Elizabeth also spelt out her proposals for Mary’s return to Scotland: ratification of the Treaty of Edinburgh, James’s education in England and Moray’s continued regency, all of which would be considered in July. It seems probable that Elizabeth would have been happy to see her uninvited guest return to Scotland, but in 1615 William Camden hinted at more personal reasons for Elizabeth wishing her cousin could find a more comfortable settlement. Camden believed that Elizabeth ‘found some conflict in her self, on the one side out of fear grown from an inveterate emulation, which among Princesses never dieth, and on the other side out of commiseration and compassion arising from often calling to mind of human compassion’. Thus he established the idea of Elizbeth’s reign as a Via Media.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
My fortune has been so evil
The possibility of Mary’s marriage to Norfolk had already been raised and was now being urged on her by the Bishop of Ross. Moray endorsed the possibility – once Mary was divorced from Bothwell – since it would put an end to rumours of foreign alliances. Norfolk was a 33-year-old widower of impeccable lineage, if somewhat dull and unromantic. To his mind, continuing to live as a single man was unacceptable and a marriage to the queen of Scotland would improve his standing within the aristocracy. For her part, Mary was willing to accept his suit if it meant an end to her captivity. She said, ‘My fortune has been so evil in the progress of my life, and specially in my marriages, as hardly I can be brought to have any mind to like of an husband.’ Her first marriage had been as the price of French support against England’s Rough Wooing, her second had been – she had thought – to please Elizabeth and her nobility, and her third had been as a result of what she claimed to be ravishment and capture. She had never met Norfolk, but the descriptions given to her by the Bishop of Ross were pleasing enough and the inevitable exchanges of jewels and portraits went ahead. The only person unaware of the proposal was Elizabeth, and even Cecil chose his moment with care before mentioning the idea of any sort of dynastic marriage.
In May Mary fell ill again and was prescribed pills for her spleen, but ‘fell several times into convulsions’, vomiting and experiencing a return of the illness that she suffered at Jedburgh, but the following day she had recovered enough to accost Shrewsbury at eleven o’clock at night, weeping, with complaints that George Bartly, one of her servants, was being detained at Berwick.
Elizabeth, ever practical, sent two doctors – Caldwell and Francis – to attend on Mary, and Mary took the opportunity to thank her cousin through them, assuring them that ‘no physic was so good as that comfort [Elizabeth’s continuing love] in adversity’. Shrewsbury wrote that Mary ‘wished to God her [Elizabeth’s] true heart and meaning were known to her and that it might please Him she might see her; and therewith appeared her tears’. Even the indulgent Shrewsbury was coming to accept the fact that epic bouts of weeping were inevitable adjuncts to Mary’s behaviour.
The doctors pointed out that, in the next room to Mary’s bedchamber, even in comfortable Wingfield, was ‘a very unpleasant and fulsome savour, hurtful to her health’ and Shrewsbury arranged for Mary’s removal to Bess’s palatial house at Chatsworth, some eight miles away, so that Wingfield could be ‘sweetened’. Mary’s visit to Chatsworth was a short one and within the month she was back at Wingfield.
Mary had kept up her appeals for help from France or Spain and a communication from Philip II to his ambassador in London gives us a glimpse of some of the wild stratagems she proposed: ‘The Queen of Scots has not sufficient power over her son to be able to send him to Spain to be brought up.’ Had Mary suggested that she send James to Spain as a token of goodwill while Alva, Philip II’s general in the Netherlands, invaded England? To all prisoners the outside world quickly loses reality and what are really only hopeful fantasies seem to them possibilities.
On 28 July 1569 Moray held a convention at Perth at which Elizabeth’s proposals for Mary’s restoration were debated and, by forty votes to nine, were rejected. Mary would remain in England and Elizabeth would have to think of some way of dealing with her. Shrewsbury was now in great pain with gout, and the poor man was the recipient of a severe reprimand from Elizabeth for having left Wingfield in order to take the curative waters at Buxton. He had left Mary in the care of the redoubtable Bess and pointed out that his house at Wingfield, with 240 inhabitants, ‘waxes unsavoury’. He suggested that Mary should be moved to Sheffield, where he had two houses, and she could then be shuttled between them without the need for long caravans proceeding across England. Elizabeth was determined that Mary should stay under the personal care of Shrewsbury – on 14 August he had been refused permission to visit the baths at Buxton seeking further treatment for his gout, so on 29 August Mary was removed to Sheffield with ‘no pomp or assembly of strangers’. Mary was now, more than ever, a millstone around George Talbot’s neck.
