by Jane Dunn
Sir Francis Walsingham was propelled by this familiar charade into the political foreground, sent as ambassador to France to deal with the marriage negotiations. His talent for intelligence gathering was already well marked. He had been suspicious of Mary’s potential as a focus, or even instigator, of rebellion from the moment she had set foot on English soil. From that point on he remained alert to her activities and watchful of those drawn to her flame. He joined the front rank of Elizabeth’s ministers with her other great statesman, William Cecil, whom she created Baron Burghley at the end of February 1571: ‘My stile is, Lord of Burghley, if you meane to know it’, he wrote proudly to a colleague, adding the plaint, ‘the poorest Lord in England.’64 Leicester too, had grown in political stature and experience. From Elizabeth’s favourite, willing to assume any stance that would promote his own position, he was showing himself to be a reliable and intelligent councillor and, despite Cecil’s personal antipathy to him, took his place with Cecil and Walsingham as the third pillar of the powerful triumvirate that formed the solid base of Elizabeth’s rule.
While Elizabeth and her ministers put a preliminary hand of friendship out to the French, Ridolphi set out for Europe in March determined on raising Spanish military aid in his scheme for Elizabeth’s overthrow. Spurred by the explicit support of Mary and the covert agreement of Norfolk, his first stop was the Duke of Alva, Philip II’s military commander in the Low Countries. Alva was engaged in ferociously suppressing the Protestants who were supported covertly by the English. Where Ridolphi was breezy and overoptimistic, Alva was tough-minded and not susceptible to dreams. He did not like the idea of forcibly deposing Elizabeth and thought Spain could only invade once the queen was dead or at least captive. Ridolphi passed on to Rome where the pope gave moral support for his schemes, but not much else. In Madrid, Ridolphi’s enthusiastic view of the numbers of English Catholics on the verge of insurrection inflamed the chronically dour and cautious Philip. The Spanish king got carried away with the plan to order an armed incursion into England to get rid of Elizabeth, place Mary on the throne and re-establish Catholicism in that heretic isle.
In fact, nothing came of it. Messengers were apprehended, letters discovered, ciphers broken, confessions wrung out under torture.* Mary was immediately and incontrovertibly implicated. Her ambassador, the Bishop of Ross, threatened with the rack, revealed Norfolk’s part in the process. He also vilified the Queen of Scots far beyond the questions in hand as a serial husband-killer who, if she had married Norfolk, would have similarly brought his life to a premature end. The bishop’s interrogator was stunned by the torrent of allegations; to Cecil he wrote, ‘Lord, what a people are these! What a Queen, and what an ambassador.’65
It was not Mary as his future wife who ended Norfolk’s life with violence, but Elizabeth. With Norfolk found guilty of treason, the English queen was put under enormous pressure from Parliament to sign his death warrant. She hesitated, she signed, she changed her mind four times in all, on one occasion she revoked the death sentence at two o’clock in the morning of the day projected for his execution. She could not bear to have the blood of such near kin on her hands.
Elizabeth was passionately exhorted by her Commons to arraign Mary for treason and thereby stop at source any more murderous plots. Tempers were frayed, voices raised and tears flowed, so strongly did they feel about the dangers Mary continued to pose. Realizing that she had to give some concession to her loyal Commons, Elizabeth agreed to Norfolk’s execution as the lesser of two evils. He went to the block with dignity on 2 June 1572, admitting his transgressions and asking forgiveness from his queen. To Elizabeth he had written, ‘The Lord knoweth that I myself know no more than I have been charged withall, nor much of that, although I humbly beseche God and your Majesty to forgive me, I knewe a greate deale too muche … For certayn it is, that these practyses of rebellions and invasions, were not brutes [rumours] without full intention. God, of his mercifull goodnesse, I hope, will disclose all things that may be dangerous to your excellent Majesty: and then I hope your highnes shall perceave that Norfolk was not such a traytor, as he hath, not without his own desertes, given great occasion of suspycion.’ News of his death sent Mary ‘into a passion of sickness’,66 and she took to her bed with grief.
