Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  As prisoner of the English queen, Mary may have been deprived of personal and political power, but she was the symbol of something more powerful and more elusive than any individual could aspire to be. A born queen kept in captivity; a mother separated from her son; a Catholic martyr abused by heretic subjects and harassed by a godless queen; a French princess and dowager queen living in conditions far beneath her dignity; a beautiful, noble and ill-used woman in need of heroic rescue: these personae were already being woven into a Marian mythology of the Queen of Scots as sainted victim. She had become a magnetic pole for any dissenting opinion in Elizabeth’s England and a focus of guilty shame for those sympathetic to her plight. Above all, she was a signal of hope for the Catholic population who dreamed of a counter-reformation, and a cause for every messianic hothead in need of a holy war.

  The opposing mythology of Mary, forged by fearful English Protestants, was of a queen who had forfeited every divine right of monarchy through her immoral behaviour. In their overheated rhetoric she was an adulteress and husband-slayer – worse, a regicide; a ruthless papist plotter intent on taking their own queen’s life and subjecting their kingdom to a vengeful Catholicism. Through rumour, fear and alienation, Mary was easily transmuted into a mysterious, even diabolical, seductress whom men approached at their peril.

  When the entrails of the Ridolphi Plot were displayed to Elizabeth’s councillors in 1572, the threat of a Catholic league against England, based on the legitimacy of Mary’s claim to the throne, seemed imminent. The whole enterprise was sanctified by the papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth and denying her legitimacy as queen.

  The relative tolerance of religious difference that marked the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign was fractured not just by plots against her but by the instability of events in neighbouring countries. There was a growing religious extremism that disconcerted Elizabeth’s secular political instinct for the noncommittal and the inclusive. It was not just the conservative Catholic forces which were growing in confidence. The Puritan wing were also becoming more demanding, although posing less threat through their lack of powerful states as allies.

  After the assassination of the Scottish regent Moray in 1570 by a Catholic Hamilton, the barely suppressed anarchy of Scottish politics once more gained the upper hand. Moray’s eventual successor as regent, Darnley’s father Lennox, was also killed by one of Mary’s supporters in September 1571; as was the next regent, the anti-Mary Earl of Mar, just one year later, some said as a result of poison. The Spanish campaign against the Protestants in the Low Countries brought Huguenots streaming through the eastern ports of England seeking asylum, with tales of cruelty and suffering, and the threat of the imperial ambitions of this most implacably Catholic of states extending across the Channel too.

  The religious wars in France had lasted almost a decade, periodically quiescent and then flaring into savage bloodletting and fanatical excess. A series of massacres of Protestants beginning on 24 August 1572, the feast of St Bartholomew, convulsed the Protestant states with horrified disbelief. In the afterglow of a royal wedding feast, Catherine de Medici had initially intended a political act of assassination against certain Huguenot leaders, specifically Admiral Coligny whose impressive character and powers of organization were gaining unprecedented influence for the Huguenot party. The still mighty and ultra-Catholic Guise family had long vowed revenge for what they believed to be Coligny’s implication in the murder of François, Duc de Guise, almost ten years before. They too were in on the plot, as was the Duc d’Anjou, soon to become Henri III. It was a plot to assassinate Coligny, but when he was merely wounded Catherine and her followers thought it too dangerous to leave his followers alive. What appeared to be a plan to kill the governing body of the Huguenot party turned into a bloodbath. The Parisian mob were encouraged to go on the rampage where every Protestant, and then anyone who crossed their paths, was destroyed in an orgy of killing.

