Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  Mary did not employ an overtly threatening tone in her messages to Elizabeth at this time, but rather insinuated an emotional pathos laced with hints of her power to challenge and disturb the fragile status quo. To sympathetic ambassadors, like Guzman de Silva, she sent messages of helpless femininity: ‘If the Christian princes abandon her she says being a woman and alone she does not know what she can do’,26 and dispatched affecting messages to every possible ally in Europe.

  To her Guise uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, she poured forth her angry eloquence: ‘I have endured injuries, calumnies, imprisonment, famine, cold, heat, flight, not knowing whither, ninety-two miles across the country without stopping or alighting, and then I have had to sleep upon the ground, and drink sour milk, and eat oatmeal without bread, and have been three nights like the owls, without a female in this country, where, to crown all, I am little else than a prisoner.’27 Her catalogue of woes was unquestionably extreme, a queen should not have to endure such fear, danger and indignity, but Mary never acknowledged any responsibility, even in part, for the disasters that overtook her.

  Elizabeth’s instinct was to return her cousin with all haste to Scotland. But this she could not do without alienating Moray and the ruling elite who were essential to the English policy of keeping Scotland close and the French out. She toyed momentarily with a compromise plan which she confided to the Spanish ambassador: ‘I am thinking of returning her to her Kingdom with the title of Queen, but without any power to govern; and I think that her acquittal should be so arranged that it should be left in doubt; for if her complete innocence were to be declared it would be dangerous to this Kingdom, to my friends and to myself.’

  Elizabeth, however, increasingly realized the unhappy reality that she would have to keep Mary in a kind of honourable imprisonment, in the medium term at least. The Scottish queen had already given cause for alarm. She had been allowed to ride out to join a hunt coursing for hares, and the speed and skill of her horse riding had so alarmed Knollys, from a security point of view, that he felt she would need to be moved deeper into England, away from the rebellious Borders and a direct escape route back to her kingdom or away by sea to France.

  Unsurprisingly Mary was adamant that she would not consent to such a change of abode, unless it was to take her directly into Elizabeth’s presence. Otherwise they would have to take her by force, she declared dramatically. Elizabeth was more than exasperated. Mary had lost everything through her own mismanagement and wilfulness, and was in no position to dictate conditions to her. Yet she continued to behave with the imperiousness of Elizabeth herself. In French Elizabeth addressed her sharply, rather as a mother reprimanding her adolescent daughter: ‘begging you to have some consideration of me, in place of always thinking of yourself’.28 A few days’ easy ride south of Carlisle was Bolton Castle which had been decided should be Mary’s next place of safety. After various inducements and veiled threats, Mary was persuaded to abandon her protest, causing the long-suffering Knollys to exclaim, ‘Surely yf I shold declare the difficulties that we have passed, before we cowld gett hyr to remove, instede of a letter I shold wryte a storye and that sumwhat tragicall!’29

  Despite Mary’s reluctant removal to Bolton, Elizabeth’s sympathies were being strained to the limit. At odds with her councillors, she still maintained that Mary should somehow be restored to her legitimate throne but she recognized, nevertheless, that Moray’s regency was established and could not be ignored. She decided that a hearing was necessary to ascertain the facts that led to this unconstitutional rejection of Mary by her subjects. Her sensitivities to Mary’s status as a monarch meant she insisted Moray and not his queen stood as the accused.

  York was designated as the theatre in which the charges against Moray and his countercharges against the Queen of Scots would be heard. The commissioners representing both antagonists gathered at the beginning of October 1568. Moray came himself and although Mary was not present she had Lord Herries and the Bishop of Ross amongst others to make her case. The Duke of Norfolk, Earl of Sussex and Sir Ralph Sadler were there to represent Elizabeth in her role of arbitrator, given express instructions by her that Mary’s responsibility for murdering her husband had to be established beyond doubt otherwise she would be instrumental in returning her cousin to her rightful throne, ‘having regard to the princely state wherein she was born’.30

  Moray was not slow to produce what he considered to be his coup de grâce, the letters purportedly written in Mary’s hand, found in the silver-gilt casket in the keeping of a servant of Bothwell after his defeat at Carberry Hill. He revealed privately to Norfolk and his fellow commissioners these eight letters and a series of sonnets, astonishingly torrid with sexual feeling and suggestively conspiratorial in the murder of Darnley.

