Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  When James finally had the choice, however, he did not wish to share his governance of Scotland with his glamorous but discredited mother, preferring instead to make his alliance with Elizabeth, thereby safeguarding his prospects of succeeding to the English throne. The Master of Gray, originally Mary’s friend, had been sent to negotiate with Elizabeth in what Mary believed was a tripartite alliance, involving both her son and herself. In fact the young Gray was keener to exclude Mary and court Elizabeth on behalf of James, in whom Scottish power now resided. He sent back a message to Elizabeth that James’s affection was ‘such to your Majesty as though he were your natural son’. To his own natural mother, James wrote without any of the filial love Mary had hoped would survive their separation: ‘as she was held captive in a remote place, [he had no choice but that] of declining to associate her with himself in the sovereignty of Scotland, or to treat her otherwise than as Queen-Mother’.28

  This complete loss of her son in every sense, physical, emotional and spiritual, was a devastating blow to Mary. She had to relinquish one of her dearest held illusions, that an instinctive filial love for her would survive everything. James lacked even a memory of his mother and this, combined with an ambition as fierce as her own to inherit the throne of England, meant ultimately he would reject her for Elizabeth. Mary unleashed on Elizabeth a pitiful rant of misery and revenge against the son she claimed to love more than anyone in the world. ‘Without him I am, and shall be of right, as long as I live, his Queen and Sovereign … but without me, he is too insignificant to think of soaring.’ She refused to be a queen mother ‘for I do not acknowledge one; failing our association, there is no King of Scotland, nor any Queen but me’.29

  As James’s real mother, she had given birth to him at risk of her own life, and produced a son and heir of her own blood and dynasty. Now she was to lose him to the pretended mother, his godmother Elizabeth, the woman she had sought as a mother, a sister, a close blood relation for herself. Mary had been denied every intimacy for which she had begged and bullied. Even her rightful place as Elizabeth’s successor had never been acknowledged formally. Her precious son, however, in betraying her would gain the prizes she had desired always.

  While captive, Mary’s only means of affecting events was through letters, either official or coded, clandestine, contraband. Her letters to Elizabeth were in French, numerous, heartfelt and repetitive in their plaints. She was a clever and emotionally manipulative writer who managed very different tones of voice to different recipients. A typical letter to Elizabeth combined pathos and seduction with hidden menace, but never once was she close to accepting responsibility for any of the ill-fortune that had befallen her, or for the plots against Elizabeth in which she starred. In early May 1580 she wrote:

  Madam, my good sister, – I have written to you several times during the last year, to lay before your consideration the unworthy and rigorous treatment which I have received in this captivity, notwithstanding the evidence which I have made a point of giving you, on all occasions, of my entire and sincere affection for you … I am constrained to beg and entreat you, as I humbly do, by my liberation out of this prison, to relieve yourself from the charge which I am to you, and from the continual suspicions, mistrusts, and prejudices with which [my enemies surrounding you] daily trouble you against me … Think that you can have me, out of prison, more your own, binding my heart to you by so signal a courtesy, than by confining my body within four walls.

  Mary then added an insight into her own sense of inviolable queenship and characteristic defiance, as candidly she explained, ‘compulsion not being the usual mode of gaining much from those of my rank and disposition, of which you may have some experience from the past’. She reiterated her credentials as a sovereign queen, nearest relative to Elizabeth and ‘plus juste hérétière [most lawful heretrix]’ and threatened she would soon die of her increasingly ill health. She ended with a request to be allowed to go to the baths at Buxton, which was granted, for three weeks at the end of July.30

  Mary’s imprisonment at this time was more of a house arrest with horse-riding and periodic therapeutic visits to the Buxton spa. Throughout she was treated with the full courtesy due to a queen, dining under her canopy of state and waited upon by servants of her own choosing. Although her mail had to pass through Shrewsbury’s hands, there was a limited welcome to courtiers and visitors who requested access to the queen. However, Walsingham’s nose for traitorous activity had long been alert to the comings and goings of friends and correspondence around the Queen of Scots. He arrested one of Mary’s go-betweens, Jailheur, but found nothing incriminating.

