Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  While equivocating and parrying her cousin’s pleas for an audience, for fairer treatment, for restoration of her crown, for her place in the succession, Elizabeth still tried to console Mary with warm promises which by now had grown increasingly threadbare. She vowed that she would protect her reputation and keep private the false accusations against her, ‘praying her to take patience in [Elizabeth’s] gentle ward, where she was nearer at hand to get the crown of England set upon her head’, and assuring her that she herself, ‘who was but the eldest sister’,38 was likely to die before her.

  Mary was not consoled. Her expectation of freedom at last was replaced with the depressed realization that Elizabeth might profess determination to restore her to her throne but the hard prescriptions of politics and the prerogatives of power made it very difficult for her to do so. On one occasion in April 1569, when she had hoped to keep the French sympathetic in her stand-off with the Spanish over their captured payships, Elizabeth thought the political benefits of releasing Mary might be worth the risks. After procrastinating for months, however, Moray flatly refused to have her back, much to Elizabeth’s fury. The problem of what to do with Mary was left explosively in her hands.

  By the end of the summer of 1569, the possible restoration of Mary had become bound up in many of the English councillors’ minds with the advantage of containing her appetite for trouble by marrying her off to Norfolk. What had begun as Norfolk’s singular ambition now involved a motley band of men with mixed, even contradictory, interests in a controversial enterprise initially cooked up behind Elizabeth’s back. The most unlikely alliance was between the long-sworn enemies Norfolk and Leicester. Leicester’s disingenuous explanation of his careerist involvement was that, despite his high regard for the duke and his low regard for Mary, he was prepared to countenance such a match if it was best for the queen and her kingdom: ‘there could be no better Remedie to provide for so dangerous a Woman … considering the present state of the World’.39

  Mary’s own attempts at release had been focused more on inveigling support, even armed intervention, from one or other of the Catholic powers. To Philip II of Spain she had sent the rash and over-optimistic message that if he ‘help me, I shall be Queen of England in three months, and Mass shall be said all over the country’.40 This inflated boast was intended to lure Philip from his usual passivity into some sign of solidarity. It revealed more tellingly, however, the unreality of an indulged woman who had relied always on her charm to effect everything. It led her to believe that now, in a neighbouring kingdom, she could translate her personal charisma into a national fervour powerful enough, with the help of Spanish gold, to dethrone Elizabeth herself.

  Her English cousin, after a decade of rule, had established herself beyond doubt as a competent and popular monarch who inspired in her phalanx of advisers a fundamental loyalty. Despite the storms of temper she unleashed periodically at their heads, Elizabeth could be relied on to offer Cecil and her council a reciprocal loyalty and an openness to reason and compromise, an utterly serious acceptance of her obligations as queen. Compromise and obligation were alien concepts to a princess raised in the French court of Henri II, and they were unwelcome restraints on the character of a queen who had ruled through personal passions, impulse and defiance.

  The Norfolk marriage plan had been put to Mary in May 1569 and she had jumped at the chance.* Rather crucially, however, it needed Elizabeth’s blessing, and no one was keen to be the one to tell her. Norfolk himself had already denied to her face that her suspicions were well-founded. His subsequent evasions only suggested something sinister was afoot. In fact when Leicester eventually told Elizabeth of the plan in September 1569 she was incensed and unsettled. That Leicester, her greatest intimate, should have supported such a match through his own opportunism, ingratiating himself, it seemed, with someone he thought might be a future sovereign, hurt her feelings. But what threatened her life, Elizabeth felt, was the alliance of her premier nobleman with the greatest rival for her throne. The Catholicism of one and the near Catholicism of the other only added to the danger. She told a chastened Leicester that she believed she would have ended up once more in the dreaded Tower if those two had been allowed to marry. Although this was an outburst sprung in the heat of emotion, the very fact that she could think her position so precarious indicated the extent of Elizabeth’s insecurity in the face of Mary’s legitimate claim to her throne.