  If these ‘casket letters’ were in fact genuine, they were unambiguously incriminating both of Mary’s complicity in, if not incitement of, the murder of her husband, the king, and in her illicit and overwhelming sexual passion for the man who was the chief suspect in his death. There was much circumstantial detail which was reinforced by other sources, and the central strand of emotion in them had a certain sincerity and truth. However, the originals disappeared soon after their exposure, some said destroyed by James VI in the 1580s to protect his mother’s reputation. Relying only on copies in the absence of the originals, debate has raged for nearly four and a half centuries, and the truth can not now be known. Mary was never allowed to examine them and consistently denied their authenticity. Buchanan, knowing the queen personally, having been her Latin tutor and therefore also in close contact with her handwriting and phraseology, declared the letters and poems were genuine. By this time, however, he had become a hostile witness, basing much of his subsequent notorious attack* on Mary on the revelations of these letters. The likelihood is that they were partly, or even wholly, forgeries; genuine letters from Mary interpolated with incriminating words and phrases, genuine letters from another of Bothwell’s lovers that had been made to appear from Mary, possibly amalgamations of more than one source, or out and out fabrications.

  Norfolk was horrified by what he read. In his letter to Elizabeth on 11 October 1568, he could not disguise his shock: ‘they shewed unto us one horrible and longe lettre of her owne hand, as they saye, contayninge foule matteir and abhominable, to be either thowght of, or to be written by a prince … The said lettres and ballades do discover suche inordinate “and filthie” [scored out] love betwene her and Bothaill, her loothesomnes and abhorringe of her husband that was murdered …’ He concluded that the writings contained so much circumstantial evidence ‘unknowen to anie other then to herselfe and Bothaill [Bothwell]’31 that it would have been hard to counterfeit them: yet if they were genuine then a judgement as to Mary’s guilt as an accomplice to the murder of her husband could not be avoided. He awaited Elizabeth’s response as to how they should proceed.

  Elizabeth seemed not overtly alarmed, and certainly not concerned to press to establish Mary’s guilt. Even when she eventually saw the letters for herself a couple of months later, after the enquiry had reconvened in London, she told Knollys matter-of-factly that they ‘conteyned manny matters very unmete to come from a “quene” [scored out] to be repeated before honest eares, and easely drawn to be apparent proves ageynst the Quene’.32 She did demand, however, that the enquiry move to Westminster better to assess the evidence, and it was convened on 25 November. To assuage Mary’s suspicions, Norfolk was ordered to explain that this move was in order to save time, bypassing some of the delay in sending communications to and fro. Elizabeth was anxious that Mary and her commissioners should continue to think that there was little doubt that her cause would be successful, and that the enquiry was concerned primarily in the detail of her restoration and the safeguarding of her son’s interests.

  Norfolk’s personal ambitions, however, appeared to overcome his disapproval of Mary’s unqueenly behaviour as suggested by the casket letters. Soon he was confiding a contrary vi
ew to her commissioner, Maitland of Lethington. In his opinion Elizabeth’s real purpose was to prolong Mary’s confinement, thus allowing Moray to blacken her reputation as much as possible and so damage her popular following in England. In this way, he suggested, Elizabeth meant to undermine the powerful Catholic support that was building around the charismatic image of the unjustly imprisoned Mary.

