by Jane Dunn
Elizabeth was outwardly defiant, although anxious not to be seen as aggrandizing her own kingdom. To the Prince of Parma she wrote: ‘Do not suppose that I am seeking what belongs to others. God forbid. I seek only that which is mine own. But be sure that I will take good heed of the sword which threatens me with destruction, nor think that I am so craven-spirited as to endure a wrong, or to place myself at the mercy of my enemy.’57 She always found it hard, however, to be decisive and now, as the Swedish king remarked, venturing her diadem on the doubtful outcome of war, she struggled with the consequent danger and expense and the threat of worse to come. The drain on her resources was emotional too; she missed Leicester whose prominence in the war meant he was now in greater peril of losing his life. Even more alarmingly, he was pursuing his own grandiose plans. When he accepted, against his queen’s express wishes, the title of Supreme Governor of the Low Countries, offered by the grateful rebels, Elizabeth’s nervous tension exploded: ‘How contemptuously we conceive ourself to have been used by you’, she wrote to her old favourite. ‘We could never have imagined … that a man raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favoured by us above any other subject in this land, would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment, in a cause that so greatly toucheth us in honour.’58 Leicester’s contrary ambitions made Elizabeth all the more desirous of extricating herself from this troublesome and ruinous enterprise.
Like all her furious rows with Leicester, this one was soon over and Elizabeth was friends with him again. After the storms of more than thirty years’ closest companionship, her letter to him in the summer of 1586, while he was still in the Low Countries facing failure rather than the triumph he had expected, makes her ease and intimacy with him clearly apparent. She began without preamble, ‘Rob, I am afraid you will suppose by my wandering writings that a midsummer moon hath taken large possession of my brains this month, but you must needs take things as they come into my head, though order be left behind me.’ She then ended a letter largely concerned with administration with, ‘Now will I end, that do imagine I talk still with you, and therefore loathly say farewell, Ô Ô,* though ever I pray God bless you from all harm, and save you from all foes with my million and legion of thanks for your pains and cares.’ She signed it ‘As you know, ever the same,† E.R.’59
The stresses on Elizabeth of expansion, as she engaged in her first foreign war, were mirrored by the stresses of containment endured by Mary under the stern Puritan regime instituted by Amyas Paulet. Neither queen was happy in these unaccustomed roles and both intended to escape them, Elizabeth through an initially secret treaty with Spain and Mary through another unrealistic but deadly conspiracy.
Mary’s fascination with coded messages, secrets, plots and lies was in large part an expression of a risk-taker’s need for excitement when confinement and constraint had closed off more conventional adventures. It was also a kind of revenge. As a clever and insightful spymaster, Walsingham recognized the Scottish queen’s peculiarly reckless temperament and hunger for action. The day before Christmas 1585 she was moved from Tutbury to Chartley, a great moated manor in Staffordshire. When a limited channel of clandestine communication was again made available to her on Walsingham’s orders, courtesy of the local brewer and a small wooden box, to conceal her letters, submerged in a keg of ale, he knew that Mary would be incapable of resisting any projected madcap scheme that came her way. Just one month later, having recovered after another collapse in her health, she was writing to the French ambassador, via the keg of ale, with enthusiastic plans for continuing her covert operations. Authoritatively suggesting he beware of spies and the bribery of his staff, Mary launched off into a discussion of methods of conveying secret messages, unaware that Walsingham and his agents were reading every word:
‘The plan of writing in alum is very common, and may easily be suspected and discovered, and therefore do not make use of it except in a case of necessity; and if you should use it, write … between the lines of such new books [sent in], writing always on the fourth, eighth, twelfth, and sixteenth leaf … And cause green ribbons to be attached to all the books, which you have caused to be written on in this manner.’ She also suggested writing on ‘white taffeta, lawn, or suchlike delicate cloth’, advising the ambassador to add an extra half yard to the bolt of cloth which had been inscribed so ‘this word “a half” may inform me that within there is something secretly hidden’. Another ingenious hiding place occurred to her; letters in cipher could replace the cork inner sole of the high-heeled slippers which seemed to be delivered frequently to her women and herself.60
With the protective fervour of the Bond of Association now made law, the legal framework was in place by the beginning of 1585 to convict Mary in the event of her being implicated, even passively, in a plot to overthrow Elizabeth and place herself on the English throne. All Elizabeth’s advisers knew that in order to get rid of Mary once and for all they would have to present Elizabeth with overwhelming evidence of her perfidy. Mary was never one to be passively part of anything dangerous or exciting when she could be wholeheartedly complicit and in the centre of things. So it was only a matter of management and time before Walsingham’s crafty surveillance would have her in his web.
