by John Guy
4. Armada of the Soul
In October 1584, a bare two weeks after Hakluyt had presented his dossier and nine days after the first of the crucial Privy Council meetings on the crisis in the Netherlands, Elizabeth faced yet another dilemma. It all started when Burghley and his fellow councillors put their signatures and seals to a revolutionary document called ‘The Instrument of an Association for the Preservation of Her Majesty’s Royal Person’, otherwise known as the Bond of Association. The signatories solemnly swore to take ‘the uttermost revenge’ on all persons, including royalty, who were found to have conspired or colluded in an attempt (successful or otherwise) on the queen’s life, and ‘to prosecute such person or persons to the death’. Retribution was to be exacted on the spot. No ‘pretended successor by whom or for whom [my emphasis] any such detestable act shall be attempted or committed’ was to be spared. This clause was at once far reaching and arbitrary, as it promised to extend the long arm of retribution to all living heirs and successors of the intended beneficiary. Thus, if anyone were to threaten Elizabeth’s life in the interests of the Stuart succession, both Mary and James VI could now be executed, whether privy to the attempt or not.1
From the outset, Burghley’s aim was to bypass existing chains of command. And that included Elizabeth. The Bond was unusual because those who signed it declared themselves to be autonomous agents of the state, empowered to act on its behalf.2 They protested their loyalty to the queen, but also asserted their loyalty to one another and to the Protestant cause. They had, in effect, bound themselves to do whatever they could to ensure that England’s next ruler would be a Protestant, and not the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots.
All this was as abhorrent to Elizabeth as it would have been to her father. As she saw it, not only was it lynch law, it struck at the very heart of the principle of God-appointed monarchy, which she held dear and was determined to uphold. When Parliament met in November, a battle of wills ensued. Burghley was already drafting radical constitutional provisions with a view to empowering a ‘Council of State’ or a ‘Great’ or ‘Grand Council’ to choose Elizabeth’s successor in conjunction with Parliament should she suddenly die or be assassinated, with the Council acting in the name of the Protestant religion so as to exclude the possibility of a future Catholic monarch.3
Elizabeth was determined to thwart him. The Act for the Queen’s Surety, in the form in which she assented to it in Parliament in March 1585, blunted the effects of the Bond by providing that any claimant or pretender to the throne (meaning Mary) who stood to benefit from a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, or anyone colluding in an invasion, rebellion or attempt on her life, would be tried by a special commission of at least twenty-four privy councillors and members of the House of Lords, appointed by the queen and assisted by judges of her choosing. These commissioners were empowered to judge whether this claimant or pretender should be barred from the succession, but they were not to publish a guilty verdict. If such a verdict were to be reached, nothing could be done until due ‘declaration’ of the decision had been ‘made and published by Her Majesty’s proclamation under the Great Seal of England’. Only then, ‘by virtue of this Act and Her Majesty’s direction in that behalf’, might revenge be exacted in keeping with the terms of the Bond.
The queen believed she had turned the tables on Burghley, limiting the potential for lynch law and recovering sufficient control to neutralize the most subversive effects of the Bond. But was she right?4
• • •
A month or so before the Bond, Mary Queen of Scots had been moved from the Earl of Shrewsbury’s custody at Chatsworth and Sheffield, where she had largely been held for the past fifteen years, and transferred to that of the veteran Sir Ralph Sadler, who as a young ambassador to Edinburgh in the early 1540s had dandled the infant Mary on his knees. This was an unenviable duty: for the next five months, Sadler and his son-in-law John Somers would come under intense scrutiny, trapped between Elizabeth, who challenged every expense they incurred, however unavoidable, and Mary, who complained incessantly about her living conditions. Sadler held Mary temporarily at Wingfield Manor in Derbyshire before taking her to the more secure Tutbury Castle, a dilapidated motte-and-bailey fortress in nearby Staffordshire, notorious for its damp and draughty rooms and stinking drains. ‘Use but old trust and new diligence’ was the blunt warning that Elizabeth gave him on informing him that Mary’s household was to occupy Tutbury.5
In a newly discovered and quite remarkable letter dictated shortly after the Bond was signed, Elizabeth opened her mind, if not her heart, to the woman who, in the 1560s, she had considered to have the best possible claim to succeed her by hereditary right.6 Mary’s flight across the Solway Firth to England in 1568 had presented the English queen with a stark choice. Should she protect her Catholic cousin or treat her as a threat? By October 1584, the answer was clear: Mary had become a dangerous threat, as Burghley had always said she would, chiefly through the actions of her Guise relatives.