Five days earlier, however, Mary had been writing to ‘My Norfolk’, refusing his requests to command him, since she would rather show her wifely duty to him. Pamphlets were appearing with opinions on the marriage. ‘A discourse touching the pretended match between the Duke of Norfolk and the Queen of Scots’ stated, ‘The safety of our sovereign should depend upon a match between the Duke of Norfolk and the Queen of Scots, for that otherwise the marrying a foreign prince might grow to that strength, as our sovereign’s forces should not be able to countervail the same (a thing most dangerous considering her aspiring mind). If she falsify her faith, no pleading will serve, the sword must be the remedy.’ This was reputed to have been written by ‘one Sampson, a preacher’.
John Leslie, Bishop of Ross entered the debate publicly with ‘A Defence of Queen Mary’s Honour’. The printer, Alexander Harvey, claimed it was a joint work by the bishop, Herries and Boyd. It asserted that Mary was the lawful heir of Elizabeth, had had no involvement in Darnley’s murder and, astonishingly, that the English commissioners were convinced of her total innocence and the guilt of Moray and his supporters: ‘I say fie, and double fie, upon the impudence of these mischievous traitors . . . The nobles of England that were appointed to hear and examine all such matters as the rebels should lay against the Queen hath not only found the said queen innocent and guiltless of the death of her husband, but do fully understand that her accusers were the very contrivers, devisers, practitioners and workers of the said murder.’
Given all this, the bishop claimed that Mary was free to marry Norfolk if she chose. The rumour of the proposed marriage came more clearly to Elizabeth’s ears ‘by means of the women of the court who do quickly smell out love matters’, and at Farnham in Surrey, the country seat of the Bishop of Winchester, while walking in a garden, Elizabeth warned Norfolk in a ‘nip’ bidding him ‘to beware upon what pillow he leaned his head’. Norfolk realised that he was liable to fall into deep disfavour and promptly answered, ‘What! Should I seek to marry her, being so wicked a woman, such a notorious adulteress and murderer? I love to sleep upon a safe pillow.’ Elizabeth commanded him to end the relationship and he, rather sulkily, retired from the court. The Scots ambassadors were instructed to tell Mary ‘to bear herself quietly, lest she saw ere long those on whom she most leaned hop headless’. The rumours persisted with pamphlets for and against Mary’s marriage flooding the streets.
Elizabeth was now in a spectacular Tudor rage and commanded Mary back to Tutbury under closer confinement, with the Earl of Huntingdon, whom Mary loathed, as an additional gaoler; the pretence was that Shrewsbury was ill, though, apart from the gout, he was in perfect health. Mary’s loathing of Huntingdon was based on his continued claim to a right of inheritance to the throne since he was descended from a daughter of the Duke of Clarence. This was the duke who was a brother of Edward IV and whom Shakespeare had fancifully described as being drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine in 1478.
Mary and Huntingdon met on 21 September 1569, and he found her despairing of help from Elizabeth and once again threatening to seek help from ‘other princes’. Four days
later Elizabeth ordered that Mary should not be allowed to leave the castle, that her servants should be reduced and that searches of her own, and her servants’, coffers should be made. Mary’s response four days later was a tragic complaint to Elizabeth. The searches had been violently carried out by men armed with ‘pistolets’, her servants had been driven out of the house and she was now being held a close prisoner. She begged that Elizabeth might grant her an interview, send her back to Scotland, or to France, and, finally, that Elizabeth ‘put [her] to ransom’ and not let her ‘waste away in tears and vain regrets’. Elizabeth ensured Norfolk’s compliance by sending him into the Tower on 11 October, while John Leslie was confined by the Bishop of London.
On 9 November Mary once again fell ill – ‘Her colour and complexion is presently much decayed’ – and Shrewsbury sent anxious reports to London while he and Bess took turns in watching by the bedside. Mary had always made decisions after hearing the advice of her advisers, the Guise brothers, or Lethington and Moray. Now she had no advisers, was prevented from applying her charm to anyone with power, and had no idea what to do. She realised, although she never admitted it, that her flight to England had been a hideous mistake and, as her confinement became stricter and her household was reduced, her position as a prisoner became clearer and clearer. Mary’s current suitor, whom she had never sought, but had thoughtlessly encouraged – such flirtations were second nature to her – was now suffering royal disfavour in the Tower. Her only recourse was to illness and her body duly obliged.
