Although Mary remained in prison and Elizabeth did not fulfil her threats to go to war on her behalf, there can be no doubt that the Queen of England’s intervention had saved the Queen of Scots’ life. Then, less than a year later, the inevitable happened. Mary, resourceful, brave and optimistic as ever, escaped from Lochleven Castle. On 13 May she and her supporters were routed at the battle of Langside and three days later, on 16 May 1568, she landed on the coast of Cumberland, a refugee with nothing but the clothes she stood up in. ‘I fear’, wrote Archbishop Parker prophetically, ‘that our good Queen hath the wolf by the ears.’
According to the French and Spanish ambassadors, Elizabeth’s first, generous impulse was to send for Mary and welcome her as an honoured guest, but the Council quickly over-ruled their mistress’s instinctive desire to show solidarity with her sister Queen. ‘Although these people are glad enough to have her in their hands’, wrote the Spanish ambassador, ‘they have many things to consider. It they keep her as in prison, it will probably scandalize all neighbouring princes, and if she remain free and able to communicate with her friends, great suspicions will be aroused. In any case’, added Guzman de Silva with studied understatement, ‘it is certain that two women will not agree very long.’
The English Council, painfully aware of the many things they had to consider, at once ‘entered into serious deliberation’ as to what should be done with the Queen of Scots. ‘If she were detained in England’, says William Camden, ‘they reasoned lest she (who was as it were the very pith and marrow of sweet eloquence) might draw many daily to her part which favoured her title to the crown of England, who would kindle the coals of her ambition and leave nothing unassayed whereby they might set the crown upon her head.’ If she were allowed to return to France, her powerful kinsmen there would inevitably stir up a hornets’ nest of faction in both Scotland and England. For Elizabeth to attempt to restore the Queen of Scots to her throne by force would be to invite civil war in Scotland, a rupture of the precious and still none too secure ‘amity’ with that country, and an almost certain revival in some form of the old France Scottish alliance which had been the cause of so much trouble and bloodshed in the past. On the other hand, it had to be remembered that Mary was one of Elizabeth’s closest relatives and that she had sought refuge in England trusting in her cousin’s promises of protection and support. To hand her back to men who would not hesitate to kill her, was equally unthinkable.
At first sight the problem looked insoluble - especially as Mary’s attitude made it plain that she was unlikely to agree to any sort of compromise. Elizabeth’s old and trusted friend, Francis Knollys, who had been sent up to take charge of the situation at Carlisle, where the Queen of Scots was now holding court, found her full of an articulate sense of grievance. ‘She showeth a great desire to be avenged of her enemies’, he wrote on 11 June. ‘The thing that most she thirsteth after is victory, and it seemeth to be indifferent to her to have her enemies diminished either by the sword of her friends, or by the liberal promises and rewards of her purse, or by division and quarrels raised among themselves: so that for victory’s sake pain and peril seemeth pleasant to her: and in respect of victory, wealth and all things seemeth to her contemptible and vile. Now what is to be done with such a lady and princess?’ enquired Francis Knollys, with a certain rhetorical flourish, of his friend William Cecil.
What indeed? Mary was told that Elizabeth could not receive her while she remained under suspicion of having been an accessory before the fact of Darnley’s murder. Mary demanded to be allowed to justify herself before Elizabeth in person, and Elizabeth wrote: ‘O Madam, there is no creature living who wishes to hear such a declaration more than I, or will more readily lend her ears to any answer that will acquit your honour.’ The Queen of England offered to mediate in the dispute between the Queen of Scots and her rebellious subjects, but since neither side would budge an inch from their previously entrenched positions the enquiry, held at York and Westminster, got nowhere. In the end, the Earl of Moray went back to Scotland as regent for the infant King James and Mary stayed in England. She was placed in the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury and was to spend the next sixteen years in one or other of that much-tried nobleman’s mansions in the North Midlands. It was, of course, a thoroughly unsatisfactory situation - expensive and embarrassing for the Queen of England, frustrating and humiliating for the Queen of Scots. Elizabeth continued with patient pertinacity to try and find some formula by which Mary could be restored peacefully to her own throne, but negotiations always foundered on the ineradicable distrust between the cousins, on the impossibility of devising adequate safeguards against Mary’s subsequent repudiation of any undertakings given under duress.