  Her relief was palpable in her letter to Archbishop Beaton, written in code just a couple of weeks after her plaintive missive to Elizabeth. The change in tone was instructive; here was a woman who was decisive, businesslike and ready for any adventure. She informed the archbishop she would find someone to replace the exposed Jailheur to ‘obtain service in my more important and secret matters’. One of these more important and secret matters was her request for help to Spain, the seriousness of which she wanted the archbishop to underline by proposing ‘the removal of my son to Flanders or Spain, according as shall be agreeable to the King [Philip II]’. Mary then went on to mention her letter to Elizabeth requesting her freedom. Should that fail, though, she promised her ambassador she was ready for any available plot or enterprise, ‘I shall expose myself to the risk of such other invention as may present itself’.31

  The following year, Mary was writing to the archbishop in similarly decisive vein: ‘I am earnestly exhorted to bring back my son to the faith, and to labour all at once for its restoration in this island, so as to engage in the cause all the Catholics in this country.’ She continued in sanguine vein, ‘Walsingham boasts of being acquainted with the plans of my cousin Monsieur de Guise for my deliverance, and also with the negotiations which have been entered into respecting it … offering likewise to prove that I have written to you in these very words, – “That I shall leave no stone unturned to escape from this imprisonment”. Consider from what quarter he could receive such information, and beware of it, I entreat you.’32

  Mary was in an impossible situation. Desperate to escape and reclaim her life and her crown, and even the crown of England too, she had to endure a long imprisonment from which hope of legitimate release had all but faded. Temperamentally she was not one to wait with patience for the tide, to resign herself to fate. She was a fighter who worked for freedom and paid whatever price. Secrecy, subversion and dreams of revenge gave her the necessary excitement and kept hope alive. Plotting was her lifeblood and games of risk saved her from insanity or chronic depression. Principal Secretary and arch spymaster Walsingham recognized the recklessness implicit in the nature of such an adventuress. He knew that it was just a matter of time before he had Mary implicated up to her neck in a cast-iron case of treason.

  Only with overwhelming evidence did he, Cecil and the more radical Protestants of Elizabeth’s council hope to be able to rid themselves of the troublesome presence of the Queen of Scots. While she lived, they believed she threatened the very core of Elizabeth’s reign, the Protestant succession, the continuance of a peaceful Reformation, the safety of the realm. Religious wars had riven France and the Low Countries. Elizabeth’s ministers feared civil war while Mary lived, but they knew well their own queen. Passionately attached to the concept of the inviolability of kings, she was repelled when it came to talk of their assassination. Desperate to keep faith with her people and not antagonize her Catholic neighbours, Elizabeth was determined that everything she did was seen to be legal. To destroy Mary, her ministers would need incontrovertible evidence.

  Not only were Mary’s hopes alive that some foreign power would come to spring her from jail into the welcoming, and militant, arms of the English Catholics, the English Catholics themselves were awakening to a new hope as their own faith enjoyed spiritual renewal. Although religious wars raged just across the Channel, E
lizabeth had hoped initially that a policy of non-intrusive tolerance would ensure Catholicism conveniently withered in her realm through lack of nurture. In 1570 she had promised Catholics freedom from ‘inquisition or examination of their consciences in causes of religion’, as long as their religion was practised in private, and that outwardly they conformed and kept the law. Harried as she had been herself during her sister Mary’s reign, this policy of freedom of conscience was close to her heart. She is reputed to have said to Philip II about his campaign against the Protestants in the Low Countries, ‘What does it matter to your Majesty if they go to the devil in their own way?’33

  Elizabeth herself had never been driven by religious conviction and was more conservative certainly than the strongly Protestant Cecil, Leicester and Walsingham. But freedom of thought mattered to her and she pursued, until cornered, an evasive policy of laissez faire. The compromise and veiled hypocrisy she demanded of English Catholics who wished to maintain their faith, along with their liberty and wealth, were merely reflections of Elizabeth’s own diplomatic style. She did not see why a certain pragmatic pretence should be rejected in favour of an awkward truth.