Yet in the middle of November Mary became, unwittingly, a more potent danger to Elizabeth. The northern earls of Westmoreland and Northumberland were determined to restore the Catholic faith and, with a disorganised army of around 1,000 infantrymen and 1,500 cavalry, they marched south. In Durham Cathedral they heard Mass, re-established the altars and holy water stoups and burned all the Protestant prayer books. Sussex, as guardian of the Northern Marches, did not dare to engage the numerically superior rebels and they quickly seized Barnard Castle while aiming for York. By 23 November the rebels were at Tadcaster, just over fifty miles from Tutbury, and the possibility that they could, in the course of a very few days, free Mary and proclaim her Queen of England was becoming very real. The Bishop of Ross wrote to them urging them to capture Hartlepool as a port of entry for forces from Alva in the Netherlands. This, needless to say, provoked panic at Tutbury, with Mary herself fearing that Huntingdon might have secret orders to murder her, should her rescue seem likely. On Elizabeth’s direct orders, Mary was hastily moved to Coventry.
Since, to Elizabeth’s council in London, Coventry was no more than a conveniently placed dot on their map, they had no idea that there was no convenient castle or aristocratic house in which Mary could stay. In desperation, Shrewsbury lodged her first in the Bull Inn, where she arrived after dark and was confined to her room to avoid ‘fond gazing and confluence of the people’. Elizabeth was apoplectic that the presumed focus of the Northern Rising was lodged in a common inn and demanded that Mary be sent to ‘some convenient house’.
The rebel forces melted away on the continued journey south and, by 20 December, the remnants had turned back and were seeking refuge in Scotland. Six hundred were hanged, Northumberland was captured by Moray who, after ironically imprisoning him in the castle of Lochleven, sent him south for beheading. The few remaining survivors fled to the Spanish Netherlands as permanent exiles. Not for the last time, a misplaced love for an exiled Stewart was to end in death or exile.
Both earls, Northumberland and Westmoreland, had attempted to implicate Norfolk in their abortive rising, which he flatly denied in a long letter to Elizabeth. In it he also denied asking Mary to marry him. By the start of 1570 Mary was back in Tutbury and the panic started to subside.
However, one of the Earl of Arundel’s men – Arundel was one of Norfolk’s many relatives – planned that ‘if she could be gotten away out of Tutbury, she might be conveyed to Arundel in Sussex, and then there take ship and go into France’. When they signified this to the Scots queen, she made answer, ‘if the Duke or the Earl of Arundel or Pembroke would appoint a knight to take it in hand, she would adventure, otherwise she durst not’. In late December 1569 Mary had written to Norfolk accepting a diamond he had sent, swearing to wear it ‘unseen about her neck’. She pledged her love to him ‘faithfully until death’ and warned him against Huntingdon, now returned to London. On 15 January 1570 she begged him to ‘trust none that shall say I ever mind to leave you’. In spite of writing in codes, Mary must have known that her correspondence was being read by Cecil and that by encouraging Norfolk, still in the Tower, she was winding a noose around the poor besotted man’s neck. The fact that they had never met makes her girlish behaviour even more reprehensible, but to Mary Stewart, the Earl of Norfolk represented a possibility of release, and when that was combined with the romantic notion of being rescued by a noble lord, what little sense of realpolitik she possessed flew out of the window.
During this time of turmoil Mary did find an opportunity to send some clothing to her son, the three-year-old James, along with ‘two little ambling nags’, or ponies, and John Leslie, the Bishop of Ross, duly begged for passports for the accompanying servants. As in the past, her Guise training ensured that Mary was always meticulous in her social and familial obligations, although this maternal duty had more than a touch of tragedy for the imprisoned mother. The passports were granted but delayed until 29 December 1569. Almost a month later, on 22 January, Mary wrote to James reminding him that he had ‘a loving mother that wishes you to learn in time to love know and fear God’, but whether or not he ever received the gifts is doubtful since his education was in the hands of George Buchanan, author of the most violent anti-Marian vitriol. Mary also sent clothing and an ABC – an ‘example how to form his letters’ – to her son via the Countess of Mar, begging her not to let James forget that he still had a loving mother.