  The Duke of Norfolk was Elizabeth’s premier nobleman. A vain, vacillating man, he had grown resentful that his princely status and vast wealth did not translate into greater influence at court. He aspired to something even grander. To be the consort of the Queen of Scotland, with the chance of becoming even, through her, the King of England, suited the amour-propre of this thrice-widowed, thirty-two-year-old magnate. Knollys had been postulating an English marriage for Mary as the only way, in the event of releasing her, to neutralize the threat she posed of inviting French or Spanish interference into the land. He thought the safest way to rein her in was to marry her to a kinsman of Elizabeth’s, specifically his own nephew George Carey who was a cousin of the queen’s on her Boleyn side. But Norfolk, in need of a wife himself, could think of no better way to advance his own status. He began making moves to canvass support for his plan almost immediately. By the end of the year the gossip around court was full of his aspirations, but for a while Elizabeth was kept in the dark. This was a perilous act. It meant Norfolk was less than impartial in a murder enquiry where the suspect was the focus of his own high ambitions. The secrecy meant too that his negotiations looked suspiciously like a conspiracy in the making.

  Inevitably the rumours reached the queen. When Elizabeth asked Norfolk frankly if his marriage plans involved the Queen of Scots he theatrically denied everything: ‘What! … Should I seek to marry her, being so wicked a woman, such a notorious adulteress and murderer? I love to sleep upon a safe pillow.’33 Elizabeth was not to forget this and Norfolk’s words would return to haunt him.

  The enquiry continued at Westminster to the end of the year. With a flourish Moray produced the pretty casket, engraved with the imperial monogram of François II and unmistakably once belonging to Mary. From it he extracted the treacherous letters now for everyone to see. Copies were duly made: everyone was pruriently riveted and aghast in equal measure. But Mary refused to answer her accusers except in person, and Elizabeth was not about to allow her sweet eloquence and personal charm any formal airing before the most notable councillors and nobility of her land. With consummate skill she sidestepped her request by pointing out that she could not allow Mary to demean herself by giving credence, through her presence, to charges based on this tawdry evidence.

  Although Mary had not been shown the letters, she consistently and forcefully maintained that any such writings were undoubted forgeries.

  Moray swore to their authenticity. The truth was probably somewhere between the two. The author of any deception, however, was another area for surmise and debate. The longest letter, known as the second letter, probably caused the most trouble. If true, it revealed a murderous duplicity and contempt by a queen and wife towards her ill and pathetic husband. Doubly damning was the fact that this callousness was united with a venal passion for the masterful lover, and her husband’s would-be murderer. Purportedly written from Glasgow, where Mary had gone to bring back the sick Darnley to Edinburgh, having promised to resume conjugal relations with him as an inducement, the writer addressed Bothwell:

  God forgive me, and God knytt us togither for ever, for the most faythfull couple that ever he did knytt together. This is my fayth, I will dye in it. Excuse it, yf I write yll, you must gesse the one halfe, I can not doo with all, for I am yll at ease, and glad to write unto you when other folkes be asleepe, seeing that I cannot doo as they doo, according to my desyre, that is betwene your armes, my deere lyfe, whom I besech God to preserve from all yll … Cursed be this pocky fellow that troublith me thus muche, for I had a pleasanter matter to discourse with you, but for him. He is not muche the worse, but he is yll arayde. I thought I shuld have bene kylled with his breth, for it is worse than your uncles breth, and yet I was sett no neerer to him than in a chayre by his bolster, and he lyeth at the furder syd of the bed.

  The letter continued with a great deal more conversational, rambling detail, and then ended ‘Burne this lettre, for it is too dangerous … Now if to please you my deere lyfe, I spare nether honour, conscience, nor hazard, nor greatnes, take it in good parte … I pray you give no credit, against the most faythfull lover that ever you had or shall have. See not also her [his wife Jean?] whose faynid teares you ought not more to regarde than the true travails which I endure to deserve her place, for obtayning of which against my own nature, I doo betraye those that could lett me. God forgive me, and give you my only friend and good luck and prosperitie that your humble and faythfull lover doth wisshe unto you; who hopith shortly to be an other thing unto you, for the reward of my paynes.’34

  The female character that emerged from this letter was obdurately set against her young, frightened and ill husband who was begging for forgiveness and a restoration of his conjugal life with her. She was prepared to sacrifice his life together with her conscience and honour in order to satisfy her own and her lover’s desire to be united. The Scottish and English commissioners and nobility who read these apparently most intimate confessions of the Queen of Scots were likely to have found them initially as repellent and frightening as did the Duke of Norfolk. There was however less evidence of contemporary public denunciation of Mary’s character as a result, or declaration as to the authenticity of the documents, than occurred in the centuries of debate that followed. This was possibly due to Elizabeth’s coolness on the matter and strong disapproval of their public dissemination.

