by Jane Dunn
these Rebells have nothing so much to Hart, nor seeke any other Thing so gredely in this theyr trayterous Enterprise, as the subduing of this Realme under the Yoke of foraine Princis, to make it the Spoile of Strangers … and so brede the Distruction of our faythfull and loving Subjects; and under Colour of Religion, to bring this and other theyr sedicious and lewde Intentions to passe, to the manifest Contempt of Almighty God, to the Troble and Danger of our Estate, and utter Desolation, Spoyle and Ruyne of our whole Realme.49
Every county was ordered to ready itself with men, weapons and ammunition, some of it to be stored in the Tower where the armaments were old and worn out, having been cleaned for too long with sand and ‘become to a great extent honeycombed from one end to the other’. Londoners under obligation to provide horses for military service were ordered to furnish them in readiness, as were ‘armourers to provide corselets; harquebus makers to provide harquebuses, and the merchants to provide arms, each one according to his ability’.50 ‘Confidential estimates’ of the numbers of men ready to be called up, according to the French ambassador La Mothe Fenelon, came to six thousand harquebusiers, six thousand men in armour and a further twelve thousand, but with some doubt as to whether there was enough weaponry for all of them. Elizabeth was not taking this threat lightly.
It did not bode well for Mary either. She was moved south from Tutbury to the greater security of Coventry, travelling at night as far as possible to avoid ‘fond gazing, and confluence of the people’,51 as Shrewsbury wrote carefully to Cecil. There was real concern from Cecil, Elizabeth and those who guarded Mary that there should be no opportunity for the Scottish queen to be seen except by authorized persons, for fear that her affecting presence would become a focus for popular sympathy. Once the rebellion had faded, she was moved back, again discreetly through an unwitting populace, to inhospitable Tutbury. Here, in the bitter January of 1570, shortage of wood for fuel made the ancient castle even more evilly favoured.
As she had done in the case of Norfolk’s disloyalty, Elizabeth needed to reassert her authority with the northern rebels too. To the Earl of Sussex, her Lord President of the Council of the North, she wrote: ‘We do marvel that we have heard of no execution by martial law, as was appointed, of the meaner sort of rebels in the North. If the same be not already done, you are to proceed thereunto, for the terror of others, with expedition and to certify us of your doing therein. We understand that some in those parts, in this hour of service, have remained at home, or shown great slackness in our service, having brethren or children with the rebels; have an earnest regard to such, and spare no offenders in that case.’52 Although only Northumberland forfeited his life, some six months later when he was returned from imprisonment in Lochleven Castle, it was the ordinary foot soldiers, poor country men on the whole who had joined the ill-starred earls in some confusion, who bore the brunt of her salutary revenge for treason. In the first few months of 1570, hundreds of them were summarily hanged, lands and livelihoods were forfeit. In the grim aftermath of rebellion, mercy was hard to come by.
Elizabeth had written a prayer in Greek, published in a 1569 collection of her prayers, which explained something of her belief that a monarch’s duty was to employ just punishment as a cauterizing process and thus safeguard the health of the nation: ‘Grant me to use mildness towards the virtuous, to encourage them still more to their duty and to chastise the wicked and lawless, so that I may turn them from evil and, truly in the manner of a physician, may bring this body of the realm from sickness to health and safety.’53
This concept of necessary justice was extended to her treatment of Mary too. When the French ambassador had the temerity to tell Elizabeth, soon after the northern earls’ rebellion, that his monarch disapproved of the continued imprisonment of the Queen of Scots, she claimed that such treatment was nothing less than her duty as a monarch: ‘[Mary’s] friends have given shelter to the English rebels, and with her aid and connivance they levied war on me with fire and sword. No sovereign in Europe will sit down under such provocation, and I would count myself unworthy of realm, crown and name of queen if I endured it.’54
Although the imprisonment of Norfolk and the disabling of the northern earls were all significant setbacks to Mary’s plans, she was in one of her buoyant periods and was not cast down for long. Scheming and plotting her escape brought meaning and purpose to a monotony of uneventful days. If Mary could envisage a triumphant denouement that involved the utter disarray of her enemies and the award of the greatest prize of all, the scheming gained added piquancy. Marriage to Norfolk still offered her the clearest path to freedom and glory and by the end of January 1570 she was writing to him, still imprisoned in the Tower, with affectionate words and a bold, even foolhardy, plan for a double escape:
Mine own lord, I wrote to you before, to know your pleasure if I should seek to make any enterprize; if it please you, I care not for my danger; but I would wish you would seek to do the like; for if you and I could escape both, we should find friends enough … If you think the danger great, do as you think best, and let me know what you please that I do; for I will ever be, for your sake, perpetual prisoner, or put my life in peril for your weal [welfare] and myne.