For England the consequences of nourishing that ‘bosom serpent’, the de facto Catholic heir presumptive, soon became only too apparent, as Mary’s restless I energy found its outlet in endless, dangerous and futile intrigues. ‘Alas, poor fool!’ exclaimed the King of France, ‘she will never cease until they cut off her head.’ By the mid-158os the revelations of the Ridolfi Plot, the Throckmorton Plot (Francis not Nicholas), the Parry Plot and the Babington Plot, together with an ever-darkening international scene and the increasing bitterness of the ideological conflict between Catholic and Protestant had all combined to bring the problem of the Queen of Scots to a festering head. As Francis Walsingham had put it, more than ten years earlier - ‘So long as that devilish woman lives, neither her Majesty must make account to continue in quiet possession of her crown, nor her faithful servants assure themselves of safety of their lives.’
By 1586, Mary’s guilt or innocence of complicity in the various Catholic conspiracies to depose the heretical Queen of England no longer had any real relevance. Guilty or innocent, the Protestant state, feeling itself threatened from within and without, could no longer contain her. It was as simple as that. Elizabeth had fought desperately to postpone the inevitable decision and when at last it had to be made, it caused her real and acute distress. Her extreme, apparently perverse reluctance to authorize the execution of her deadliest enemy - even after she had been presented with enough evidence to convince any reasonable person that Mary was not only prepared to seize her throne but to connive at her own assassination -is, on the face of it, difficult to understand. So difficult, in fact, that it has often been dismissed as mere play-acting. Perhaps there was some play-acting. Elizabeth always was a consummate actress, ‘a princess who can act any part she pleases’, and, of course, she knew she would be presenting the Catholic world with a first-rate propaganda weapon. ‘What will they not now say’, she exclaimed, ‘when it shall be spread that for the safety of her life a maiden Queen could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman!’
Elizabeth had always suffered from a most un-Tudor-like squeamishness when it came to spilling the blood of her kinsfolk, but she told Parliament in November 1586: ‘I am not so void of judgement as not to see mine own peril, nor yet so ignorant as not to know it were in nature a foolish course to cherish a sword to cut mine own throat.’ And yet, if she could have found a way of keeping Mary alive, even at that eleventh hour, she would undoubtedly have done so. If it had not been for Elizabeth, Mary would almost certainly have died at the hands of her own subjects in 1567. If it had not been for Elizabeth, she would quite certainly have gone to the scaffold with the Duke of Norfolk in 1572. So why was the Queen of England, that most practical of rulers, so anxious to preserve the woman she had herself recently described as a ‘wicked murderess’?
There were sound practical reasons. For although Mary had come to represent such an intolerable threat to England’s internal security, she also, ironically enough, remained England’s best protection against attack from abroad. While she lived, Philip of Spain was likely to go on hesitating before launching his much-heralded Sacred Enterprise against the Protestant island and its anathematized Queen. The success of the Enterprise might well store up treasure in heaven for the King of Spain
, but he would still be lavishing earthly treasure (always in painfully short supply) on elevating the half-French Mary Stuart to the English throne - and that elevation would sooner or later inevitably result in the close Anglo-French alliance which for generations the Hapsburgs had laboured to prevent. Once Mary was dead, the situation would look different to a King who could, after all, prove his own remote descent from John of Gaunt.
But more than the political considerations, more than her inherent dread of committing herself to any irreversible course of action, more than natural compassion for her close kinswoman and sister Queen, that aspect of Mary’s end which upset Elizabeth most and which surely lay beneath her violent, hysterical reaction after the deed had been done, was the superstitious revulsion of one who has violated a sacred mystery. To one of Elizabeth’s heredity and upbringing, there was something unspeakably atrocious in the act of subjecting God’s anointed to the process of earthly trial and judicial executioner. It was the ultimate taboo. It was also setting a grimly dangerous precedent.