  The papal bull of 1570 was the first alarm bell: taken literally, a true Catholic was exhorted to rid England of the heretic pretender to the throne, with the promise of heavenly reward. Bills proposed by the Parliament of 1571 to make every subject take Protestant communion were vetoed by the queen, still insisting on freedom of conscience for all. However, a bill was passed which designated as high treason any attempt to convert an English subject into a subject of Rome, or even to be an English subject whose first allegiance was to Rome. It would take six years, however, before a priest was prosecuted and executed for treason under this new act. More than a hundred would follow by the end of Elizabeth’s reign.

  While the papal bull breathed fire, the arrival of missionary priests, trained at the recently established Douai seminary in the Low Countries, gave heart to the Catholic faithful in England. They entered the country clandestinely and were greeted with great enthusiasm as they carried new blood into the cells of the disheartened resistance across England. Many of the priests were English exiles, hastily trained and ill-prepared for their missions. According to Camden, Elizabeth thought ‘these silly priests’ were mostly innocent of ‘plotting the Destruction of their Countrey’34 and were much more the instruments of their superiors’ treasonous will.

  A far from silly priest was the English Jesuit Edmund Campion. A brilliant scholar at Oxford he had debated before the queen during her historic visit to the university in 1566. She had been particularly impressed during the Natural History Disputation with his contribution to the proposal that the tides were caused by the moon’s motion. Both Cecil and Leicester, who were present, offered to become his patrons. He had been a deacon in the Church of England in his twenties before converting to Catholicism and fleeing to Europe to train at Douai and then Prague. He arrived back in England in 1580 and was arrested, accused of plotting against Elizabeth to place Catholic Mary on her throne.

  Even under torture Campion denied his motives were anything other than spiritual. He had written an apologia before embarking on his mission in which he denied any political intent: ‘I never had mind, and am strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of State of Police [policy] of this realm, as things which appertain not to my vocation, and from which I do gladly restrain and sequester my thoughts.’ But the Pope’s bull, disputing Elizabeth’s legitimacy, had made the spiritual political. Any support from these priests for the English Catholics would implicitly involve them in the treason of offering greater obedience to the pope than to the queen.

  Elizabeth was sensitive to accusations of religious persecution and cruelty towards the missionary priests. Her government was careful to make the sophistical point that they questioned their suspects on political allegiances and steered clear of any spiritual matters. There was uneasiness too at reports of excessive cruelty being used to extract confessions (the Spanish ambassador had reported to Philip II that Campion had been viciously racked, even subjected to nails driven into the quick beneath each fingernail) and a declaration was published that although Campion was put on the rack it was never so extreme that he was not ‘presently able to walk, and subscribe his Confession’.35 Under English law, torture was illegal but could be used by special dispensation and, during these years of conspiracy and intrigue, it was one of the tools used frequently in the search for evidence.

  The increasing influence of rebel priests and the upsurge of Catholic support meant that the Parliament of 1581 passed an act aimed at restricting aberrant behaviour. It became a dangerous and expensive world for English Catholics. Converts were subject to the charge of treason, as were the priests who converted them. The recusants who refused to attend church and accept the Protestant sacrament were liable to be fined twenty pounds a month, a sum to beggar even the wealthiest of families. Elizabeth had long resisted the pressures of her ministers to deal more decisively with her Catholic subjects and had consistently been more lenient in her attitude towards the confinement and punishment of Mary. Uneasy when having to conduct her rule in broad strokes of black and white, Elizabeth was much happier when lines were blurry and detail open to a variety of interpretations.

  Suffering ever more savage reprisals against the priests and the laity who shielded them, the English Catholics were harassed, but their faith was spiritually invigorated. The executions, particularly of self-evidently courageous and principled men like Campion, fuelled a lively martyrology. However draconian their Members of Parliament might wish to be in their measures against the Catholics, ordinary people were less willing to inform on or prosecute those neighbours who appeared to be otherwise peaceable, law-abiding citizens.

  This revival of support energized Mary too. Temperamentally inclined to optimism and never short of confidence in her powers of attraction, she believed that there was a very significant body of dedicated English Catholics ready to take up arms for her cause. Mary sent the Spanish ambassador a remarkable message for Philip II: ‘[She] did not mean to leave where she is, except as Queen of England … her adherents and the Catholics were so numerous in the country that, if they rose, it would be easy even without assistance, but with the help of your Majesty it would soon be over, without any doubt.’36 With that she hoped to encourage armed Spanish intervention in the fates of herself and of Elizabeth.

  Such naivety and overconfidence meant she gave her blessing to any schemes and intrigues that came her way, and would in the end even put her name to incriminating letters of intent. Just as the rise of Catholic solidarity in England gave Mary cause for hope it also meant her position grew increasingly perilous. It would make it easier to implicate her legally in the treasonous activity of others. Also as factions became polarized and fear took a grip there would be some prepared to assassinate Mary rather than risk losing English autonomy and their Protestant monarch.

  In the final decade of Mary’s life there came a variety of plots based on this papal plan. The spiritual imperative to restore to England the true faith and the rightful heir was stamped with the pope’s – and therefore, to the English Catholics, God’s – imprimatur, while the force to effect this was expected to come with Philip II’s army and the spontaneous uprising of Mary’s newly invigorated supporters. Ever vigilant, Walsingham was full of foreboding but frustrated by the reluctance of his sovereign to act swiftly and harshly in protection of her self, her religion and her realm. It was to his advantage to prove the ubiquity and ruthlessness of the plotters, and persuade Elizabeth to stiffen her resolve against the Catholics and Mary herself, the focus of their hopes.

  The discovery at the end of 1583 of what was to become known as the Throckmorton Plot was further proof to Walsingham, Cecil and Leicester that the status quo between Mary and Elizabeth was too dangerous to leave undisturbed. For a while Elizabeth had appeared willing to accommodate again a plan p
ut forward by Mary two years before. In return for her freedom and recognition of joint sovereignty with her son James of Scotland, Mary declared herself ready to relinquish her claim on the English throne while Elizabeth lived, denounce the papal bull of excommunication, safeguard the Protestant religion in Scotland, and proclaim an amnesty for all those who had wronged her in Scotland and England. Mary’s willingness to accept such terms exhibited either a sincere desire for freedom at any cost or, as Walsingham warned, a lax approach to promises and treaties which could be modified or even ignored as occasion demanded. In the end it was James himself who declined the power sharing, and temporarily broke his mother’s heart at his betrayal of her maternal illusions.

  Mary’s insistence during the revived negotiations in the summer of 1583 that she was a practitioner of ‘plain and upright dealing’, desiring ‘nothing so much as her majesty’s good favour’, and ‘greatly wearied … of her long captivity. She is much decayed in health …’,37 sounded rather hollow when it was discovered that simultaneously she was keenly engaged in the workings of another plot. After six months’ surveillance, Walsingham emerged with evidence of close involvement of the Duc de Guise, the Spanish king and the Queen of Scots, with Sir Francis Throckmorton, as go-between, in an ambitious plan of invasion, rescue and assassination, the dream being to place Mary on Elizabeth’s throne through force, and return the heretic isle to Catholicism.

  In November 1583, Throckmorton was arrested and confessed under torture. Mary denied everything. She had long ago decided that it was far more noble to be persecuted for her faith than for the tawdry machinations of treason. The combative Spanish ambassador, Bernadino de Mendoza, was summarily expelled from the English court the following January. ‘Being a man of a violent and turbulent Spirit’, he did not go quietly. He insulted Elizabeth by telling her ministers that as she was a woman he had expected nothing better than her rank ingratitude. He threatened that ‘as I had apparently failed to please her as a minister of peace she would in future force me to try to satisfy her in war’.38 So injured was his pride he wrote to Philip II that the only point of life now for him was to avenge the insolence of the English, ‘even though I have to walk barefooted to the other side of the world to beg for [God’s commission to do it]’.39 From his vantage point in Paris, he laboured to promote the next great plot against Elizabeth but died just before the insolent English rout of the Spanish Armada.