  This bloodlust lasted for days, sweeping across France and settling its bloodied fangs into other towns and districts until tens of thousands lay butchered in the streets and the fields. The emblem of St Bartholomew was a knife, recalling his death by flaying: the massacre that was for ever to bear his name was made notorious through its similar barbarous inhumanity. It was the most shocking episode in the French religious wars and was greeted with celebration by the new pope Gregory XIII, who struck a commemorative medal, and Philip II of Spain, who congratulated the king and Catherine, his historic enemies, on a job well done. The militant faithful considered turning back the tide of European Protestantism as much an expression of God’s will as Christianity’s onslaught on the infidel Turk, and the sword therefore became a legitimate means of conservation and conversion. The papal medal on the reverse side depicted an angel with the cross in his left hand and a drawn sword in his right while before him lay the bodies of the slain, the inscription, Ugonotorum Strages, ‘the Massacre of the Huguenots’, quite unambivalent in its meaning.

  The news reached Elizabeth while she was hunting. Immediately the day’s sport was abandoned and the court went into mourning. The predominant response was one of shock, puzzlement and fear. Elizabeth had only recently allowed her ministers to respond with some encouragement to the French king’s latest offer of his youngest brother, the Duc d’Alençon*, as a possible husband for her. What appeared to be a policy of systematic destruction of the French Protestants filled her with outrage and alarm. All anyone could talk about at court was these latest revelations of the perfidy of the French. Was this part of a greater Catholic plan which would spread to England’s shores and sweep up the Queen of Scots as its heroine?

  Mary’s inheritance was both Stuart and Guise, and on all showings the courage, passion and charisma of her nature made her more her mother’s daughter than her father’s. It was wondered whether she would also prove herself as ruthlessly fanatic as her Guise uncles in the pursuit of her religion, in the willingness to destroy others. Certainly Mary was aware that her close blood ties and affective connection to this powerful family was considered suspicious. In a letter to the French ambassador she admitted, ‘they say that I love the house of Guise too much’.1 Elizabeth, however, was disinclined to use the horrors across the Channel as a way of reflecting more opprobrium on Mary. To the French ambassador who, soon after the massacre, asked her not to punish Mary further, she retorted: ‘The Queen of Scots has enough sins of her own to answer for, without ascribing to her those of other people.’2

  She was less understanding towards Mary’s brother-in-law, Charles IX. Elizabeth wrote to him that even if this was punishment for rebels intent on relieving him of his life and his crown – an excuse frankly she doubted – it was ‘a terrible and dangerous example’ to set by not taking these nobles for trial before executing them. She turned her outrage next to the reported treatment of the common people, ‘that women, children, maids, young infants and sucking babes, were at the same time murthered and cast into the river; and that liberty of execution was given to the vilest and basest sort of the popular [populace], without punishment or revenge of such cruelty done afterwards by law’.3 To his ambassador who delivered the king’s version of events to her at court, Elizabeth interrupted the excuses with a thunderous expression, ‘even if everything had happened as the King said, and the conspirators had been rightly punished’, she said sharply she would like to know ‘what blame was attributable to the women and children who were murdered’.4 The ambassador left soon afterwards.

  Assassination had become a commonplace tool of policy among the European powers at this time. Yet it was striking how easy it was to gain close access to anyone in a position of power. The series of dead regents in Scotland was indication enough of how simple and unremarkable such a lawless act had become. Even in Elizabeth’s court, full of rumours of individual plots against her, fearful of concerted actions by hostile states, access to her palaces and even her person seemed to be surprisingly relaxed. In one of the prayers composed while Mar
y was in captivity in her kingdom, Elizabeth expressed the ever-present awareness of uncertainty: ‘I see all things in this life subject to mutability, nothing to continue still at one stay … I hear ofttimes untimely death doth carry away the mightiest and greatest personages.’5

  Although Mary was at the mercy of Elizabeth and the English state, and vulnerable to some contrivance that appeared legal enough to justify her execution, closely confined as she was, she was much more protected from opportunist assassination than Elizabeth could ever be. The English queen pursued her life at court and on regular progresses round the country, with immediate access to her nobles, her visitors and the people. There are fascinating travelogues of visiting foreign nobility who detail how they walked into any of the queen’s residences, inspected her living quarters, handled her plate and furnishings, gazed at portraits of her ancestors, turned up at church while she was at worship, joined the company around her and were presented to her, with very little barrier or protective protocol.