Once Mary had gone, the problem of the English succession finally lost its urgency. The Suffolk line had withered away. Margaret Lennox was dead and so was her younger son, Charles; although he had left a daughter, Arbella, the last of those forlorn female descendants of Henry VII whose fate, in the next century, was to closely mirror that of the unfortunate Katherine Grey. Mary Stuart’s son, James, was a man of twenty when his mother died and while Elizabeth, sticking rigidly to her principles, never openly acknowledged him as her heir, it was now generally and tacitly recognized that he would in due time succeed the ageing Queen of England. For Elizabeth, incredibly, was beginning to grow old. In the climactic year of 1588 she celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of her accession. Not that the Queen was prepared to make any concessions to the passage of time, and it would have been as much as anyone’s place was worth to have reminded her of it. Her health remained excellent and she was as energetic as ever, dancing six or seven galliards in a morning and still riding and hunting tirelessly. But, all the same, time was passing and 1588 brought Elizabeth private sorrow as well as public triumph.
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had been given command of the citizen army hastily recruited to resist the threatened Spanish landing and it was he who walked bare-headed at the Queen’s bridle hand when she reviewed her troops during the famous visit to Tilbury. It was to be the last time he escorted her in public, so it was fitting that it should have been the most glorious occasion of all. In the middle of August, while the Invincible Armada was being beaten up the North Sea, Robert broke camp and returned to London - a stout, balding, red-faced man in his mid-fifties. He was not at all well, the past few months had been an appalling strain, and he had promised himself a short holiday. He spent a few quiet days with the Queen, dining with her every day, and then left for the country, intending to take the waters at Buxton. On the way he sent Elizabeth an affectionate little note from Rycote Manor, home of her old friends the Norris family, where they had often stayed together in the past. He wanted to know how his gracious lady was - she had been suffering a few twinges lately - ‘it being the chiefest thing in this world I do pray for, that she should have good health and long life.’ As for his own poor case, he wrote, ‘I continue still your medicine and find it amends much better than with any other thing that hath been given me. Thus hoping to find a perfect cure at the bath, I humbly kiss your foot. From your old lodging at Rycott this Thursday morning, ready to take my journey...’ He got as far as Cornbury, a few miles from Oxford, and there, on 4 September, he died, possibly from cancer of the stomach.
In the general excitement which followed the defeat of the Armada, the disappearance of this great landmark of the Elizabethan scene passed unmourned and almost unnoticed. At a time when her people expected to see her bathed in the radiance of victory, the Queen could not afford the luxury of giving way to her grief, but she took that note scribbled at Rycote and put it away in a little coffer which she kept by her bed. Across the back she had written ‘His last letter’. Although her relations with Robert had never been quite the same since his second marriage to the widowed Countess of Essex, he was still her brother and best friend’, the man who had been an essential part of her life for almost as long as she could remember. His death, too, tore the first real gap in the ranks of that hand-picked little coterie of intimates whom the Queen honoured with pet names and who ruled England under her supervision.
Robert had been her ‘Eyes’. Francis Walsingham, who died in 1590, was ‘the Moor’ - a reference to his dark colouring. Elizabeth had never really liked Walsingham, he was too much of a left-wing Puritan for her taste, but he had been a faithful and valued servant and he, too, had been around for a long time. Christopher Hatton, ‘Mutton’ or ‘Bellwether’, went in 1591 and Francis Knollys in 1597, but the most irreparable loss came in August 1598 with the death of old William Cecil, Lord Burghley. The Queen missed her ‘Spirit’ bitterly. She would often speak of him with tears and turn her face aside when his name was mentioned. Their partnership had lasted for forty years and to Elizabeth its ending meant a break with the past more complete than anything that had gone before. So many of her old friends had vanished now - even her old enemy, Philip of Spain, died that autumn - and the Queen found the new generation growing up around her difficult to understand and to work with. It is true she had Robert Cecil, carefully groomed by his father to take his father’s place, but it was not the same thing. There was never quite the same trust and confidence between them. Elizabeth had problems, too, with Robert Dudley’s step-son, the young Earl of Essex, whom she was trying hard to train up to take Robert’s place at Court. But Essex proved untameable and early in 1601 he paid the price of his paranoia to the executioner on Tower Hill. The Queen sorrowed for the death of a brilliant and beautiful young man, but she never hesitated over its necessity. Essex had committed the unforgivable sin of attempting to challenge the authority of the crown by violence; and when, nearly forty years before, the young Elizabeth Tudor had told William Maitland that as long as she lived she would be Queen of England, she had meant exactly what she said.
