by John Guy
Walsingham’s illness was real. Ever since his time as ambassador to Paris in the early 1570s, he had suffered under stress from extremely painful, recurring urinary infections. Without the benefit of modern antibiotics, he had no alternative but, literally, to sweat it out.
William Davison, now back from the Netherlands and sworn in as Elizabeth’s secretary and a privy councillor, advised Burghley that the queen would never sign Mary’s death warrant ‘lest extreme fear compel her’.21 Resorting to a method he had used earlier in her reign when Elizabeth had failed to come around to his point of view, Burghley now fostered a false rumour that Spanish troops had landed in Wales, and briefed the queen accordingly. He and Walsingham then called on the newly appointed French ambassador, Guillaume de l’Aubespine, Baron de Châteauneuf, at his house in Bishopsgate Street, in the company of Leicester and Hatton. They effectively blackmailed him into conspiring with them to ‘discover’ a fresh assassination plot which was, in reality, two years old and had amounted to very little.22 Centring on a shady character named Michael Moody, a servant of Sir Edward Stafford, the conspirators had allegedly talked of planting barrels of gunpowder in the room beneath Elizabeth’s Bedchamber to blow her up, or of poisoning her stirrup or shoe. A beleaguered Châteauneuf was forced to connive in this deceit, as Henry III was by this time so threatened by the forces of the Duke of Guise encircling him in Paris that he felt he could not afford to jeopardize his accord with England.23
Told by Burghley to double the number of her bodyguards, Elizabeth momentarily caved in. On Wednesday, 1 February 1587, while at Greenwich Palace, she sent for Davison and asked him to bring with him the copy of Mary’s death warrant Burghley had carefully drafted some weeks before, in which he called for speedy justice against a woman who was an ‘undoubted danger’ to Elizabeth and the ‘public state of this realm, as well for the cause of the Gospel and the true religion of Christ’.24 When he arrived, she called for pen and ink, and signed. She then ordered Davison not to let the document out of his possession or to show it to anyone before he had it sealed by the Lord Chancellor. Next, she made a joke. Walsingham was still recovering in bed in Seething Lane and she wryly told Davison he should call on him and tell him she had at last signed the death warrant – ‘because the “grief” thereof would grow near to kill him outright’.25
Elizabeth and Walsingham shared a strong line in sardonic humour. The idea that he would die of grief at Mary’s death was grimly ironic. Except that Elizabeth did not jest in vain. She had a far more lethal intent. For next she instructed Davison to order Walsingham to write a letter in his own name to Mary’s custodian, Amyas Paulet, demanding that he do away with his prisoner. It was a desperate move. Paulet was to act as a private citizen, ‘prosecuting’ the Scottish queen ‘to the death’ without a warrant and taking the ‘uttermost revenge’ in his capacity as a signatory to the Bond of Association – this with all the risk of reprisal, not least after the event from Elizabeth herself.26 Wisely, Paulet refused, calling the plan ‘dishonourable and dangerous’ and rightly foreseeing that Elizabeth would soon be looking for scapegoats.
• • •
Soon after visiting Walsingham, Davison made what he later realized was a catastrophic mistake. Although Elizabeth had ordered him not to allow the signed death warrant out of his possession or to show it to anyone, he let Burghley and Leicester see it. Immediately grasping its momentous significance, they ordered him to have it sealed that very afternoon.
Shortly after ten o’clock the next morning, however, Elizabeth sent Davison a message. If, she said, the warrant had not yet been sealed, he should delay the process. Deeply uneasy, he hurried to the Privy Chamber to warn her that it had been sealed already. She muttered something barely audible about his ‘unseemly haste’, and then (according to Davison) said she wished to be ‘no more troubled with the matter’.
Davison was too experienced not to see the danger signals. He had the sealed warrant in his possession, but what was he to do with it? He quickly shared his doubts with Hatton, who in turn consulted Burghley. Acting on his own initiative, the queen’s chief minister questioned Davison intently, then convened a clandestine meeting of ten privy councillors in his private lodgings for the next day. Before parting with Davison, Burghley ordered him to hand over the sealed warrant for safekeeping. He did.
With the death warrant signed and sealed and now safely in his possession, Burghley complacently believed that he could still mould or manipulate Elizabeth as he had done so often in the earlier years of their relationship. When his colleagues assembled on 3 February, he read the warrant aloud, then coaxed his fellow councillors into agreeing that Robert Beale, one of the clerks of the Privy Council and Walsingham’s brother-in-law, should carry it to Fotheringhay as quickly as possible, ‘without troubling Her Majesty further in that behalf’. She was to hear nothing more about Mary’s execution ‘until it were done’. Drafts of covering letters, prepared overnight by Burghley for Amyas Paulet and the commissioners chosen to preside on the day of the execution in the Great Hall at Fotheringhay, were read and approved and it was ordered that they be written out in fair copy. Burghley then swore everyone to strict secrecy. He asked all those attending to sign a record of the meeting, after which he sent Robert Beale to Seething Lane to secure Walsingham’s signature from his sickbed. The proceedings were justified in the record as for Elizabeth’s ‘special service tending to the safety of her royal person and universal quietness of her whole realm’.27
• • •
That night, Elizabeth woke in fear, complaining that she had dreamed of Mary’s death. Her loyal kinswoman and long-standing friend in the inner Bedchamber, Dorothy Stafford, whose turn it had been to sleep beside her on a pallet bed, reported a simultaneous nightmare.28
At daybreak, the queen sent again for Davison and told him of this strange ‘augury’. In keeping with his oath, given to Burghley at the clandestine Council meeting, Davison answered evasively, skirting any mention of the sending of the warrant. Later, he would profess somewhat weakly that he felt there had been no need to say more: he had, he said, ‘naturally’ assumed that Elizabeth had already been told what had been done by more senior privy councillors.
For Elizabeth, this was not just a dream but a real-life nightmare. Faced with the conundrum of how to bring about Mary’s death without sacrificing her most cherished ideals and fatally compromising the sanctity of God-appointed monarchy, she found herself emotionally paralysed. Then, her survival instinct kicked in, just as it had in 1560 when the news of the suspicious death of Leicester’s first wife, Amy Robsart, had reached her. To protect her reputation and self-esteem, she decided to play poker with her councillors, for the highest possible stakes.
Determined not to let Burghley outwit her and knowing his working methods all too well, she began to prepare herself mentally for what she would do if, as she suspected, he had gone behind her back and sent the signed death warrant to Fotheringhay. Davison alone stood in the way of her ability to disavow knowledge of all that she and they had done. She could claim she was the victim of a Court conspiracy. Had she not recalled Davison the very day after she had signed the warrant and told him to delay in having it sealed? And had she not told him that on no account was he to allow the warrant to leave his possession? She conveniently chose to forget that she had also told him she wished to be ‘no more troubled with the matter’. And if, as she hoped, her cousin were to be killed under the terms of the Bond of Association, she could blame Paulet and disclaim all responsibility for what she still regarded as a terrifying act of regicide.
On account of riding out for the day with a Portuguese diplomat, Elizabeth was almost the last person at Court to hear of Mary’s death. The execution took place shortly after nine o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 8 February. So fearful of what he was about to do to an anointed queen, the executioner bungled the task. His first strike of the axe was misaligned, missing the ne
ck and hacking into the back of Mary’s head. A second strike severed her neck, but not completely, and he had to slice through the remaining sinews, using the axe as a cleaver, with blood gushing everywhere. Mary died in agonizing pain. A shocked eyewitness wrote that ‘her lips stirred up and down a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off’.29
The news travelled fast. Burghley and Hatton both knew before dawn the next day. Châteauneuf had heard by midday, and at around three o’clock in the afternoon all the bells of London rang out and bonfires were lit in the streets. When Burghley finally came clean in the evening and told Elizabeth that her cousin was dead, she gave ‘a great sigh’ but otherwise feigned indifference.30
Or at least she did for a time. On Friday the 10th, the sleeping dragon stirred. Refusing to speak to Burghley and using Hatton as her intermediary, she inveighed angrily against those who had attended the clandestine Council meeting, ‘casting the burden generally upon them all but chiefly upon my shoulders’, as Davison related, ‘because (as she protesteth) I had in suffering it [the warrant] to go out of my hands abused the trust she reposed in me’.
That evening or the next, Elizabeth summoned her privy councillors – all but Leicester, who had conveniently absented himself – to attend her in her withdrawing chamber. There, she berated them all for their treachery. Burghley and Davison were singled out and attacked with venom for their part in dispatching the death warrant, ‘for she protests she gave express commandment to the contrary, and therefore had taken order for the committing of Mr Davison to the Tower’. The councillors fell on their knees, pleading for forgiveness, to no avail.31
Within a week, Davison was dragged off to the Tower in a cart, despite being ill. According to Robert Beale, Burghley escaped a similar fate only because Elizabeth ‘thought that to commit him to the Tower would kill him’. Not yet fully appreciating the danger he was in, Burghley began experimenting with drafts of two petitions on behalf of himself and his colleagues.32 By the time he had perfected the second, a metamorphosis had taken place. When beginning the first he had used language that made it plain the blame was shared, but by the end of the second draft all of it was squarely transferred on to the shoulders of the unfortunate Davison. Burghley also systematically purged the archives. Documents he is known to have drafted or corrected himself, notably his drafts of the instructions sent to the commissioners at Fotheringhay and to Amyas Paulet, he recovered and burned.33 If Elizabeth had an instinct for self-preservation, so did he.
Davison was lucky not to be hanged. Elizabeth consulted a panel of judges to see whether she could order this summarily by the royal prerogative and, in fear, some said she could. His life was spared only after a valiant intervention on his behalf by Lord Buckhurst. Another of the queen’s kinsfolk, he was her second cousin. A zealous Protestant and Burghley’s close ally, lately made a privy councillor for his loyal service to Elizabeth, Buckhurst had played no part in Mary’s trial or in the sending down of the death warrant. Taking his courage in both hands, he told the queen to her face that she should consider the damage that would be done to her reputation if it ever became known that she had hanged her unfortunate secretary when, all along, the warrant he had allowed out of his possession had ‘both your hand and seal’ upon it. Were she to persist in seeking Davison’s blood, Buckhurst dared to say, she would end up looking like a murderer.34
Elizabeth relented. But having been reminded that she had indeed signed the warrant, and wondering what had become of it, she did her own bit of archival sleuthing, after which the original of the signed death warrant that Robert Beale had fatefully delivered to Fotheringhay mysteriously disappeared. Since Beale records that he carefully preserved it among the records of the Privy Council for ratification in Parliament, we must assume that its disappearance was no accident. Today, it is known only from two hastily written copies made by Beale himself shortly before he left for Fotheringhay.
• • •
Who had won? Was it Burghley, who had achieved his long-held ambition to exclude the Catholic Mary from the throne and in the process spectacularly vindicated the right of a woman ruler’s (male) privy councillors to bypass her if she wavered? Or was it Elizabeth, who had humbled her advisers and achieved what, in the end, she knew had to be done, but in a way that allowed her, in her own mind at least, to believe she had safeguarded the highest ideals of God-appointed monarchy?
To all practical effects, Elizabeth won. Davison was put on trial in the Star Chamber, the most feared tribunal in the land, since the basis of its jurisdiction was the royal prerogative. As his case turned on his word against the queen’s and boiled down to a matter of interpreting her mind, he could not really mount a credible defence. Seeing that his salvation lay in keeping his mouth shut, he told his judges that he ‘desired not to be urged to utter the private speeches that passed between the queen and him’. He suppressed all mention of Elizabeth’s demand to Paulet that Mary should be assassinated. And he never disclosed publicly that those who had met in Burghley’s lodgings had sworn an oath not to reveal their action to the queen.35
To save his own skin, Burghley was forced not just to lie but to commit perjury in court. On the eve of the trial, he and his colleagues filed a legal affidavit in the Star Chamber in which they blamed Davison for summoning the clandestine Privy Council meeting, for reading the death warrant aloud, for writing the letters and instructions sent to Fotheringhay and, especially, for reassuring everyone that Elizabeth meant the warrant to be dispatched. Or, at least, all but one of the ten councillors who had been present perjured themselves: Walsingham, honourably, refused to sign the affidavit, throwing his career briefly into jeopardy.36
After a draining ordeal lasting four hours, Davison was fined 10,000 marks (more than £6 million in modern values) and sentenced to imprisonment at the queen’s pleasure. He could not possibly pay such a huge sum, but his fine was never collected and he was quietly released from the Tower after a year. His salary continued to be paid, but he was suspended from office permanently.37
Burghley, too, was far from unscathed. Elizabeth banished him from her presence. He was allowed to speak briefly to her in March, but as late as 1 June she was still freezing him out, denouncing him as a ‘traitor, false dissembler and wicked wretch’. She partially relented later in the month, consenting to pay a visit to his magnificent country house at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, where she had stayed at least three times in the 1570s, before continuing on to Oatlands and Richmond palaces.38 But their relationship would never be the same again. She had abjectly humiliated him, teaching him a lesson he would never forget: she was no longer the novice he had manipulated in the past, she was his absolute sovereign – certainly not a ‘mere’ woman whose will could be disregarded. Everything rested on her favour, which, as he now understood, could not be taken for granted.39
With Davison’s conviction in the Star Chamber, Elizabeth considered herself sufficiently exculpated in the eyes of Europe from a charge of regicide. Writing to James VI, Mary’s son, who would shortly be twenty-one and had declared his minority to be at an end, she feigned innocence and simply brazened it out. The whole affair, she professed, had been a ‘miserable accident’.40 Since the details were ‘too irksome for my pen to tell you’, she sent Robert Carey, the youngest of ‘Harry’ Lord Hunsdon’s nine sons, whom she affectionately called ‘Robin’, to report them verbally. Carey, who had first met James while accompanying Walsingham on a mission to Scotland in 1583, had already made a favourable impression on the young king, but on this occasion James forbade him to cross the frontier for his own safety and forced him to deliver the queen’s excuses to two of his councillors.41
Elizabeth harped on her innocence to James. ‘I am not so base minded that fear of any living creature or prince should make me afraid to do that [which] were just or, done, to deny the same,’ she protested. ‘I am not of so base a lineage nor carry so vile a mind. But as not to disguise fits most a ki
ng, so will I never dissemble my actions, but cause them [to] show even as I meant them.’ If indeed she had intended to have his mother executed at Fotheringhay, she informed James, lying through her teeth, ‘I would never lay it on others’ shoulders.’42
By the time she wrote this letter, Elizabeth had already decided to be her own woman and never again to be inveigled or bounced by her councillors into anything she strongly disagreed with, if she could prevent it. On this occasion, the results were bittersweet, but by sacrificing Davison she had subordinated Burghley and his coterie to her authority in ways they had never experienced before. Her victory had come at a high price. Whatever she chose to tell herself or others about it, an anointed queen had been killed at Fotheringhay. Elizabeth had to live with her conscience, but now she also had to move on. She would find it to be no easy task. For the searing events surrounding her cousin’s execution struck to the core of her psychology. This, truly, was Elizabeth’s Armada of the soul.
5. No Warrior Queen
With Mary dead, Philip II was quick to claim the kingdom of England for Spain. Since May 1585, when he first placed an embargo on English and Dutch shipping, he had been contemplating more drastic retaliation for Elizabeth’s decision to send the Earl of Leicester with an expeditionary force to intervene in the Netherlands. In January 1586, he asked one of his leading commanders, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, a veteran of the spectacular Spanish naval victory against the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, when the entire western Mediterranean was made safe from Islam, for a secret report outlining what would be needed for a full-scale invasion.