December 1585 was a busy month. If the relationship of Elizabeth and Mary was seen as a marathon chess match, this marked the beginning of the endgame. Just as Leicester sailed as a knight in splendour for the Low Countries, Mary took up her residence in Chartley and Walsingham apprehended at Dover a dubious priest and envoy to Mary, one Gilbert Gifford. He was persuaded to join the opposition, to become a double agent now, intent on opening communications with the Scottish queen. Walsingham’s own queen was distracted by the movements of her unruly knight and not fully aware of the trap being set for Mary. With a motley crew of English refugees, religious fanatics, double agents and romantic young hotheads, a plan to rescue Mary was merged with a simultaneous plot to take Elizabeth. It was a two-pronged move on Elizabeth’s life and throne which would leave Mary vulnerable to a devastating checkmate, masterminded by Walsingham.
The catalyst was a priest, John Ballard, who sought out a young Catholic gentleman, Anthony Babington, a passionate supporter of Mary since he was a boy and had first had contact with her when she was held at Wingfield, near his family estates. Now, barely twenty-five and with the zealotry and arrogance of youth, he was determined to play the hero and rescue Mary. There was a new generation of idealistic and romantic Catholic youth who knew little of Mary’s previous history yet found the poignancy of her situation, her adherence to her faith, her long captivity by a heretic sovereign, affecting and arousing. The papal bull had sanctified if not encouraged the murder of Elizabeth and for young men wishing to serve their God and earn their spurs, the death of the bad queen and salvation of the good seemed to be a thrilling and righteous enterprise. When Ballard suggested that Spanish and French forces were ready and willing to invade, the plan became more grandiose and concrete.
Mary was liberated by her new channel for sending and receiving contraband messages and wrote in May to Mendoza, Philip II’s ambassador in Paris. She was in despair at her son’s continued Protestantism and desire to make his political alliances with Elizabeth rather than with herself, his own mother. The last shreds of hope were abandoned with the news that James had made formal his alliance with Elizabeth by accepting a pension of £4,000* a year. Certainly wishing to elicit support from the Spanish, and possibly seeking revenge on her ungrateful son whose desire to succeed to the English throne was as great as her own, Mary made this extraordinary offer. ‘I have resolved that, in case my son should not submit before my death to the Catholic religion … I will cede and make over, by will, to the King your master, my right to the succession to this [i.e. the English] crown, and beg him consequently to take me in future entirely under his protection, and also the affairs of this country … I again beg you most urgently that this should be kept secret, as if it becomes known it will cause the lo
ss of my dowry in France, and bring about an entire breach with my son in Scotland, and my total ruin and destruction in England.’61
Mary was right. This action risked all those calamities and yet she seemed compelled to seek the most perilous path along which to career, unconcerned with the consequences. Her dealings with the conspiracy that was brewing around her showed a recklessness so extreme it could be thought suicidal. Contemporaries, even, recognized a certain self-destructiveness in her obsessive plotting and collaboration with any hare-brained conspiracy that raced past her door. The writer and her contemporary, George Whetstone, suggested that in her conspiracy letters ‘there is nothing more manifest, than that her malice thirsteth to death of her own life’.62
Mary was highly conscious of her effect on others and aware that what she did had ramifications far beyond England’s parochial shores. She had a strong element of self-dramatization in her nature and a desire for transfiguration. She had already written to Elizabeth in 1585 that she would welcome the opportunity to sacrifice her life for her faith: ‘I am perfectly ready, with the grace of God, to bow my neck beneath the axe, that my blood should be shed before all Christendom; and I should esteem it the greatest happiness to be the first to do so. I do not say this out of any vain glory, while the danger is remote.’63 Although impatient and inexperienced in the chicanery of political life, she was astute enough in her directives to her ambassadors. To Beaton she wrote in code from Chartley that summer, ‘Endeavour by all means which you can to discover for certain the design of the King of Spain for revenging himself against this queen, and especially if it is for an enterprise in this country, or only thereby to counteract the attempt of the Earl of Leicester in Flanders, and of Drake upon the Indies; because upon that depends entirely the resolution which I and all the Catholics here have to take for our part.’64 If Philip’s avenging armies were aimed at England’s shores then she would take hope.