The last decade of the Queen’s reign was overshadowed by the troubles in Ireland, by the protracted and inconclusive war with Spain, by faction within the government and by increasing monetary problems. But although the Queen might be growing old - she was well into her sixties now - she remained in full possession of her faculties and in full command of the political situation both at home and abroad. In December 1597 a French diplomat, Andre de Maisse, came over to London on a special mission from Henri IV and has left an unforgettable picture of Elizabeth as she was.
At his first audience, de Maisse found the Queen en déshabillé. A boil on her face had made her feel wretched she told him and, although she apologized for receiving him in her nightgown, the ambassador evidently got the impression of a somewhat outlandish old lady, perpetually fidgeting about and with a disconcerting habit of opening the front of her robe ‘as if she was too hot’, so that he could see the whole of her bosom. Elizabeth was very affable and ordered a stool to be brought for de Maisse but, he wrote, ‘all the time she spoke she would often rise from her chair and appear to be very impatient with what I was saying. She would complain that the fire was hurting her eyes, though there was a great screen before it and she six or seven feet away; yet did she give orders to have it extinguished, making them bring water to pour upon it.’
When de Maisse saw the Queen again a week later, she was feeling better and was rather more conventionally dressed. All the same, he noticed that ‘when she raises her head, she has a trick of putting both hands on her gown and opening it so that all her belly can be seen.’ In the course of conversation Elizabeth often referred to herself as ‘foolish and old’, saying she was sorry de Maisse, who had met so many wise men and great princes, should at length come to see a poor woman and foolish. The ambassador was not deceived by this kind of tal
k and remarked that the Queen liked to speak slightingly of her intelligence *so that she may give occasion to commend her’. She was pleased when he praised her judgement and prudence, but said modestly ‘that it was but natural that she should have some knowledge of the affairs of the world, being called thereto so young, and having worn that crown these forty years.’ ‘When anyone speaks of her beauty’, wrote de Maisse, ‘she says that she was never beautiful, although she had that reputation thirty years ago. Nevertheless, she speaks of her beauty as often as she can.’
Altogether Elizabeth and de Maisse had about half a dozen interviews. On Christmas Eve the Queen was ‘in very good humour and gay’. De Maisse presented one of his entourage, ‘the secretary Phillips’, and describes how, when Phillips knelt before her, the Queen began to take him by the hair and made him rise and pretended to give him a box on the ears. ‘It is a strange thing’, wrote the ambassador, ‘to see how lively she is in body and mind and nimble in everything she does.’ Elizabeth had obviously taken to de Maisse and talked to him freely on a wide range of subjects, reminiscing and telling him ‘tales of many kinds’. ‘Whilst I was treating with her in the matter of my charge’, he recorded in his journal, ‘she would often make such digressions, either expressly to gain time...or because it is her natural way. Then would she excuse herself, saying, “Master Ambassador, you will say of the tales that I am telling you that they are mere gullery. See what it is to have to do with old women such as I am.” But de Maisse thought that apart from her face, which looked ‘very aged’, and her teeth, which were bad, it would not be possible ‘to see a woman of so fine and vigorous disposition both in mind and body.’ She knew all the ancient histories, he wrote, and ‘one can say nothing to her on which she will not make some apt comment.’ In fact, despite her various little oddities, the ambassador had come to feel an enormous respect for the Queen. She is a very great princess who knows everything’ was his considered judgement.
The House of Tudor Page 37