Although asking for his desires in the matter and promising blind obedience to his commands, Mary was the more adventurous and courageous of the two. She urged action where he seemed hesitant and was full of daring when he was in two minds. Although this alliance with Norfolk certainly suited her ambitions, Mary was also emotionally engaged by the idea. To a young woman in the prime of life, her imprisonment, inactivity, loneliness and long hours of wishful thinking added an inevitable aura of romance to a man she had not met, did not know, but hoped to marry and eventually love: she addressed herself to ‘My Norfolk’ and signed off ‘Your own faithful to death, Queen of Scots’.55
With every year that passed, with each new scare, Mary’s presence in England was becoming more clearly an incitement to plotters, religious fanatics, lovelorn noblemen, interventionist foreign powers, ambitious courtiers, to play the hero and rescue her from her pathetic state. There were some who were beginning to call for the death of the Queen of Scots as the only way to safeguard Elizabeth, the reformed religion and the peace of the nation. Knox, never one to pull his punches or choose a discreet word when a dozen rabble-rousing ones would do, wrote to Cecil in the new year of 1570 using the same horticultural analogy, but with different meaning, that Mary was busy embroidering on Norfolk’s cushion. Mary’s needlework depicting the need for excising a sterile vine threatened Elizabeth’s life. Knox’s gardening lore on the force of regeneration thundered out the threat to Mary’s: ‘Yf ye strik not att the roote, the branches that appear to be brocken will budd againe (and that mor quicklye then men can beleve).’56
In Cecil he had someone not altogether hostile to the idea, but Elizabeth was never to accept wholeheartedly the necessity of Mary’s death. She was, however, often exasperated, rattled, intimidated even, by what was fast becoming a double bind, where she was as much imprisoned emotionally and politically by her relationship with Mary as Mary was physically constrained by her. She was reputed to have exclaimed to the French ambassador, ‘I am just as anxious to see Mary Stuart out of England as she can be to go!’57 For Mary the way out was continually blocked by decisions and events largely beyond her will, but the dream was kept alive in the letters and messages, the codes and confidences, which streamed from her various prisons. Increasingly, for Elizabeth, there seemed no way of ridding herself of her uninvited guest whose presence attracted such treachery.
The insecurity of life was once again brought home to everyone with news of the assassination of the Earl of Moray, natural brother to Mary and regent to her son. A Hamilton, kinsman of the Duke of Châtelherault, had ambushed Moray as he left Edinburgh on 21 January 1570. Despite the regent being in the company of one hundred and fifty armed horsemen his assassin managed to wound him fatally with a shot from a harquebus. Elizabeth was
shocked by Moray’s death. They were of similar age and had been mutually helpful colleagues during inchoate times when the new religion and new reigns were in the process of being established. On hearing of his death, she cried out, ‘saying this would be the beginning of her ruin’.58
For Mary, hope rose again. It seemed that without being asked Hamilton had done her job for her. She had little impulse to pity or forgive the brother she had once professed to love and in fact by the summer of the following year she was promising a pension to be paid to his assassin. The queen’s party gained enormous confidence and more noble recruits while the king’s men (those supporting James VI and the regency) declined in support, reaching possibly their lowest point. Again the ancient feudal rivalry of Hamilton and Lennox remained the underlying scaffold for this deadly opposition. For six months Scotland was without a regent while the possibility that Mary might be restored seemed as close as it would ever come to reality. Elizabeth then gave her approval to the choice of Lennox, Darnley’s father and the child-king’s grandfather and a man inveterately opposed to Mary, as the next regent.