  Mary posed much more than a political threat to Elizabeth. For a solitary, unmarried queen, a woman bereft of immediate family, the loyalty of her closest associates was of paramount importance. Leicester was her lifelong intimate: the fever of passion may have passed but a possessive and close affection remained. For him to dilute his loyalty to Elizabeth with his favour of Mary’s interests was an emotional betrayal of a particularly poignant kind. Elizabeth was jealous of the effect her Scottish cousin seemed to have on all who encountered her. It was becoming tediously predictable that every male bent a little at the knees and went weak in the head with even short-term exposure to Mary’s personal charm. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, seasoned ambassador, gave some compelling reasons why the Scottish queen, ‘a Woman so ill thowght of heretofore’, should suddenly be surrounded by English friends: ‘the first, hir misery; whereof all Men naturallie take Compassion: The second, hir Entertaynment of such as came to hir: And the third, Th’opinion that some had of hir Title in Succession’.41

  One of Elizabeth’s officials had spent a night at Tutbury in the foul winter of early 1569. One hour in Mary’s company had so impressed him that he wrote to Cecil and his queen warning them, ‘there shulde veray few Subjects in this Land have Accesse to, or Conferens with this Lady. For besyd, that she is a goodly personadge, (and yet in trouthe not comparable to our Souverain) she hathe withall an alluring Grace, a prety Scottishe speche, and a serching Witt, clowded with Myldnes [and a searching intelligence softened with sweetness of manner].’42 The highly infectious and indiscriminate nature of Mary’s ‘alluring Grace’ made her the most formidable rival, all the more so given that Elizabeth would never meet her and had to rely only on such reports from her half-smitten nobles and executives. In a time when the supernatural was a companion to daily life, this physical alienation from Mary’s human reality meant her power inflated in imagination into something almost like sorcery.

  Knollys, Lord Scrope, her own cousin George Carey, Norfolk, Throckmorton, the northern earls and eventually even solid Shrewsbury himself, who could she trust not to be entranced? For a while it seemed only Cecil, Elizabeth’s cast-iron Secretary of State, was immune to the Queen of Scots, a fact of which Mary herself was acutely aware. Like all beautiful women who were used to getting what they wanted, she was galled by the rare individual who did not succumb to her charm. When she was not in one of her passions, vilifying him as ‘hir Enemy’, she credited Cecil with intelligence and a respect for the law, for being ‘a faithefull Servaunt to his Mistress’, while wanly wishing ‘it might be hir Luck to gett the Friendshipp of so wise a Man’.43

  While Mary hankered after an adviser of Cecil’s calibre, Elizabeth had to deal with her manoeuvres for a fourth husband in the form of the less intellectually impressive, but more princely, Norfolk. The perfidious duke was immediately summoned to Elizabeth’s presence. In fright he feigned illness. His sudden departure from court to return to his estates had caused all kinds of alarmist talk; his disobedience and continued absence set tongues wagging that Norfolk was mustering his forces in a show of treasonous rebellion. Even Elizabeth was worried and moved to the more defensible Windsor Castle. The ports were temporarily closed and extra guard put on the Queen of Scots. Elizabeth recognized that it was essential for her to maintain authority, particularly against the highest nobleman in the land. She could not leave unpunished his defiance of her peremptory order to attend her at court, even if it meant coming in an invalid’s litter. Elizabeth knew that strong leadership meant the pack mentality of her nobles worked in her favour but th
at if she showed any weakness the rogue males could as easily turn on her and establish their own hierarchy of power. With Mary as a legitimate candidate for queen, they could gloss any treason with legality.

  Norfolk might have had the desire for power but he lacked the nerve. He had been in urgent communication with the disaffected northern earls, his brother-in-law Westmoreland and Northumberland being the most bellicose. Having sworn he would not answer the queen’s summons, he did set out finally from his estates in Norfolk in the company of forty of his men on the last day of September. Within three days he was under house arrest, and by 10 October imprisoned in the Tower of London (‘to[o] great a Terror for a trew Man’44 as he had exclaimed to Elizabeth just two weeks before). He was to remain there for ten months, unhappy, uncomfortable but with his ambitions towards the Queen of Scots undimmed.