  Elizabeth possibly understood better than anyone how the attitudes and emotions unmasked in the ‘casket letters’ were not just a devastating destruction of Mary’s reputation but were also an attack on every ‘unnatural’ woman in a position of authority. Her attempts at protecting Mary from public vilification went on throughout her reign with various proclamations against a variety of books and pamphlets. The soldier-poet and playwright George Whetstone,* looking back on this time, commented that Elizabeth ‘forbad the bookes of [Mary’s] faultes, to be conversant among her English subjects which almost in every other nation were made vulgar’.35 Norfolk’s view that this was Elizabeth’s double-dealing in action, being seen publicly to do well by Mary while allowing the slander of murder and adultery to hang over her head indefinitely, might have been part of the reason for her carefulness with Mary’s fame. It was just as likely, however, that highly sensitized as she was to her own reputation, Elizabeth wished to protect them both personally and as female monarchs from defamation. All the worst qualities of emotionalism, weak-mindedness and treachery were still believed to belong to the female and to gain frightening proportions with the promotion of women to power.

  Mary’s commissioners repudiated the enquiry and withdrew when permission for Mary to appear in front of Elizabeth was refused. Judgement was deferred and the enquiry dismantled with no movement in any direction. As Norfolk had predicted, through sleight of hand Elizabeth had managed to maintain her favourite diplomatic stance, self-righteous and Janus-faced as the guardian of her throne without actually having to take any decisive action at all.

  Mary was left bereft of hope. Suddenly the tide was comprehensively against her, and without her being aware of the turn. Peremptorily, she was moved in early February 1569 from Bolton to the medieval castle of Tutbury, a windy, exposed and semi-derelict fortress in Staffordshire. Of all the places Mary was kept during her long English imprisonment, Tutbury was the one she loathed most. Ill-furnished and uncomfortable, freezing cold and plagued with damp, it was one of the properties belonging to the Earl of Shrewsbury, an austere but sympathetic and just man, who had been chosen to replace the overly susceptible Knollys as Mary’s keeper.

  In an impassioned letter to Elizabeth written later that year fr
om the fastness of Tutbury, Mary’s description of the rough treatment of herself and her servants, and the ‘bodily fear’ it occasioned in her, had uneasy echoes of the fear Elizabeth endured at the hands of her own sister while imprisoned during the investigation of the Wyatt Rebellion. Mary’s plea, not to be left ‘to waste away in tears and complaints … at least let me not be placed in the hands of any one suspicious to my friends and relations, for fear of false reports …’, was the exact anxiety which had haunted Elizabeth. Her valediction was also affecting: ‘I shall pray God to give you a happy and long life, and me a better share of your favour than to my sorrow I perceive that I have, whereto I shall commend myself affectionately to the end … Your very affectionate distressed sister and cousin.’36

  Elizabeth was not happy with the role in which she was cast by Mary in her unhappy imprisonment. She did not see herself as an unjust oppressor, and certainly not as the persecutor of a fellow queen. She was bombarded by Mary with pathetic letters full of complaints and half-suppressed rage. Much of the time she did not answer them, for the answers could only be the same. But the weight of them and the guilt, frustration and self-righteousness they roused in Elizabeth were hard to bear. Running through the letters was the threnody of Mary’s close kinship with Elizabeth (daughter, sister, cousin) and her longing to meet her. This she was continually denied, and the anguished impotence of her enforced isolation from the queen had Mary resorting to the language of unrequited love: if allowed into Elizabeth’s presence at last, ‘I shall discover to you the secrets of my heart … I shall devote myself more and more to love, honour, and obey you … and if you please so to favour me, I would beg of you first of all to command me when you please, where you please, in what company, to remain as secretly, as long or as short, without seeing or being seen but by you, with whom alone I have to do’.37