As what became known as the Babington Plot took root and grew, the assassination of Elizabeth became a central necessity. Babington’s inflated plans involved six assassins and a group of a hundred gentlemen ready simultaneously to release Mary from captivity. In July he wrote to the woman he hoped to make his future queen, explaining that he and his co-conspirators were ready for the coming invasion of Catholic power. Quite unaware of how insecure his letters were he stated boldly in his letter to Mary his treasonous intent: ‘For the despatch of the usurper [Elizabeth], from the obedience of whom we are by excommunication of her made free, there be six noble gentlemen, all my private friends, who for the zeal they bear to the Catholic cause and your Majesty’s service will undertake the tragical execution.’65
This was a gift to the patient Walsingham. Now he had to wait and see if Mary would incriminate herself in her reply. Mary’s eventual answer was everything they could have hoped. In a long letter and with a matter-of-fact tone she accepted all the details of Babington’s scheme, but added her own logistical concerns about the need for foreign aid and for substantial quantities of armed men and money. She asked him to assure his aforementioned gentlemen friends ‘of all that will be required from my part for the entire accomplishment of their good intentions’. Declaring that even should the plan to rescue her fail and she end up in the Tower, she would pray that Babington and his followers continue with their enterprise ‘pour l’honneur de Dieu’; she would die happy ‘when I shall know that you are delivered from the miserable servitude in which you [as English Catholics] are held captive’.66 It was a letter inviting foreign invasion and the utter overthrow of Elizabeth and the Protestant religion. Walsingham had his queen.
He wished to delay just a little longer in the hopes of uncovering more of the conspirators but Elizabeth, who had just recently been acquainted with the conspiracy, was shocked ‘that so dreadfull a Storm hung over her head, on the one side from her own Subjects at Home, and on the other side from Strangers abroad’.67 She commanded Walsingham to act immediately to round up what plotters he could, ‘lest [as she said herself] by not heeding and preventing the Danger while she might, she should seem rather to tempt God, than to trust in God’.68 Babington’s immediate fellowship of assassins were, like himself, very young, aged between twenty and twenty-five. On news of his apprehension on 14 August, the bells of London pealed out in triumph and celebratory bonfires lit his enforced journey back to the city.
While the conspirators were being arrested and interrogated, Mary was kept in ignorance of the dangerous turn in the tide of events. Her spirits were buoyant and when Paulet suggested a day’s stag hunting she agreed with alacrity. She was in such an optimistic frame of mind that, when a body of strangers on horseback galloped up over the horizon, for a moment she believed these were her young gentlemen conspirators come to rescue her and carry her away. Unexpectedly and terrifyingly she was confronted instead by Elizabeth’s commissioners with the brutal message that she was under arrest for treason.
Separated from her servants, Mary was conveyed to Tixall, a nearby manor. She was confused and distressed. She had been taken completely unawares and for a while was frightened that her life would be ended then and there. During her days of seclusion at Tixall it appears her thoughts became settled on her final plan. This was to be the last time that she was to express in public any fear or anxiety as to her fate. While she waited for news of how Elizabeth would proceed against her, Mary must have known that whatever happened next the tedium and stasis of her prolonged genteel captivity was at an end. Anything was preferable to a return to those leaden hours of inactivity and hopelessness.