Leicester, possibly seeing the greatest threat coming from Spain not France, argued that France should be placated and made an ally. To best achieve that end, Mary needed to be returned to Scotland, albeit with drastically curbed powers. Elizabeth too seemed to be sensitive to the fact she could no longer justify holding her in custody. Writing to Sussex, her loyal Lieutenant of the North, she explained her thinking: ‘if the Queen of Scots shall not refuse reasonable conditions – we do not see how with honour and reason we can continue her in restraint’.59 Reluctantly, but willing to do anything to escape her debilitating situation, Mary did indeed agree to swingeing conditions. Her son would go to England to be brought up there; prominent members of the king’s party, her enemies, would occupy the major administrative posts; and Scottish foreign policy would be bent to English will. In exchange Mary would be named as Elizabeth’s successor. Desperate for freedom at any cost, and not one to plan ahead or put much value on foresight as a defensive tool, Mary chose to grab the opportunity while she could, and charm or storm her way through the consequences later.
A series of events however were to jeopardize Mary’s chances of freedom and push Elizabeth further from the sympathetic solidarity she had felt when first her cousin had fled south. In the last days of February 1570, the aged Pius V acted finally to excommunicate Elizabeth, ‘that servant of all iniquity … pretended Queen of England’. The papal bull only reached England in mid-May when a foolhardy Catholic gentleman nailed it to the garden gate of the Bishop of London’s palace. This pronouncement, purportedly from God, not only absolved all the faithful from any loyalty or obedience to Elizabeth or her laws, it threatened that anyone who remained loyal to the ‘pretended queen’ ‘shall incur the same sentence of malediction’.60
This was a distinct threat to Elizabeth. In a time when the authority of the spiritual prince far outweighed the temporal, the pope in theory was commanding English Catholics to rebel on pain of similar anathema. In effect, most were happy to continue with the ideologically unsound practice of offering spiritual allegiance to Pius and his successors, and political allegiance to Elizabeth and hers. Elizabeth’s policy of equivocation and tolerance towards the private matters of faith of her subjects, however, was forced increasingly during the new decade to become more wary and prescriptive.
Undoubtedly, Mary’s presence and the Catholic ambitions that fomented around her, speeded this process of suspicion and division. There seemed to be numerous plots against Elizabeth’s throne, even her life. With the benefit of hindsight most were amateurish, but all prior to discovery had the potential for harm. Norfolk’s release from the Tower in the summer of 1570 provided a focus once more for the bolder schemes. He remained under a kind of house arrest at Howard House, his residence in London, and appeared to have gone cold temporarily on the plan to marry Mary. Possibly the ordeal of the Tower was still too fresh in his memory; possibly he did intend to keep the promise he had given Elizabeth which had persuaded her to release him at last: ‘from the Bottome of my Harte [I] crave of your Majestie Forgivenes for that which is past … with a full Intencion never to deale if that Cause of Mariage of the Quene of Scottes, nor in any other Cause belonginge to her, but as your Majestie shall commaund me’.
Begging that the omnipotent queen ‘drawe me owt of the Dongeon of your Displeasure’,61 he was soon to show he had neither the wisdom nor the self-control to keep from a dungeon of far greater peril. Elizabeth had made a similar promise to Cecil that she would never marry Lord Robert, and had managed to keep it despite her passions being deeply engaged. Norfolk soon failed where ambition was the motive force, and Mary Queen of Scots its seductive charioteer. Too late he was to realize his mistake, and in an affectionate letter of concern and advice to his children written as he awaited execution for treason he warned: ‘Beware of high degrees! To a vainglorious proud stomacke it seemeth at the first sweet … in the end it bringes heapes of cares, toyles [snares] in the state, and most commonly in the end utter overthrowe.’62
The utter overthrow of the Duke of Norfolk caused Elizabeth great anguish, and brought Mary into deepest suspicion and closer to the risk of execution herself. This time, she had accepted Elizabeth’s humiliating conditions for her release whereby she relinquished everything but her title as Queen of Scots and her claim to be a successor to the English throne. The procrastination of the Scottish king’s party, concerned for their own power and security should she return, finally exhausted the negotiations. They would not countenance any reversal of the abdication document signed by Mary at Loch Leven, nor would they allow the king to be removed into England. By March 1571, Mary’s expectation of a legal restitution to her throne was over. In fact that winter Mary was ill for a month or more, whether of her old complaints or of the strain of frustrated ambition no one could say. The deadly inertia while she waited, her hopes artificially elevated or plunged into despair, would have driven an impatient nature such as hers into chronic depression or mania. Instead she kept her hopes alive through elaborate schemes of escape and fantasies of derring-do, in the only serious activity left to her.