  Mary’s captivity and the close constraint of her days meant her hopes were artificially inflated and liable to extreme collapse. She was naturally a woman of action not reflection, and to be prevented from riding or hunting, which happened periodically as the political situation in England deteriorated, was a great hardship to her. Her energies were channelled into writing pleading, affectionate letters to Elizabeth, angry and inflammatory ones to her family in France and other supporters, and devising plots for escape. Mary delighted in codes and ciphers and hidden messages and this fascination translated into the embroidery work she had enjoyed ever since she was a girl in France. When asked by an English visitor the previous January how she passed the time when the weather kept her indoors, Mary explained ‘that all that Day she wrought with hir Nydill, and that the Diversitie of the Colors made the Worke seme lesse tedious, and contynued so long at it till veray Payn made hir to give over’.45 The long hours waiting for deliverance were spent in devising motifs to embroider, choosing the colours and investing the images with layers of meaning. Often she worked alongside her jailer’s wife.

  The Countess of Shrewsbury, better known to posterity as Bess of Hardwick, was a redoubtable woman of exceptional will and ambition. A squire’s daughter from Derbyshire, she married four successively wealthier husbands and, remarkably for the age, managed to hang on to all her accumulated wealth. The Earl of Shrewsbury was her last husband and their notoriously quarrelsome marriage took a far greater toll on him than on her. She was a dynamic builder of magnificent houses (Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall being just two of them), property speculator, moneylender, dynastic engineer and gale-force personality. She outlived every husband by decades and even outlived her queen, though she was six years her senior, dying at last in 1608 at the defiant age of eighty-one. Perhaps she was more a woman to admire from a distance than to live with in close intimacy. Although Bess and Mary used different powers to get what they wanted from the world, neither was capable of neutral relationships. Mary loved and hated with passion, often the same person and within the same week; Bess was more calculating and disciplined but unused to being denied or gainsaid. Their relationship was an interesting one. The Earl of Shrewsbury’s custody of Mary lasted fifteen years, an imprisonment as much for him and his family as it was for his ward. It added enormous financial and emotional strains to his life, which no doubt affected his health (he was plagued with gout) and hastened his death.

  To begin with, Bess and Mary were friends, although they would end as enemies, with Bess accusing her husband of committing adultery with their royal prisoner. Fifteen years the elder, the Countess of Shrewsbury was cast more as a mother figure to Mary who was still only twenty-five when they first met. Their main activity together in those early years of captivity was embroidery, during which time they mapped out their images, selected their silks and wools, and practised their needlework. Shrewsbury wrote to Cecil that every day Mary would seek out Bess and they would work on their projects together, only talking of trifling matters he was quick to reassure. In fact the women’s talk was full of court gossip, some of it highly malicious, about Elizabeth and her love affairs, her vanity, speculations about her recoil from marriage, all of which Mary later was to recount in a rash defamatory letter to Elizabeth, when she had fallen out with Bess and wanted revenge on the two iron-willed women who had her in their power.

  Not only was the gossip anti-Elizabeth: some of the devices that Mary embroidered expressed her simmering anger, resentment against the queen, and hope for renewed life and glory. The women would leaf through emblem books, popular in France and England during the sixteenth century, or Gesner’s book, Icones Animalium, a catalogue of fine woodcuts of animals, birds and fishes published in 1560. These gave ideas for their work, some with added detail or Latin mottoes satisfyingly suggestive of hidden meaning. Mary embroidered one small panel of a tabby cat worked in orange wool with a crown on its head (Elizabeth was famously red-headed) and a little mouse, not in the original pattern, was added to the picture to emphasize the threatening nature of the ginger predator.