In her absence from Chartley, Mary’s belongings were searched and incriminating letters and a variety of coding alphabets were found, ‘about 60 Indexes or Tables of private Cyphers and Characters’.69 In the careful inventory of her possessions were mentioned miniature portraits of Elizabeth herself, Mary’s son James and mother, Mary of Guise, her father James V and all the previous Scottish kings from whom she was descended, back to James II. Her dead Guise uncles who had had such a powerful influence on her life, the duke, and the Cardinal of Lorraine, were also represented, as was the present Duc de Guise, inheritor of that line of which Mary and her son were so proud.
Most distressing for Elizabeth amongst the discoveries were letters from some of her own noblemen swearing loyalty to her rival. Camden noted that Elizabeth bore these revelations in silence, disguising her true feelings, ‘according to that Motto which she used, Video & taceo, that is, I see, but say nothing’.70 The nobles themselves, however, in terror made great play as to their fealty to Elizabeth and abhorrence of Mary’s deeds. Disloyalty upset and disturbed Elizabeth, unpopularity frightened her. Her suppressed emotion was discharged explosively at the French ambassador, whom she had summoned to her presence. ‘Well, what do you think of your Queen of Scotland? With black ingratitude and treachery she tries to kill me who so often saved her life. Now I am certain of her evil intent, and it may be she will not have another opportunity to behave like this,’71 she raged.
The country was in a state of alarm. Rumours such as ‘10,000 Frenchmen had landed and captured three villages’ gathered potency with the telling; the sight of three ships near the Isle of Wight, and a haystack set alight by chance, meant all the warning beacons were torched to summon the country to arms. Lord Buckhurst, the local governor, found himself suddenly in charge of four to five thousand men, armed and ready to defend England from invasion. Mendoza reported to Philip with glee the extent of the country’s fear and confusion; eyewitnesses, just arrived in Paris, ‘are never tired of recounting it with infinite laughter’.72
Elizabeth’s vengeance was first of all directed at the young conspirators. Torture had wrung full confessions from them and death was the only punishment, but Elizabeth was adamant that it should be as cruel a death as was judicially possible. The death of a traitor was terrible enough if enacted to the letter, when the victim would be half hanged and then disembowelled still alive and sentient. Most executioners wait
ed until the prisoner was dead before proceeding with the savage sequel. On 20 September, Babington and six of his fellow conspirators were brought to the scaffold. With the immediacy of the eyewitness, Camden wrote that they were ‘hanged, cut down, their Privities cut off, their Bowels taken out before their Faces while they were alive, and their Bodies quartered, not without some note and touch of cruelty’.73 Elizabeth was reputedly taken aback at the cruelty, and sensitive to reports of the watching crowd’s pity and sense of shock, she commuted the sentence for the next batch of prisoners. They were hanged until they were dead, ‘by the Queen’s express Command’, and then cut down and quartered.
But what to do with Mary herself? By the confessions of these men and the freely given evidence of her two secretaries who had transcribed their mistress’s incriminating letters, her complicity in the plot was clear enough to all. A trial for treason, invoking the newly ratified Act of Association, seemed the next logical step. There was uneasiness even then, however, among some councillors about the means used to entrap the Queen of Scots; others were wary of the presumption of subjects sitting in judgement on a divinely ordained monarch. But these were mere cavils. To the majority of Elizabeth’s councillors this was not the time to quibble when such gross intentions had been revealed. They were not about to allow the queen to evade her duty to safeguard herself, her people and her realm, by pleading some metaphysical nicety be respected. They were determined that this time the Queen of Scots must die. All they needed now was for Elizabeth to agree.
Elizabeth had long recognized how equivocation and indecisiveness had been both her weakness and her strength; now she could procrastinate no longer. Years before she had told a French ambassador: ‘I know that it is true I have the imperfection of being longer than necessary in coming to a conclusion in these deliberations – a fault that has caused me much injury in the past … it is true the world was made in six days, but it was by God, to whose power the infirmity of men is not to be compared.’74