Roberto Ridolphi had already played a minor role in the conspiracies surrounding the earlier plan to marry Mary to the Duke of Norfolk, and the consequent rebellion of the northern earls in 1569. A Florentine banker and papal agent then living in London, he concocted a grandiose plan which became notorious as the Ridolphi Plot. Potentially dangerous to Elizabeth and the security of the realm, its effects in reality were to prove fatal to Norfolk and deeply damaging to Mary. Ridolphi had been busy distributing the papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth and denying her legitimacy on the English throne.
Spurred by this papal authority he aimed to enlist a Spanish army of invasion to support a rising of the English Catholics, under the leadership of Norfolk, and inspired by the prospect of placing a Catholic Queen Mary on the ‘pretender’s’ throne. It was inevitable that Mary would put her name to this scheme. She was desperate to be free, and she thrived on the excitement and sense of hope that smuggled letters, encoded messages and clandestine meetings brought to her sorely constrained life. Even the intrigues of court life, the pleasures of dance and music, and the pursuit of love, were much diminished by captivity. All that was left to her was to plot her escape, however madcap and dangerous, and dream of revenge on her enemies by grasping Elizabeth’s crown.
At the beginning of February 1571, Mary wrote to Norfolk using the Bishop of Ross as her envoy. She pointed out that Ridolphi intended telling Philip II that there were numbers of the English nobility together with thousands of their men ready to rise in support of her. All they needed was a sign of support from Spain. Norfolk was not immediately enthusiastic. He knew already the force of Elizabeth’s displeasure; he had promised not to promote Mary’s interests in any way and must have realized that to be exposed again as a central figure in such a conspiracy would be to forfeit
his life. However, his pride and ambition to be elevated to the role of princely consort got the better of his caution. Reluctantly he agreed to join the enterprise.
The inception of this plot coincided exactly with Elizabeth’s agreement that her ambassadors could open marriage negotiations with the Duc d’Anjou, Charles IX’s younger brother. As Henri III, he was destined to inherit the French throne after Charles’s death in 1574. He was not yet twenty years old and Elizabeth was in her thirty-eighth year, but by now she knew, and her closest advisers must have been wearily aware, that this was another proposal that would not develop beyond the fruitless discussion stage. This would prove, however, protracted and artificially sustained, and would secure for England the advantages of being in provisional alliance with a powerful European neighbour, saved for a time from the loneliness and vulnerability of being a renegade Protestant state in a continent of Catholic powers. It also cooled French concern for the fate of Mary, their erstwhile queen.
So far and deep had court gossip spread about Elizabeth’s immoderate behaviour with Leicester that Anjou, renowned himself for his promiscuity and later for flamboyant transvestism and homosexuality, complained to his mother Catherine de Medici about Elizabeth’s reputed immorality. He had to be assured she was the model of propriety before he would proceed. Such reservations as to her reputation only served to outrage Elizabeth when she was unfavourably compared to Mary. Upbraided by the French ambassador for not allowing Mary greater liberty, she was determined, she said, to point out to all European princes that her treatment of her cousin was of ‘such rectitude’ that she had no cause for shame or regret, unlike Mary herself. ‘Would to God that the Queen of Scots had no more occasion to blush at that which can be known of her,’63 was her sharp riposte.