For some reason, Elizabeth’s letter and some forty other documents concerning this period of Mary’s captivity were removed from the main body of the Sadler family papers in 1762 and then locked away in private hands until 2010, when they unexpectedly reappeared in a London saleroom.7 When examined prior to the auction, some pieces of sewing thread could still be seen attached to them, indicating where they had been ripped out of an earlier bound volume. The cache included eight letters from Burghley and nineteen from Walsingham. Many vividly illustrate Walsingham’s obsession with security: Sadler was given strict instructions about the restraint to be placed on his charge. She was, for example, ‘not permitted to ride far abroad but only suffered [to go] on foot or in a coach to take the air and use some such exercise near the house where she shall lie’.
The most important letter, which Elizabeth signed with her customary flourish, is extraordinary for the insight it gives into the state of the complex relationship between the two queens at the time. Curiously, it was addressed to Sadler, who was to read all of it aloud to Mary. This indirect method of communication was made necessary, Elizabeth explained, ‘through a vow heretofore made not to write unto her with our own hand until we might receive better satisfaction by effect from her to our contentment than heretofore we have done’.
Speaking her mind with rare candour and barely pausing for breath, let alone grammar or punctuation, Elizabeth levelled sharp criticism against Mary, who had pleaded that their mutual ‘jealousy and mislike’ should be set aside. Ever since Burghley had cancelled a rendezvous between the ‘sister’ queens planned for August or September 1562, following the massacre of a congregation of Huguenots in a barn at Wassy, near Joinville, in the heart of Guise territory, Mary had maintained that the two ‘British’ queens would be able to settle their differences woman to woman – if only they could meet. To such a plea, Elizabeth wished Sadler to give this reply:
We wish she had been as careful for the time past to have avoided the cause and ground by her given of the just jealousy by us conceived as she now sheweth to mislike of the effects that the same hath (by due desert) bred towards her. For she herself knoweth (wherein we appeal unto her own conscience) how great contentment and liking we had for a time of her friendship, which as we then esteemed as a singular and extraordinary blessing of God to have one so nearly tied unto us in blood and neighbourhood, so greatly affected towards us as we then conceived, so are we now as much grieved to behold the alteration and interruption thereof, taking no pleasure to look back on the causes that have bred so unpleasant effects which we wish that either they had never been, or at the least we could never remember, and that she were as innocent therein as she laboureth greatly to bear both us and the world in hand that she is.8
Following these cutting remarks with an assurance that her goodwill was not wholly extinguished, despite Mary’s ‘sundry hard and dangerous courses held towards us’, Elizabeth indicated that, should Mary seek a last-minute settlem
ent, she might send one of her secretaries to attend her at Court. The reality is that she was genuinely torn: outwardly aloof but inwardly longing as much as her Scottish cousin for reconciliation so that normal queenly relations could resume between them. Should Mary wish to extend an olive branch, she confided to Sadler, she would consider any proposals she might have. And they would be welcomed.
A fresh start, however, would be difficult. After Mary’s enemies in Scotland had forced her to abdicate in 1567, they appointed a regent to rule in the name of her young son, and her repeated proposals that Elizabeth should restore her to her throne by whatever means, perhaps jointly with James, had been strenuously blocked by Burghley. That Mary continued to insist on a personal interview as the precondition of reconciliation did not help. And yet there was more than a hint of hypocrisy in Elizabeth’s stance, for she was denying her Scottish cousin what she had once asked for herself in uncomfortably similar circumstances. In 1554, facing arrest on suspicion of colluding in Wyatt’s rebellion, she had appealed for a face-to-face meeting with her half-sister Mary Tudor before she was led away to the Tower. Beseeching her to ‘take some better way with me than to make me condemned in all men’s sight afore my desert known’, Elizabeth had begged to be granted an interview so that she might ‘answer afore yourself and not suffer me to trust your councillors – yea, and that afore I go to the Tower (if it be possible), if not afore I be further condemned’.9
• • •
In April 1585, Sadler was summarily relieved of his duties. He had allowed Mary to ride out hawking with insufficient supervision and had even (as the newly discovered documents reveal) given her permission during a rainstorm to make an unauthorized stop in the town of Derby at a widow’s house, where she had spoken animatedly to several inhabitants.10 Closely questioned by Burghley, Sadler gave his own account of the incident:
Her entertainment to the women of Derby was in this sort. In the hall of the widow’s house was the good wife with 3 or 4 at the most of her neighbours, whom she saluted with a beck [nod] with her head and kissed her hostess and none other, saying that she was come thither to trouble her and that she was a widow too, and so trusted they should agree well enough together having no husband to trouble them.11
Elizabeth was not amused, so instead Mary was put in the custody of Sir Amyas Paulet, a zealous Calvinist who had no time for what he called ‘foolish pity’, and taken to Chartley in Staffordshire, a manor house more comfortable than Tutbury but considerably more secure. Severe and uncompromising, Paulet was Walsingham’s trusted ally. As another former ambassador in Paris, he had come into contact with several of Mary’s agents, about whose malice he had never entertained the slightest doubts. A fervent supporter of the Huguenots and the Dutch rebels, Paulet was yoked to Walsingham in a concerted effort to bring Mary down.
They had little over a year to wait. In July 1586, four months before Leicester was summoned home from the Netherlands, Walsingham began unravelling the threads of what at first seemed to be one of the most menacing plots so far to assassinate the queen. Under the notional leadership of a rich, gullible, young Catholic dilettante named Anthony Babington, the conspirators aimed to send a troop of cavalry to Chartley to liberate Mary while she was out riding with her guards to take the air. At the same time, six gentlemen – ‘all my private friends’, as Babington helpfully explained in a highly compromising letter to Mary – would set out for the Court to kill Elizabeth.12
A dangerous plot existed, but the conspirators fell into a trap when, at a very early stage in their planning, they made the fateful mistake of welcoming as their postman a dubious seminary drop-out who was one of Walsingham’s agents. The result was that all their and Mary’s correspondence was delivered straight to Walsingham’s assistant, the expert cryptographer Thomas Phelippes. When Babington got cold feet and threatened to pull out, Walsingham used his agents provocateurs to revive the plot, so as to secure the evidence he needed to put Mary on trial according to the Act for the Queen’s Surety. In other words, rather than arresting Babington and his associates so as to nip the plot in the bud as soon as he learned of it, Walsingham secretly nurtured the conspiracy, almost to its fatal conclusion, in an extraordinary piece of puppetry.
Mary sealed her fate when she dictated to her two faithful secretaries, Claude Nau and Gilbert Curle, a ciphered reply to Babington in the course of which she asked him, ‘By what means do the six gentlemen deliberate to proceed?’ This was taken to mean that she had specifically endorsed the part of the conspiracy which sought to kill Elizabeth. She was entirely unaware that her letter would immediately be intercepted and passed to Thomas Phelippes.
A euphoric Phelippes nicknamed this the ‘bloody letter’, but instead of arresting Babington even at this advanced stage of the plot, Walsingham and Phelippes decided to doctor the letter and send it on to Babington in the hope of securing more incriminating evidence. The main text was left alone, but Phelippes added a postscript, using an identical cipher: a blatant and audacious forgery of which he cheekily left his draft in the archives.13 It was a clumsy subterfuge: an attempt to entice Babington to disclose the ‘names and qualities’ of the ‘six gentlemen’ and their accomplices. And it conspicuously failed, as Babington’s suspicions were aroused: he burned the letter and fled. Ten days later, he was caught hiding in a barn with his hair cropped short and his face grimed to make him look like a farm worker.14
When Walsingham handed Elizabeth his file on the plot, she stalled. Along with Burghley, she was concerned that – with the original of the ‘bloody letter’ destroyed for ever – the evidence would be incomplete. Walsingham’s ingenious solution was to arrest Mary’s secretaries. Detaining them at his house in Seething Lane in London, he laid before them a brilliant forgery: an accurately ciphered reconstruction by Phelippes of the missing ‘bloody letter’ without the postscript. Pressed to the limit of their physical and mental endurance by Burghley during a series of long interrogations, Nau and Curle confessed that this was indeed the letter to Babington which Mary had dictated to them. Next, Walsingham either put a transcript of the ‘bloody letter’ in front of Babington or asked him to confirm from memory what it said. Without further ado, Babington authenticated the text, although his version, embarrassingly, included the forged postscript.15
Babington was hanged in a glare of publicity in September 1586, after which Elizabeth gave all of his now-confiscated lands to Ralegh, to help him pay his debts after the failure of his Roanoke expedition.16 She knew it would be only a matter of time before Burghley pressed her to name the commissioners who would hear the evidence against Mary. By giving her assent in Parliament to the Act for the Queen’s Surety she had boxed herself in: the law would have to take its course. Weighing strongly on her mind when at last she agreed to name commissioners was her belief that, even if they were to come up with a ‘guilty’ verdict, she could refuse to proclaim their sentence in keeping with the terms of the Act.
She knew that one regicide by its very nature encourages another, and that a regicide authorized by a law made by Parliament would alter the future of the monarchy in the British Isles for ever. It would tend to make the ruler accountable to Parliament, creating the impression that kings could be proclaimed or deposed by the people’s elected representatives, and so diminishing for ever what Shakespeare’s Hamlet called the ‘divinity [that] doth hedge a king’.17
• • •
Mary was put on trial in the Great Hall at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire between 12 and 15 October 1586, watched by the local gentry. She took part only under voluble protest and was visibly shaken as, piece by piece, the case against her took shape. When she realized that all of her secret correspondence had been intercepted, she could no longer contain her emotions. She burst into tears and left the hall on the final day before the hearings were over. But despite her distress, she kept her wits about her, taxing Walsingham for the uncanny perfection of his proofs. ‘It was an
easy matter’, she said, ‘to counterfeit the ciphers and characters of others.’ She was not fooled by Walsingham’s methods, even if she did not know precisely what he had done in the business of the forged postscript.18
The commissioners were asked to reconvene on the 25th at Westminster, in the Star Chamber, where the evidence was reviewed again in full. Mary was found guilty in her absence. But when Burghley called upon Elizabeth to proclaim the verdict under the Great Seal in keeping with the terms of the Act for the Queen’s Surety, she was numbed at the prospect of attenuating the ideal of monarchy by killing Mary, and refused. In her eyes, a queen, even one deposed by her own subjects or Parliament, was still a queen. Once she had been anointed and crowned, nothing could take that inviolable status from her.
On 4 December, under intense pressure from Burghley, Elizabeth grudgingly allowed the guilty sentence to be sealed and proclaimed. Now, she struggled to escape a fresh dilemma she had herself largely created. By insisting in Parliament on the clause of the Act that governed how revenge might be exacted against a guilty party (‘by virtue of this Act and Her Majesty’s direction in that behalf’), she had made a rod for her own back. Had she fulfilled all of her obligations under the Act by appointing commissioners and then sealing and proclaiming their sentence, after which anyone who had subscribed to the Bond might lawfully kill Mary? Or would she physically have to sign her cousin’s death warrant, the thing she most dreaded? After the appalling revelations of the Babington Plot, she finally wished Mary dead, but she wanted her to be quietly smothered by a private citizen, thereby relieving her of the responsibility of having her killed.
Elizabeth gave Walsingham brutally short shrift for informing her that she would now need to sign Mary’s death warrant. Twelve days after the guilty sentence was sealed and proclaimed, he left London in dismay, telling Burghley: ‘Her Majesty’s unkind dealing towards me hath so wounded me as I would take no comfort to stay there.’19 Things were no better after Christmas, when he reported himself sick. ‘The grief of my mind’, he declared, ‘hath thrown me into a dangerous disease.’ Dr Bailey – one of Elizabeth’s personal physicians, who ordered her monthly supply of unguents and medicines from her apothecaries – would confirm this.20