Shrewsbury was charged by Elizabeth to tell the Queen of Scots of the discovery of the plot and her part in it. He had to explain too that he was ordered to reduce her attendants to sixteen and temporarily restrict her movements and communications with the outside world. Mary, confronted with evidence of her own incriminating letters, her own writing even, and the confessions of her ambassador and messenger, not only denied everything but was self-righteous in her defiance. ‘I had of my own free will placed myself in the hands of the Queen his mistress,’ she told Shrewsbury, ‘relying upon her promises and friendship; that since she has detained me forcibly, if she suspects that I desire my liberty, I cannot help it. Nevertheless I am a free princess, and in that am not responsible to her or any other.’67
Mary was courageous and clever in her response. She knew that legitimacy mattered to Elizabeth, and that it was necessary to the English queen that actions were seen to be lawful. In a speech to her Commons some fourteen years later explaining why she would not comply with their urgent plea that she execute Mary, she elaborated on this principle: ‘we Princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed. The eyes of many behold our actions; a spot is soon spied in our garments; a blemish quickly noted in our doings. It behooveth us therefore to be careful that our proceedings be just and honourable.’68 Mary also knew that, much more than any of her ministers and much more than Mary herself, Elizabeth was an idealistic monarchist who considered herself to have a sacred authority which no mortal could put aside.
With the discovery of the Ridolphi Plot there was a heightening of tension in Elizabeth’s government. It was significant that even cool-headed, rational Cecil, now Lord Burghley, considered his country to be in a perilous position in relation to its neighbours. Weak, ill-equipped and vulnerable as it still was, he knew England was incapable of withstanding an onslaught from an alliance of the Catholic states. That such a concerted action was expected brought fear to Elizabeth’s supporters and some frisson of excitement to Mary’s. Rumours of other plots, possible traitors and potential routes of invasion were everywhere. The ports were watched, guards around the queen increased and the militia placed in a state of alert.
Such nervous anxiety proved to be unmerited. Catherine de Medici, queen mother of France, had given up long ago the pretence of warmth and concern for her onetime daughter-in-law. She and her son, Charles IX, required that a woman who once had been Queen of France should be shown all due respect, but they were not about to risk war in order to rescue her from captivity. The news of the Ridolphi Plot, however, and Mary’s eagerness to ally herself with Spanish might, marked the end of even a pretence of anything more than mere verbal support for her from the French monarchy. Catherine de Medici had a revealing interview with Walsingham in the aftermath of the plot’s discovery:
Catherine began, ‘[Mary] is alied to the King and to me, and brought up here … [but] she seketh an other way to ruinate hir self, to hurt hir freends, to deserve no pitie nor favour, and sorie we must be for hir. And if she be so dangerous (as yt aperith) we can not nor dare not require liberty for hir, which is so perillous to the Queene my sister’s [Elizabeth’s] State.’69 She continued that if, through Elizabeth’s mercy, Mary’s life should be spared then Catherine and the king would trouble the English queen no further.
On a personal level, the Ridolphi Plot marked the end of any sisterly solidarity that might have existed between the two queens. Elizabeth was forced to accept that Mary was prepared to have her assassinated in order to gain her own freedom and subsequently the English crown. She had long realized that here in the heart of her kingdom was a charismatic presence who seemed to have a fatal attraction for everyone who fell withi
n her circle of influence. Mary, for her part, had recognized that Elizabeth may have longed to be rid of her but would not return her to Scotland where her Protestant lords were implacably set against her. Nor would she leave her free to go to France and there re-energize old alliances injurious to England.
Mary’s next letter to Elizabeth, written from Sheffield Castle on 29 October 1571, acknowledged the irreparable deterioration in their relationship: ‘Madam, the extreme severity with which by your orders I am used, so convinces me, to my great regret, of the misfortune which I have, with many others, not only of being in your disfavour, but, which is worse, esteemed by you as an enemy instead of a friend, as a stranger instead of a close relation – even the more detested that it does not permit the exercise of Christian charity between parties so nearly related by blood and propinquity.’70 Her impervious self-righteousness made her very difficult to deal with. She emotively reminded Elizabeth in every letter of their close blood ties, the sanctity of their mutual queenship, the poignancy of her position as a lone woman, captive and away from friends, family and home. Her position was tragic, close to Elizabeth’s own experiences, and affectingly expressed. But the implicit message was always self-justifying, sometimes pious and superior, yet fundamentally accusatory. Impossible as her situation was, Mary still operated on the principle she had demonstrated so strikingly during the Huntly Rebellion a decade earlier – attack was the best defence.