  With so much turmoil abroad, with the pope’s call to action, and the Queen of Scots at home attracting support from disparate and dangerous factions, it was not surprising that Elizabeth’s ministers and Commons should fear for her life. The Bishop of London wrote urgently to Cecil, ‘these evill tymes trouble all good men’s heads, and make their heartes ake, fearing that this barbarous treacherie will not cease in Fraunce, but will reache over unto us … Hasten her Majestie homewards, her safe returne to London [from a royal progress] will comfort many hearts oppressed with feare.’6 During the Parliament of 1572, the members pleaded for the chance to try Mary for treason and thereby sentence her to death. Elizabeth, pressed by emotional speeches to safeguard herself and her country, would only agree reluctantly to the more modest suggestion that Mary be deprived of her right of succession. However, despite being passed by both houses, she unexpectedly backed away from ratifying the newly drafted bill.

  Burghley was exasperated at her obduracy and apparent blindness to the danger: as long as Mary retained her claim on the English crown Elizabeth would not be safe from every kind of European or Catholic ambition against her. Anxieties grew to fever pitch when she fell ill with a pox that was immediately assumed to be a recurrence of the dreaded smallpox. No one was more fearful than Shrewsbury. If Elizabeth should die, Mary still remained the next in line to the throne. His position was perilous if in this sudden change of fortune his prisoner would become his sovereign, intent on revenge. After the execution of the Duke of Norfolk in early June 1572, Mary’s bitterness against Elizabeth had been vitriolic. Shrewsbury had thought it wise to let Cecil know: ‘She still continues great enmity, and gives no hope of other intent. It is too plain her heart is overhardened with deadly hate against the Queen’s majesty – the more, therefore, her majesty’s safety is to be thought upon.’7

  What faithful and literal-minded old Shrewsbury could not fathom, however, was the volatility of Mary’s emotions. Living in the moment, thriving on sensation, Mary’s expression of feeling was fundamentally intense but mutable; exuberance quickly followed despair, depression metamorphosed into action. Although, in her desperation to be free, she was an eager participant in any passing plot she knew that her own life so easily could be forfeit in the chaotic process of a rescue attempt. Mary cannot have forgotten the pack frenzy of Riccio’s murder and the danger to herself in the panicky aftermath.

  Elizabeth too was capable of outbursts of uncontained emotion. The strain of living with Mary’s presence, and the problems and dangers that she threatened sometimes got the better of her diplomatic cool. Introduced to Gondi, the French envoy, in the summer of 1578, ‘she told him loudly in the audience chamber that she knew very well he had come to disturb her country and to act in the favour of the worst woman in the world, whose head should have been cut off years ago’. When Gondi reminded her that Mary was a sovereign queen and a kinswoman, Elizabeth angrily shot back at him, ‘that [Mary] should never be free as long as she lived, even though it cost her [Elizabeth] her realm and her liberty’.8

  After the Ridolphi enterprise it was more than a decade before there were again significant conspiracies to rescue Mary or murder Elizabeth. Various plots of varying incompetence continued to come to light, thanks to Walsingham’s efficient intelligence gathering, but none of them, until Throckmorton’s involvement in 1583, caused any great consternation. Mary continued in her stately imprisonment, her household once more allowed to increase to royal proportions, and treated with increasing laxity until rumoured plots or threatening conditions abroad meant her activities were temporarily constrained. Her negotiations with Elizabeth turned to requests for more opportunities for outdoor recreation and expeditions to improve her health.