  The most telling piece of embroidery was worked by Mary in about 1570 while Norfolk was still imprisoned but keeping their marriage hopes alive. It was a panel with a large vine at the centre, one half fruitful and laden with grapes, the other half almost leafless and barren of fruit. A large hand with a billhook was shown in the process of pruning the barren branch under the motto Virescit Vulnere Virtus, ‘Virtue flourishes by wounding’. This was sent as a cushion to Norfolk. Under the guise of a pious homily about accepting the necessity of suffering, its message from his impatient future bride was something much more aggressive. It was recognized by the protagonists and their supporters as a veiled encouragement to get rid of Elizabeth, the barren Tudor scion, possibly even by killing her, so that the fertile, fruitful, branch representing Mary could flourish.

  Although Elizabeth did not know yet of this lethal embroidered message she feared that she was at risk from her disaffected northern earls attempting precisely this excision. She ordered Mary to be moved from the more salubrious Shrewsbury house at Wingfield, where she had spent some of the summer, back to dreaded Tutbury Castle. Mary’s household also was reduced to around thirty, the better to maintain security. Prior to this she had been much more leniently treated and servants, friends and hangers-on frequently swelled her retinue to twice that number, all to be supported by Shrewsbury’s estate, inadequately reimbursed by Elizabeth.

  Immediately on return to Tutbury, Mary’s coffers were searched for any incriminating correspondence, and her visitors and letters, usually closely vetted, now were forbidden. Nothing suspicious was found although Shrewsbury wrote to Elizabeth that, before they left Wingfield, the queen ‘consumed with Fier very many Writings’.46 Mary hated returning to Tutbury and resented deeply the harsh constraints placed on her activities while the crisis lasted. She was particularly incensed by the rude way in which she and her servants were treated. In a letter to Elizabeth on the first day of October 1569, her outrage burnt through her usual tone of sweet woebegone reason: ‘they have forbid me to go out, and have rifled my trunks, entering my chamber with pistols and arms, not without putting me in bodily fear, and accusing my people, rifle them, and place them under arrest’.47

  Elizabeth’s sharp treatment of Norfolk had certainly reasserted her authority but it also panicked Northumberland and Westmoreland who had been in communication not only with Norfolk but with Mary and her agents too. These northern earls had always been more a law unto themselves with their own Council of the North, distant geographically and philosophically from the monarch and court centred in the south. They, like the majority of their people, remained reactionary and wedded to the old religion. They were solely concerned with restoring Catholicism and their association with Norfolk and his plans to marry Mary was with this intent, with Mary sprung from jail as their Catholic queen. Nor were they squeamish at the idea of inviting foreign aid to help effect this. Norfolk’s capitulation without a struggle, however, left them exposed and alarmed.

  At the end of October, Elizabeth demanded that Sussex, Lord President of the North,
summon the earls to London. Fearful that this meant their freedom, if not their lives, were already forfeit, the reluctant rebels accompanied by a body of armed retainers rode to Durham to raise their standard of rebellion. On 14 November they took possession of the cathedral, threw the book of Common Prayer on the ground, overturned the communion table and demanded that Mass be said. Their aims, however, were confused and their force divided and lacking in conviction or focus. Some wanted to ride south and release the Queen of Scots, but that bold scheme was abandoned when they heard of the prompt action which had confined her more straitly. Others wanted the succession clarified with the Duke of Norfolk’s name among the leading contenders, still others thought the main aim was to re-establish the Catholic religion.

  Elizabeth’s forces were mobilized on all sides. There was general alarm and confusion, some of the nobility hesitantly joining the breakaway earls, more joining the government, patriotic allegiances crossing religious lines. With Durham occupied, Berwick, Newcastle and Carlisle remained loyal. Poorly organized, too hastily initiated, the rebellion was soon over without a shot being fired in anger. By Christmas 1569 the two renegade earls had fled over the border into Scotland. ‘The earls are old in blood but poor in force,’48 Elizabeth is reputed to have said to her court as they galloped towards the border, leaving their supporters in disarray.

  In retrospect it was easy to dismiss the whole thing as a damp squib, but at the time Elizabeth and her council had real fears that the whole of the north might rise in rebellion, the inflammable borderlands catch fire too and in the ensuing chaos France or Spain gain a foothold. Elizabeth’s long letter at the end of November to the Earl of Sussex expressed both anger and fear: