by Jane Dunn
Not only was Mary once more implicated in treason, her own personal behaviour again was under attack. The Countess of Shrewsbury, a friend no longer, had taken damaging allegations to court about the leniency of her husband’s wardship of the Queen of Scots, due to the fact, she claimed, that he was in love and had enjoyed sexual relations with her. Mary was incensed and quick to write to the French ambassador begging him to acquaint Elizabeth, her council, the French king and Catherine de Medici, as well as all the Guises, with her innocence of ‘anything in the world contrary or prejudicial to my honour’.40 A second, but this time secret, letter was also intercepted and decoded by Walsingham’s agents: in this Mary requested that the ambassador should pass on a veiled threat to Leicester, intimating that if nothing was done to clear Mary’s name from ‘this false and unhappy imposture’41 then she would reveal certain information concerning his intimate behaviour with Elizabeth, as well as his personal ambitions. (He had a scheme to marry his son to Arbella Stuart, Mary’s niece-in-law, the Countess of Shrewsbury’s granddaughter, and a claimant to the English throne.)
None of these revelations consoled Elizabeth. The Throckmorton Plot brought together her two most powerful enemies, Spain and France – in the form of the Guises – in nightmare alliance. The fear of invasion by a superior force had haunted her reign. The Pope’s support for a religious crusade against Protestantism had made the sacred political. In June 1584 the assassination by a Spanish agent of the Prince of Orange in the middle of his campaign in the Low Countries brought Elizabeth’s own death closer. There were increasing rumours also of a great Spanish fleet in the making, with the fear that it meant some aggressive intent against England. In the heart of her kingdom too was the canker of a captive Catholic queen whose presence focused every form of dissent and wrung sympathy from even the most incorruptible of hearts.
Although officially Elizabeth did not give them much credence, the stories the Countess of Shrewsbury had to tell of Mary’s seductive presence subverting one of the most solid and trusty of Englishmen merely reinforced the mythology of the Scottish queen’s supernatural powers of attraction. All scurrilous rumour around Mary also undermined Elizabeth’s struggle to maintain her own reputation and probity against the malicious talk that her status and sex always had attracted. Her answer to Mary’s distress over these allegations expressed how closely Elizabeth identified with the need to maintain the honour of all queens: ‘we can neither forget [Mary’s] quality nor her proximity in blood. We have always had special care to suppress the licentiousness of this corrupt age in speaking evil of princes, whose credit and reputation ought to be held sacred.’42 She feared the disrespect of the people and the condescension of her fellow monarchs who were keen to denigrate the feminine inadequacies of every queen. These many precarious elements hung heavily on Elizabeth. She was conscious of her own vulnerability, her country’s poverty and weaknesses, and frightened always of war.
The confused details of another possible plot to assassinate the queen involving one of the Members of her own Parliament, William Parry, were revealed hard on the heels of the Throckmorton Plot. In an atmosphere where potential assassins lurked at every turn, Cecil produced a declaration in October 1584 aimed at protecting Elizabeth’s life by removing the reward expected on her death – a Catholic queen on the English throne. The signatories to this document swore to defend the queen and to pursue to death anyone who attempted any violence against her. Its clauses were broadened to disallow the succession of any person involved in an attempt on Elizabeth’s life. This became known as the Bond of Association, and by the end of the autumn was enthusiastically signed by tens of thousands of loyal subjects up and down the land. Elizabeth was touched by the evidence of her people’s love and loyalty, and thanked her Parliament, promising as much care for her people in return: ‘I am not unmindful of your Oath made in the Association manifesting your great goodwills and affections … done (I protest to God) before I heard of it or ever thought of such a matter, until a great number of hands with many obligations were showed me at Hampton Court, signed and subscribed with the names and seals of the greatest of this land. Which I do acknowledge as a perfect argument of your true hearts and great zeal for my safety, so shall my bond be stronger tied to greater care for your good.’43
Although it did not name Mary, the Bond was aimed directly at anyone who might act against Elizabeth in order to place her rival or that rival’s heirs on the throne. If it was made law, which Parliament attempted that November, in effect it would have become Mary’s death warrant. Should any other plot to assassinate Elizabeth be uncovered with the objective of placing Mary on her throne, even if there was no evidence that she had any part in it, she could be found guilty by association and summarily executed. Elizabeth was unhappy with the extremity of the proposed act and insisted that guilt should be established first, by a minimum of twenty-four councillors and noblemen.
Careful also not to debar James, Elizabeth ensured the heirs of a guilty party were not prevented themselves from inheriting. Mary, writing to Cecil in January 1585 from Tutbury Castle, was so keen to impress him and Elizabeth with her trustworthiness she offered to put her signature to the Bond of Association to prove ‘before God and on her honour’ she was not ‘one who would wish to attempt, support, or favour an act so wicked as an attempt against her person or her kingdom’.44 Within eighteen months she was deep in the final conspiracy of her life in which the murder of Elizabeth and the invasion of England by Spain were integral parts.
During this Parliament an act against the Catholic missionary priests was introduced which ordered any priests ordained abroad to leave England within forty days or be executed for treason. Scores of priests, some already condemned and imprisoned as traitors, were deported to France, where the militant Spanish ambassador Mendoza noted with delight that these English attempts to stem the flow only served to increase the fervour of the ‘seminarists [who] go over daily to England with glad hearts and wonderful firmness to win the crown of martyrdom’.45
This general alarm meant Mary was moved from Sheffield Castle and finally out of the care of the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury had discharged his onerous duty over a period of fifteen years, during which time his health and his fortune had been significantly depleted. On taking leave of Elizabeth the following year he had kissed her hand and thanked her fervently for having ‘freed him from two devils, namely, the Queen of Scotland and his wife’,46 the indomitable Bess of Hardwick.
Mary was moved, with great forward planning and in the company of a body of armed men, to Wingfield Manor, to be temporarily in the care of the kindly old diplomat Sir Ralph Sadler. Now in his late seventies, he had been Henry VIII’s ambassador to Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, when she was regent of Scotland. At that time he had been impressed both by her, and by the beauty and vigour of her tiny baby, Mary herself. Nearly forty-two years ago she had been unwrapped and undressed in the middle of winter to prove to the King of England’s envoy that the baby he coveted in marriage for his son Edward was both healthy and perfect, and likely to survive. If Sadler was touched by her then, inevitably he would be putty in the hands of the now grown-up and tragic woman, the deposed queen.
In January 1585, despite protestations and delaying tactics, Mary was transferred once more to the grim stronghold of Tutbury Castle. On the way Sadler, Mary and their party had unexpectedly to stay the night in a lowly house, kept by ‘an ancient wydow, namid Mrs Beaumont’. Mary’s charming manners and gift of empathy in her concern to put at ease this unimportant woman gave an insight into why her own female servants, particularly, remained so affectionate and loyal to her all their lives: ‘So sone as [Mary] knew who was her hostesse, after she had made a beck [nod] to the rest of the wemen standing next to the doore, she went to her and kissed her, and none other, sayeng that she was comme thither to trouble her, and that she was also a wydow, and therefore trusted that they shulde agree well inough together, having no husbands to
trouble them’.47
One of Sadler’s favourite sports was hawking. Mary too was an enthusiast and long ago had surprised her French family when she first arrived in France, aged not yet six, by exhibiting precocious expertise as a falconer. When Sadler sent for his hawks and falconers to wile away what was an unhappy situation as jailer, he could not resist Mary’s blandishments, even when it got him into trouble. On the arrival of his birds, she had ‘ernestly intreated me that she might go abrode with me to see my hawkes flie, a passetyme indede which she hethe singular delite in’. Sadler could not deny her and allowed Mary to accompany him three or four times, even though it meant riding on horseback some miles down the valley from the castle. Elizabeth was far from happy when she heard of this breach of security in his keeping of the Queen of Scots, alarmed at a possible escape or rescue attempt. Sadler explained that he was an unwilling jailer and anyway had never had less than forty armed men on horseback with them. Weary of life, he said, he desired nothing more than to relinquish this unsought charge, to return home to prepare himself for death and ‘the euerlasting quyetnes of the lif to com’.48
His wish was to be granted, for his duties as Mary’s keeper were handed over in April 1585 to Sir Amyas Paulet, a scrupulous Puritan and the least susceptible of men. Sadler had mildly complained to Elizabeth that it was impossible to keep track of all the correspondence and conversation that eddied about the Queen of Scots, so large was her household and the numbers of Scottish, English and French servants and courtiers who came and went almost without check. Paulet immediately imposed his more austere will. He pared down her household and closed off the channels of her private mail, even for a while to the French ambassador. The casual expeditions were also stopped. There were no more summer visits to Buxton baths and certainly no more days hawking miles downriver from the castle gates. If Paulet was unimpressed by Mary, she was equally dismissive of him: ‘he is one of the most gruff and rebarbative [un des plus bizzares et farouches] of persons whom I have ever known; and, in a word, fitter for a jail of criminals than for the custody of one of my rank and birth’.49 She also felt that should Elizabeth die, Paulet would have little compunction in eliminating her, rather than countenance a Catholic successor to the English throne.
Mary fired off an indignant complaint to Elizabeth at these new restrictions. Even as she wrote, however, it occurred to her that her letters were barely read by the recipient as they were ‘so long and customarily tedious, according to the subject that is daily provided to me for them’. Through the years the stream of letters from Mary to her cousin veered from professions of love to the pathos of the victimized, through queenly outrage to veiled menace and threats of foreign intervention. Elizabeth at first had been sympathetic, sometimes intimidated, even amazed, but after nearly two decades when neither the content nor context had much changed she had grown distant; as Mary perceptively feared ‘you yourself will not always give yourself leisure to read my letters’. Mary was not a fool and as a natural charmer and entertainer she also regretted the paucity of her experiences now, the narrowed horizons so different from the glamour and promise of her youth. She ended the letter with her unique combination of apology, accusation and pathos: ‘I regret that my letters convey to you only continual complaints and grievances; but still more the so pregnant cause which I have, to which I beseech my God to send a termination in some shape or other.’50
Elizabeth did not immediately read this letter, if in fact she ever did. Despite the heightened awareness of her vulnerability to assassination and the complete lack of protection from anyone wishing her ill, she was on one of her annual summer progresses greeted by crowds who pressed close with offerings, any one of whom could have killed her. Elizabeth had never forgotten that she owed her crown not only to God but to her people, and she recognized the power of her presence and the necessity of pageant and display.
Leopold von Wedel was a young German adventurer from Pomerania of independent means who arrived in England in the summer of 1585. In his informative diary, he not only admired the beauty of the fair-skinned English women but was surprised at their forwardness and the fact that they participated so wholeheartedly in public events: ‘the womenfolk in England wish to be in at everything’,51 was his half-admiring aside. He also noted how accessible the queen was, despite the level of anxiety raised by the discovery of various plots and possible assassination attempts. He had already been shown around her palaces, with great informality, noting the wealth and luxury of the furnishings and jewel-studded objets d’art; the pearl-encrusted bed hangings of the queen’s bed of state and the even larger pearls embroidered onto the pillows, being amongst the details which caught his eye.
Wedel was struck by Elizabeth’s popular touch despite the overwhelming grandeur of the pageant of her public life. Having been to church at Hampton Court she walked between two rows of her ‘common people’, who as she approached fell upon their knees. ‘The Queen’s demeanour, however, was gracious and gentle and so was her speech, and from rich and poor she took petitions in a modest manner.’52 Her surprising patience and affection seemed to be reciprocated by the populace many times over. Elizabeth managed to combine personal familiarity with semi-divine spectacle, with herself at the centre of the show. On her arrival in London in early November, ready for the annual festivities on the 17th, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the day she was proclaimed queen, the glamour of the procession on horseback was recorded vividly by Wedel:
[Burghley and Walsingham] were followed by the Queen in a gold coach, open all round, but having above it a canopy embroidered with gold and pearls … The Queen sat alone in the carriage. She was dressed in white and cried to the people: ‘God save my people’, to which the crowd responded with ‘God save Your Grace’. This they repeated many times, falling on their knees. The Queen sitting all alone in her splendid coach appeared like a goddess such as painters are wont to depict. Behind the Queen’s coach rode my Lord Lester, who is an Earl of princely blood.53
Remarkably, this procession, almost three decades after that first triumphant entry into London on her accession, was fundamentally unchanged. Her two closest advisers then, Cecil and Lord Robert, some thirty years later were her closest still. Despite the passage of eventful years, only Walsingham had been added to the intimate family circle around Elizabeth, and this continuity and enduring loyalty was one of the keys to the stability and success of her reign. Wedel appeared as caught up in the general emotion of fealty and gratitude to Elizabeth. A young man overwhelmed by the palaces he had visited, the pageants and jousting tournaments, the feasts and the balls, it was not surprising that he should declare the English as ‘rich, wealthy, very ostentatious and pleasure-loving’.54
Just as this starry-eyed tourist was preparing to return to Germany, life in England was growing more difficult and dangerous for both Mary and Elizabeth. The Protestant rebels in the Low Countries were in disarray since the assassination of the Prince of Orange and were petitioning desperately for more help from Elizabeth than just the money and munitions she had supplied during the previous decade. Fear of Spanish aggression meant there were many in England who considered that Spain, having reasserted its authority over the Low Countries, would turn its warlike energies at last on England. Bowing to the passionate advocacy of an ageing Leicester, determined on his chance of military command in the Protestant cause for which he had long campaigned, Elizabeth reluctantly allowed her favourite to go to the Low Countries in command of her forces, with the title of the queen’s Lieutenant General.
Accoutred with magnificence, and in the company of an impressive array of noblemen, the portly earl arrived in Flushing to an ecstatic welcome. He had a fleet of one hundred ships to transport his entourage and was in charge of thousands of foot soldiers and cavalry. Camden recorded how Elizabeth’s decision to come to the Netherlanders’ aid meant ‘all the Princes of Christendom admired at such manly Fortitude in a Woman, which durst, as it were, declare War against so puissant
[powerful] a Monarch: insomuch as the King of Sweden said, “That Queen Elizabeth had now taken the Diadem from her Head, and adventured it upon the doubtfull Chance of War”’.55
To distract the Spanish further, Elizabeth let loose again Sir Francis Drake and his band of venture capitalists to prey on the Spanish colonies, their treasure ships and trade routes. This overt piracy enraged the Spanish further as the looted treasures enriched not only Drake’s own coffers and those of the grandees who lent their support to his expeditions, but Elizabeth herself. Mendoza, writing to Philip II, explained the outrageous deal: ‘[Drake] did not take precise orders from the Queen, except to plunder as much as he could, to enable her to sustain the war in Flanders.’56 Her unashamed encouragement of her rapacious adventurers extended even to ennobling them. This insult combined with every other English outrage against his proud and powerful nation and drove the chronically cautious Philip II closer to waging outright war on English soil.
Elizabeth was the princess he had once saved from the bitter wrath of her sister, his wife Mary I. Now a presumptuous and ungrateful queen, a heretic who encouraged heretics within his own territories, she was about to face the consequences of his slow deliberations. The greatest Catholic power intended putting a brake on this renegade state. His duty as the military arm of the Catholic church, and with great commercial interests at stake, gave Philip every reason to act decisively at last.