Elizabeth wrote far fewer letters in reply to her distressed cousin. As she explained, often there was no answer she could give that would placate her. However, writing on 1 February 1572, she was moved to remonstrate against Mary’s previous letter which, she objected, was full of ‘uncomely, passionate, and vindictive speeches’. Elizabeth warned her ‘to qualify your passions, and to consider that it is not the manner to obtain good things with evil speeches, nor benefits with injurious challenges, nor to get good to yourself with doing evil to another’.71 ‘She then delegated all negotiations to the hapless Earl of Shrewsbury who still remained as Mary’s host – jailer.
In that phrase to get good to yourself with doing evil to another, Elizabeth was more obviously thinking of the plots against her own life. However, it was a phrase that could be applied to Mary’s career so far, and the devastating effect she had on the men who were drawn to marry or assist her. Elizabeth did not like losing family members. Her cousin Lord Darnley, fleetingly Mary’s husband and King of the Scots, had been murdered in confused and unhappy circumstances. Norfolk’s treason lay heavy on Elizabeth. When she wrote this letter he was still alive in the Tower, and she was under mounting pressure to have him executed. He was her leading nobleman, a suitor in the past for her hand and one of her inner circle. it made her wonder at the powers of persuasion the promise of Mary had exerted over this vain and susceptible man. Elizabeth had every reason to believe that her own life had hung in the balance, and still would, while her cousin’s presence inspired schemes of rescue, and dreams of religious restoration and personal ambition. But there were other lives too. How many more men, important and close to Elizabeth perhaps, would become caught and ruined in that web of ambition and desire?
At the same time as she wrote her exasperated letter to Mary, Elizabeth commented to the French ambassador, ‘There seems to be something sublime in the words and bearing of the Queen of Scots that constrains even her enemies to speak well of her.’72 On the face of it, Elizabeth had all the advantages in the relationship between the two queens. Yet she was as much captive to the situation as was Mary herself, imprisoned by the insecurities of her own past and her deep-rooted respect, both philosophical and self-serving, for the divine elevation of them both as queens.
Elizabeth, in her actions and her letters, seemed intimidated at times by the reputation of her rival. Perhaps Mary’s unimpeachable pedigree, her unquestionable legitimacy, was part of her power over her cousin. In this way she challenged Elizabeth’s deepest vulnerabilities. Perhaps, too, Elizabeth was daunted by the mystery of Mary’s almost sorcerous power of attraction, even on the briefest acquaintance. She had been wary of her personal charm from the beginning, ‘since her flying into our Realm’,73 as she vividly put it in a letter to her ambassador in France. Why, even that most reliable and adamantine of men, her own Burghley, had attributed irresistible qualities to the Queen of Scots and feared the effect she would have on anyone, including those naturally averse, who fell into her toils: ‘she is able by hir great wytt, and hir sug[a]red eloquence, to wyn even such, as before they shall come to hir company, shall have a great mislykyng’.74
Mary knew that magical powers of bewitchment were supposed to be hers. When she had first blazed over the English horizon, uninvited, as potentially inflammatory as a smouldering meteor, she had tried to allay her cousin’s suspicions, ‘Alas! Do not as the serpent that stoppeth his heering, for I am no inchanter, but your suster and naturall cousyne … I am not of the nature of a basilisk, and lesse of the camelions, to turne you to my lykeness. And though I shuld be so dangerouse and curst as men: yow ar sufficiently armeyd with constance, and with justice.’75 In the process, however, she just reinforced the uneasiness that here was a woman of supernatural power.
Elizabeth was armed with justice, but in her struggle with Mary this was to her disadvantage: how to act justly and yet safeguard herself and her country? Assailed by mysterious forces, by unknown plots and conspiracies against her life, Elizabeth recognized that her fate was inextricably linked with Mary’s; that she too could not escape. ‘I am not free, but a captive’, she wrote in some despair76 during a long constraint that both queens, in their different ways, shared till death.
* * *
*James Stewart had been Prior of St Andrews before giving up the ecclesiastical life.
*The Earl of Bothwell was already a prisoner in Denmark. After being held captive for ten years, he died 14 April 1578 in Dragsholm, a forbidding castle in the north of Zealand, apparently in pitiful circumstances, chained to a pillar in a dungeon, filthy and insane. He was forty-three years old.
*Detectio Mariae Reginae Scotorum (A Detection of Mary Queen of Scots), George Buchanan, 1571.
*George Whetstone (1550–87) is principally remembered for his play Promos and Cassandra written in 1578 in rhymed verse which provided the plot for Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.
*Mary was still married to Bothwell and would remain so until his death on 14 April 1578. From 1570 onwards there were various requests from Mary and her envoys to the pope for nullification of the marriage by reason of it being bigamous, or Bothwell having taken Mary by force. If Mary had had a serious suitor there is little doubt that she would have received dispensation from the pope to marry a fourth husband.
*Elizabeth had to sign a warrant herself to allow, if necessary, two of Norfolk’s servants to be tortured in the Tower. The usual procedure was to try the threat of the rack, and if that did not loosen the tongue of the prisoner then the full horror of the rack was to be used. She wrote: ‘if they shall not seem to you to confess plainly their knowledge, then we warrant you to cause them both, or either of them, to be brought to the rack, and first to move them with fear thereof to deal plainly in their answers. And if that shall not move them, then you shall cause them to be put to the rack and to fe[el] the taste thereof until they deal more plainly, or until you shall think meet.’ (Collected Works, 127)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Singular Foes
I will appeal to the ever-living God, in whom onely I acknowledge a Power and Dominion over us that are Princes of equal Jurisdiction, Degree and Authority. And upon him will I call, (with whom there will be no place for Craft nor Fraud,) that in the Last day he will reward us according to our Deserts one towards another.
Letter from Mary to Elizabeth 1582
She wishes by way of invocation that God should ‘retribute’ to us at the time of His last Judgement according to our deserts and demerits one towards another, putting us also in mind that all disguisements and
counterfeit policies of this world shall then not prevail … if that severe censure should take place it would go much more hardly with her than we … can in Christian charity wish for her.
For howsoever she is bold with men, who can judge but of things outwardly, she ought to beware how she dallies with God.
Answering letter from Elizabeth to Mary 1583
THE POWER OF AN ISLAND PEOPLE, encircled by an unpredictable sea, is forged in independence, self-reliance and insularity from continental influence. Inward looking, slower to change, an island race has an enduring sense of identity and the confidence of knowing who they are, where they have come from and where they are bound. Elizabeth’s father, through desire for her mother and for herself, the unborn heir who should have been a boy, had ensured for his country a spiritual and ideological isolation too. Elizabeth’s sister, Mary I, had attempted to rebuild the bridge with Europe and Catholicism, with catastrophic results. Elizabeth was herself quintessentially English and insular, an island queen who, despite her long life, her wide learning, linguistic skills and intellectual curiosity, never travelled beyond her immediate frontiers.
Yet within those limitations she claimed great strengths. She knew her people intimately, and was quick to remind them that she was like them and had been a subject too. She was proud that she was born of a domestic union and not from a dynastic alliance with a foreign power. Her claim that her blood was unsullied by foreign taint reinforced the chauvinism, superiority and suspicion shown towards foreigners that was beginning to characterize her people. Confident of their love and with her familial images as wife and parent she promised them her care and loyalty to death, and was believed.
This comfortable fertile fortress, protected by an inhospitable sea, was safe even from incursion through her borders with Scotland now that the Protestant lords were well established there. The Scottish queen’s precipitate flight, however, and her continued unwelcome presence in the heart of Elizabeth’s kingdom had breached the walls and once more thrown a bridge to Catholic Europe through which interest, influence and outright aggression could be channelled. Mary’s nature was far from insular. She was not immediately identifiable as truly belonging anywhere. She had spent only seven years in her kingdom, always an exotic presence for whom her subjects initially felt a greater patriotic feeling than she could return. French was her natural language of choice and she never lost her accent. Her connections of family and religion extended from France to Spain and to the pope himself, and her affections remained unwaveringly Francocentric, indelibly impressed with the charismatic family and the influences of a charmed youth.