With Moray in seemingly firm control of Scotland, a terrified Norfolk eager to do Elizabeth’s bidding, the Northern Rising crushed and Mary being closely watched – the locks were removed from her servants’ doors so that they could be subject to random checks, even when asleep – there appeared to be a period of calm at the beginning of 1570.
Diplomatic manoeuvres continued unabated as Guerau de Spes, the Spanish ambassador, was assured that, given support from Alva and Philip, the Catholics in England would ‘rise in a day and persevere until this country is again Catholic and the accession is assured to the Queen of Scotland’. Somewhat confusingly, Philip was solemnly told that it had always been Mary’s wish ‘to take refuge in [his] dominions’. The English Catholics would be encouraged by support from Rome in the form of a Bull, excommunicating Elizabeth. Philip, who was short of money, had no intention of doing more than giving letters of reassurance and playing the waiting game. Montluc, the French ambassador, formally added his voice to the pleas for Mary’s freedom.
It is difficult to believe that these machinations were more than polite responses to Mary’s pleas through the Bishop of Ross. Neither France nor Spain had the slightest intention of provoking a certain war with England over the restoration of the Scottish queen. They made suitably devout noises towards Rome – itself now almost powerless – and kept the pot from boiling over by giving bland promises which nobody believed.
This calm was broken, however, on 23 January, when, despite numerous warnings as to his safety, Regent Moray was riding slowly through the streets of Linlithgow. A shot rang out from the direction of the house belonging to the Archbishop of St Andrews, where James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh was concealed behind some drying laundry. A fresh horse hidden within a mile carried the assassin to safety. The bullet had struck the regent ‘a little below the navel’ and he was able to dismount and walk back to his lodging. However, his condition declined throughout the day and, at eleven o’clock that night, he died.
Moray was Mary’s half-brother and had, of course, been one of Mary’s
most trusted advisers on her return from France. He had, with Lethington, stood at her elbow during her short reign; he was close to the throne itself by blood and had been given the power of the regency by the nobility. But he had never used political pathways to appease the Hamilton claim to the throne and had, instead, plunged Scotland into an intermittent civil war. Hamilton himself, with the vacillation that was typical of his family, did not seize the opportunity presented by Moray’s death, and disputes that verged on another civil war raged throughout the spring. It was not until the summer of 1570 that Lennox was appointed as the new regent, with the Hamilton faction breathing down his neck. As Darnley’s father, Lennox was a sworn enemy of Mary, and he was also hostile towards the Hamilton faction, but Elizabeth felt his regency could be useful to England. Once her support became known, Elizabeth received a long begging letter from Margaret, Countess of Lennox: ‘I cannot see how his purse can be able to take that chargeable journey in hand . . . I have been forced to lay my jewels in gage.’
Although the Northern Rising had been crushed, there was still a lingering threat in the person of Leonard Dacres, Northumberland’s cousin, ‘one of the wildest of men’ and one who had plotted Mary’s rescue. On 19 February, Henry, Lord Scrope, as Warden of the West Marches, issued a warning to the populace against the continued threat of Dacres. Back in January, Cecil had been warned against him: ‘if the Queen’s majesty understood truly Mr Leonard Dacres part from the beginning of this woeful enterprise [the Northern Rising] to the end she would hang him above all the rest’. The difference between Dacres and the rebellious earls lay in the fact that the Northern Rising was a political movement which planned to restore the Catholic faith and use Mary to replace Elizabeth, while Dacres’ plan was simply to free Mary from her cruel imprisonment. In his own mind, he was a knight errant riding to free a beautiful captive princess from her ‘durance vile’ at the hands of a cruel tyrant. Mary, who already had a somewhat lumbering knight errant in the person of Norfolk, dissuaded him, as did Norfolk himself, who feared that Dacres’ intervention would ruin his own suit. The Bishop of Ross claimed that Dacres had met Mary ‘on the leads at Wingfield and had put his plan of escape to her, but, on Norfolk’s advice, she decided to ignore it’. Mary’s encouragement of Norfolk was simply part of the same game, and once her mind had been fed with the fantasy of escaping into the arms of her loyal champion knight, her sense of reality was quickly abandoned and she readily accepted her new role as the embattled princess imprisoned in a dark tower. Dacres, with such men as he had gathered, met with Hunsdon’s forces near Carlisle on 20 February and was soundly defeated, although he escaped and managed to send an apology to Elizabeth via Shrewsbury. The apology was not accepted.
An Accidental Tragedy Page 37