  Her indoor leisure activities were still embroidering fine bed hangings and smaller pieces, their motifs charged with meaning, often in the company of the Countess of Shrewsbury. The gossip that animated these long hours of stitching was much enlivened by details of Elizabeth’s last significant courtship that unexpectedly became a love affair. More than a decade after her amorous activities with Leicester had set the scandalmongers of Europe alight, Elizabeth’s reputation remained dubious, to her Catholic neighbours at least. Don John of Austria* had commented to his natural brother, Philip II, on the fleeting suggestion of a marriage between himself and the Queen of England: ‘I blush while I write this to think of accepting advances from a woman whose life and example furnish so much food for gossip.’9

  In fact, he was happier to consider marriage to Mary, admittedly a Catholic like himself, but a queen whose life gave more food for unfavourable talk than any queen living or dead. Elizabeth was vilified for being a heretic and, worse still, a woman and a monarch who had defied nature and God’s law by refusing to marry. In choosing to rule alone, thriving in her heresy instead of being struck down for her sins, she challenged every principle, succeeding where all prejudice decreed she would fail. To the fanatical Catholic rulers of Europe, Elizabeth was an affront. Her unmarried state made her vulnerable to the judgements of others, but it also made her personally vulnerable to the promise of love.

  The youngest French prince, François, Duc d’Alençon, finally began his courtship of Elizabeth in earnest in the beginning of 1579. This youthful, over-excitable young man was described as ‘featherbrained’ by Walsingham, who added dourly that this characteristic was true of most of the prince’s countrymen. Monsieur, as he was universally called, had added his support to the Huguenot struggle against the Spanish in the Low Countries. With his army in disarray, starving and beginning to desert, he faced an ignominious return to France. Instead he decided to try his fortune with Elizabeth. There were those in England who muttered cynically that he, like Aeneas, was seeking merely the easier option, with Elizabeth as the Dido he would betray. Already he had sent a series of extraordinary, passionately effusive letters, lauding her beauty and personal attractions to the skies and promising undying love, promising to die himself if deprived of her.

  Elizabeth had embarked on this courtship, as she had on every other, as a diplomatic ruse, this time with the intent to make some kind of holding alliance with the French. The lowering presence of the Spanish, marauding the Protestant rebels in the Low Countries and just too close for comfort, was Elizabeth’s real concern. Marriage negotiations were always a good way of disturbing an unfavourable status quo, unsettling the established power balance and delaying proceedings that might be injurious to her country. There were some alarming reports that the Spanish were building ships and fitting them out in Italy in such numbers that could only be explained by an enterprise against the English. This spectre of Spanish aggression loomed increasingly during the coming decade. The possibility, however faint, of an alliance between France and England menaced the Spanish in a way that English power alone could never achieve.

  A major factor in the success of the Duc d’Alençon’s courtship of the wily queen was a highly sophisticated courtier, Monsieur’s best friend, Jehan de S
imier. He travelled with an entourage of French courtiers to England in January 1579, with the express purpose of softening Elizabeth up before his master arrived in person. A series of extravagant entertainments were organized ‘with Tiltings performed at vast expense … to say nothing of other Courtly Sports and Pastimes, which are not so proper for an Historian to relate’,10 so Camden, Elizabeth’s earliest historian, related. The marriage had first been proposed when Elizabeth was thirty-eight and Alençon barely sixteen. From the start Elizabeth found the age difference embarrassing, saying she considered herself an old woman compared with this ‘beardless youth’, a characteristic gleefully pointed out to her by the many detractors of the match. By early 1579, she was forty-five and Monsieur had become a man. Although Elizabeth would conduct other flirtations to flatter her vanity and beguile her loneliness, this would become her romantic swansong.

  The impetus for this coup de foudre was Simier rather than his master. He was a man of forceful character with a capacity for Machiavellian ruthlessness.* Yet Simier was also a consummate courtier and practised in the ways of courtly love. He had an unexpectedly electrifying effect on the Virgin Queen. She was so taken with him that she insisted on seeing him daily, and simpered and posed and flirted so amorously that the whole court and the eagle-eyed ambassadors were agog. She also flagged her intimacy with him by awarding him a fond nickname, ‘monkey’ or ‘ape’, which punned in Latin on his name.