauvinistic than the English, while Mary was much more at ease with the great European Catholic traditions and interests with which she had grown up. The rift between her and her nobility widened as suspicion grew at her obstinate insistence on governing through favourites (a characteristic she was to pass on to both her son, James VI and I of England, and her grandson, Charles I).
By 4 September 1565, just over a month after Mary and Darnley’s marriage, Randolph had written to inform Cecil and Elizabeth of a plot against the new king’s life: ‘One hundred gentlemen are determined to set upon him in battle wheresoever the Queen’s husband be, and either to slay him or tarry behind lifeless amongst them [or be left for dead in the attempt].’51 The assassination of Darnley, now King of Scotland, was not in fact carried through at this point, although there were a number of alarms and excursions during the first months of Mary’s marriage when both suspected some sinister plot of kidnap or murder. However, as distrust and fear of Riccio’s increasing power grew, a plan to rid Mary’s government of both his and Darnley’s unwelcome influence began to take form. Information flowed freely between the disaffected lords and Randolph, who passed it immediately to Elizabeth’s ministers at Berwick and London. Elizabeth herself knew long before Mary that Riccio’s murder was plotted and Darnley’s situation was far from secure.
By the middle of February, Randolph was writing to Leicester, who was in constant contact with Elizabeth: ‘I know for certain that this Queen [Mary] repenteth her marriage – that she hateth him [Darnley] and all his kin … I know that there are practices in hand, contrived between the father and the son, to come by the [matrimonial] crown against her will. I know that if that take effect which is intended, David [Riccio], with the consent of the King, shall have his throat cut within these ten days.’52 This was a sensational piece of reporting, but there was no reaction from Elizabeth or her ministers, just a policy of wait and see. In the sixteenth century, political assassination was acceptable as a necessary evil. Murder of a king, however, was treason.
Morton, Argyll and Ruthven were the main protagonists, with Moray and his supporters closely implicated, poised to return from exile once the deed was done. Darnley was propelled to the centre of the conspiracy, his callowness, arrogance and sexual jealousy the means by which the lords harnessed his destructive energy. So great was his hurt and anger at being cold-shouldered by his wife, frozen from her bed and eased out of government, it was an easy matter to convince the young king that the cause of his fall from grace was ‘that villain David’, who had ‘done hym the moste dishonour that cane be to anye man’. A deed of association was entered into to kill the usurper. Darnley determined to be there ‘at the apprehension and
execution of hym’.53 A bond was signed between Darnley and the lords whereby they promised to support his claim to the matrimonial crown, even against the queen’s wishes. Morton had played on Darnley’s inflated ambition and the universal prejudice against female power, urging him ‘to free himself from the Command of a Woman, seeing it was for Women to obey, and for Men to rule’.54 In exchange for promoting his kingly rights over his wife, the lords extracted the promise of pardon for the rebels and the restoration of their lands.
Spurred by the fact that Parliament was summoned for 12 March 1566 at which the rebel lords were due to face confirmation of their forfeiture, the conspirators decided that Saturday 9 March would become the day of execution. It was early evening and Mary was entertaining Riccio and some friends* to supper in a small cabinet room adjacent to her bedchamber when Darnley arrived by his own private staircase, followed closely by Ruthven and his followers. The story of what followed is well known but none the less sensational for that: the confusion of armed men, the frightened shouts, the flash of weapons; the upending of the table and everything upon it in front of Mary and her guests; the rough hands on Riccio, cowering in terror behind Mary’s skirts; the disrespectful man-handling of the queen as she tried in vain to protect him; the violent expulsion by a group of large, vengeful men of the pathetic Italian, screaming for mercy; the frenzied butchery of him with fifty-six dagger wounds, and the victim’s cries, echoing through the stone rooms of the palace.
There were other details that added to the horror for Mary. In part explanation of the deadly act, Ruthven apparently rounded on her and furiously denounced her tyranny and misgovernment, and the immorality of her relationship with Riccio. Although she was weeping with anger and the undoubted shock, she remained uncowed and defiant. In a subsequent report on the murder from Bedford and Randolph to Elizabeth and the Council of England, relating an argument between Mary, Darnley and Lord Ruthven, Mary is shown as exhibiting an unwavering resistance to their attempt to put some responsibility for the situation on her own failings: