An Accidental Tragedy

by Roderick Graham

  On 22 September Mary asked the archbishop to buy her some dogs, in addition to the pretty little pair she was sure her uncle the cardinal was sending her, since besides reading and necessary work she had no other pleasures. She ended her sad letter by reminding the archbishop to make sure the puppies were warmly packed for the journey.

  Mary may have been concerned only with her growing menagerie, but Bess, her hostess, had a close eye on dynastic advantage. For some time she had been negotiating for her daughter, Elizabeth, to marry the Earl of Suffolk, but when she heard that the recently widowed Countess of Lennox and her son, Charles Stuart, the new earl, were to journey north, an invitation immediately went out for a meeting. Elizabeth had forbidden the countess to visit Chatsworth. The idea of Darnley’s mother, an inveterate plotter and regular resident of the Tower, coming anywhere near Mary made her blood run cold, but Rufford Abbey was a property of the Shrewsbury’s and on the countess’s route north, so a visit was planned. It lasted five days, with the two mothers locked in pre-nuptial tête-a-têtes while the nineteen-year-old children were left to each other’s company. Charles Stuart was the great grandson of Margaret Tudor and therefore had a direct claim on the crown of England, albeit through the female line, and if their marriage produced a son, he would in his turn become Earl of Lennox, with debateably a stronger claim to the English throne than that of James VI. For his peace of mind, if nothing else, Shrewsbury looked forward to the outcome: ‘This taking effect I shall be well at quiet, for there is few noblemen’s sons in England that she hath not prayed me to deal for at one time or another.’ The marriage did ‘take effect’ with great promptitude.

  Elizabeth was hysterical with rage and both countesses were immediately summoned to London to be thrown into the Tower. Both of these formidable women had offended Elizabeth so often that it is not over-fanciful to imagine that they had their own regular accommodation in that grim fortress, but, thanks to the intercession of friends, they suffered no more than house arrest. Everyone except for Bess breathed a sigh of relief when, in the autumn of 1575, a girl, Lady Arabella, was born to the couple. For Bess, this meant that Mary and her son James VI stood in the way of her becoming queen mother of a united kingdom, and Bess did not like obstacles.

  Logic had nothing to do with Elizabeth’s paranoia and she hysterically included Shrewsbury and Mary in her rages, convinced that they had conspired with Bess to bring about the marriage. Mary was terrified that, at best, she might be transferred into the care of Huntingdon or, at worst, simply poisoned. She wrote to Henri III pleading for either a rescue, or the avenging of her death, and her sense of isolation increased when, on 26 December, the Cardinal of Lorraine died at Avignon. He was the last of her close advisers, and although he had embezzled large amounts of her income and had used her as a pawn in the political games of the Guise family, he represented a link with the golden days of her youth among the palaces of the Loire. She was willing to accept his death as the will of God, like all the other adversities visited upon her.

  As yet unaware of the cardinal’s death, Mary was writing to the Archbishop of Glasgow on the same day, explaining why she would reject all attempts to have James acknowledged as King of Scotland. He had been crowned aged thirteen months, as soon as had been possible after she had abdicated, but she had subsequently renounced the abdication and therefore she was, in her eyes, the true ruler of Scotland. Mary wished her ambassador to make clear that the treaties of friendship between France and Scotland were treaties with herself and no one else.

  One of the long-term effects of the excommunication of Elizabeth had been an increase in the persecution of the Catholics, and Mary had been no exception. Ninian Winzet had been acting as her confessor while employed ostensibly as a secretary, but he had been exiled with John Leslie, Bishop of Ross and so, for some time, Mary had been deprived of her religious observances. They had been so much a part of her life that, as a result of their absence she wrote to Pope Gregory XIII in October 1575 asking for various concessions. Mary wanted her chaplain, a Jesuit priest called Samerie, who visited secretly, to be authorised to grant her absolution after hearing her confession. She wanted absolution also to be granted to twenty-five Catholics who had attended Protestant services only in order to avoid detection; she asked for papal forgiveness for not having refuted the insults of heretics; and, finally, she wanted to obtain indulgentiam in articulo mortis ore dicendo Jesus Maria, an absolute forgiveness of her sins at the moment of death simply by utterance or thought of the words ‘Jesus Maria’. The possibility of a violent death, either by assassination or judicial process, was very real.

  At about this time Mary inscribed some lines of verse in a Book of Hours which she had kept with her since her time in France. She seems to have used this priceless medieval devotional work as a scribbling pad to pass the time during her moments of depression, and the comments are depressing in the extreme. Many of the scribblings, such as ‘was ever known a fate more sad than mine?’, are desolate and may have been written over a long period. She now accepted her fate – ‘I am no longer what I once have been!’ – and appeared to think of life as something to be endured while awaiting death. Mary was not a deep thinker, but these lines show the dark side of her character. The flashing smiles and chivalric charm had gone and imprisonment had started to crush her optimism. Five years later, in 1580, she is presumed to have written an ‘Essay on Adversity’, a collection of loose jottings on the subject of her imprisonment without any real focus, which read as if she had started to assemble her thoughts and then to fortify them with examples. Being prevented from carrying out the duty to which ‘God called me in the cradle’, Mary sought to illustrate the misfortunes of life – ‘a subject so familiar to me’ – since she felt that no one else ever had greater experience of them, certainly no one of such royal quality.

  Thus she began by establishing her God-given right to rule and the uniqueness of her plight. She spelt out a plan, which she failed to follow, of examining inner torment and then physical, showing how God will finally forgive all sinners. The inevitable examples from Scripture followed with a diversion to the classics and celebrated suicides. She accused ‘a noble and virtuous prince to whom I feel honoured to be related’ who brought his ‘illustrious name’ into disrepute by failing to confess to a small dishonour. Mary did not tell us which of her relatives did this, but the choice was wide. She ended by warning that, while humility is a great virtue, those who have been called to greatness must not avoid their divinely attributed duty. The entire work, with its many erasures, omissions and alterations, was a teenager’s version of a learned sermon delivered by a prince of the church, but at the time of composition Mary was thirty-eight years old and might have been expected to show greater maturity. The possibility of escape and restitution were no longer thought of and her only hopes for the future were an unquestioning belief in her God and the little ameliorations and relaxations accorded to life-sentenced prisoners.

  Chief among those relaxations were, of course, her visits to Buxton, which she found relieved her painful joints, and, towards the end of May 1577, Nau hints at some hopeful rumour. Mary and he had received ‘very secret’ information that Elizabeth was to visit Buxton from where she would travel in disguise to Chatsworth to meet Mary. Nau was not entirely convinced of this, but Mary was certain that at last she would meet her cousin. It was an illusion and the information was completely wrong. Elizabeth had never had, from the time of Mary’s arrival in England, any intention of meeting Mary. It was a meeting from which nothing could be gained except verbal expressions of love and amity, and one which might very well lead to unflattering physical comparisons between the two women. Elizabeth has been accused of being afraid that she might have been swayed by Mary’s undoubted charm, but Mary’s was a charm which was most effective on men, while Elizabeth was susceptible only to compliments from men. If Elizabeth had any doubts as to how to act, she prevaricated brilliantly, and if there was any possibility of being pu
t into a situation where action was essential, she deftly avoided the trap. The two queens would never meet and in fictional portrayals of such an encounter the dramatic effect has been, at best, feeble, contributing nothing to the play.

  Perhaps reflecting her mood at the time, in February 1577 Mary drew up a draft of her last will and testament. Should she die in prison, which she now expected, she asked that her body should be taken to the cathedral of St Denis to be buried beside François II, her first husband, and that, provided he converted to Catholicism, James was to be heir to all her property and to her rights to the crown of England. If he did not convert, then Mary left everything to Philip of Spain to dispose of as he wished on the advice of the Pope. If James should predecease her, she left the throne of Scotland to the Earl of Lennox or Lord Claude Hamilton, either to be selected by the house of Lorraine on condition that the selected one then married into the house of Lorraine. Lady Arabella was to be created Countess of Lennox. History cannot but be grateful that this will was never put into effect, since the result could have been war between Spain and England, coupled with a renewed civil war in Scotland.

  In June 1577 Leicester paid a visit to Buxton as a guest of Shrewsbury. He was presumably overweight and Elizabeth sent Shrewsbury a comic diet to be served to the earl. Two ounces of meat, washed down with the twentieth part of a pint of wine and as much of ‘St Anne’s sacred water as he listeth to drink’. On feast days his diet would be augmented by the shoulder of a wren for dinner and the leg at supper. Elizabeth could still play silly schoolgirl jokes. Mary, with her Valois antennae finely attuned to smell out a plot, if lacking judgment as to the plot’s chances of success, suspected that Leicester had come to Buxton to sound out the nobility as to the feasibility of his marriage to Elizabeth. Since Leicester had secretly married Lettice Knollys, the daughter of Mary’s former gaoler, Sir Francis Knollys, in 1575, this was unlikely. Mary herself may have been at Buxton at the same time since on 25 June Elizabeth thanked Shrewsbury for looking after Leicester so well and, only two days later, Walsingham noted that Tutbury – his favoured prison – was unsuitable and Mary should be returned to Sheffield.

  Burghley himself came to Buxton with as much speed as his ‘old creased body’ would allow him, and it is tempting to speculate that during all this coming and going Mary may have renewed her acquaintanceship with Burghley and may finally have met her quondam suitor Leicester. Either circumstance would have needed the connivance of Shrewsbury, and both men were more powerful than the earl. But both men were also well aware that the wrath of Elizabeth would be terrible in the extreme should they be discovered. Although, like all Elizabethan politicians, both men controlled a network of spies, they also knew that many of these spies were double agents, and that arching over all was the great spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, one of whose most sinister agents, Sir Richard Topcliffe, was in Buxton at this time.

  Topcliffe was a psychopathic anti-Catholic frequently employed by Walsingham to administer the rack in the Tower, a task he greatly enjoyed. Should the torture of the rack fail to produce results, prisoners would then be taken to Topcliffe’s own house – the windows of which were painted black – for more elaborate tortures. He enjoyed the total confidence of Walsingham and claimed – probably unjustifiably – to have seen Elizabeth ‘naked above the knee’. He wrote to Shrewsbury on 30 August 1577 about ‘Popish beasts’ at Buxton – ‘One Dyrham, as I remember, at the bath or lurking in those parts after the ladies’ – and he asked Shrewsbury to arrest Dyrham. With the close presence of such a man under the patronage of Walsingham, even Burghley would be cautious. Inevitably there were rumours of rescues, and Burghley consoled himself that near Chatsworth there was ‘no town or resort where ambushes may lie’.

  The smaller pieces on the political chessboard started to move again, with indirect results for Mary. A new arrival in Scotland from the troublesome Stuart family arrived in 1579 in the handsome form of the 37-year-old Esmé Stewart, Seigneur d’Aubigny. He had been sent by the Duc de Guise to ingratiate himself with James and to clip the wings of Morton. In this he was partially successful, the fifteen-year-old James creating him Duke of Lennox in 1581. Thanks in some part to Esmé’s influence, Morton was beheaded in June 1581, which was followed by an official abjuration of Catholicism. Mary had once been the most powerful card in the Guise hand, but now she took carefully guarded walks in the gardens at Chatsworth while she was informed at third or fourth hand of their newest machinations.

  Finally, in London, the Duc d’Alençon arrived, albeit in secret. He had previously been considered as a suitor for Elizabeth when he had held the title of Duc d’Anjou. As the youngest of Mary’s brothers-in-law, he was over twenty years younger than Elizabeth, heavily pockmarked and below average height. He was, however, more than prepared to play marriage games and the couple, being careful not to appear together in public, exchanged intimate love tokens through Jean de Simier, Alençon’s ambassador. Elizabeth, hugely flattered by the elaborate attentions of a much younger man, called Alençon her ‘frog’ while Simier was her ‘monkey’. Alençon had shown distinct Huguenot leanings in France – to the horror of Catherine de Medici – and had befriended Condé.

  For Mary the possibility of the Alençon marriage was terrifying for several reasons. Firstly, the marriage threatened that, even allowing for what was regarded as Elizabeth’s advanced age, it might produce an heir and all Mary’s dynastic dreams for James and herself would crash irrevocably to the ground. Secondly, Mary’s only realistic source of foreign aid would then be from Spain where, so far, Philip had shown extreme caution in offering anything more than moral support. The Pope would fulminate, but, having already excommunicated Elizabeth, there was nothing more he could do. Mary let some of her feelings be known in conversation, and Elizabeth inevitably heard that Mary Stewart was criticising her marriage plans. When Mary heard that she had fuelled Elizabeth’s fury, she wrote to de Mauvissière, the French ambassador, denying everything: ‘Whosoever has told this to the Queen of England, my good sister, has wickedly and villainously lied . . . ask Shrewsbury and his wife in what terms I spoke of the Duke’. Perhaps with more honesty Mary wrote to the Archbishop of Glasgow, hoping that the marriage might improve the lot of the English Catholics. Elizabeth and Alençon’s marriage dalliance continued with the young man trying to escape from the political clutches of his family and the older woman acting out the teenage romance she had never been allowed until, with finance from Elizabeth, Alençon undertook a campaign in the Netherlands where, on 10 June 1584, he died after an attack of fever. It was now inevitable that Elizabeth would die childless.

  Mary’s hope for better treatment for English Catholics had suffered a heavy blow in June 1580, when the first Jesuit missionaries had begun to arrive from the seminaries in Rome and Douai. The hope in Rome was that they could unify and strengthen Catholic support for Mary’s seizure of the throne and the deposition, bloody or otherwise, of Elizabeth. The effect was exactly the opposite, since, almost without exception, they fell into the merciless hands of Walsingham and Topcliffe, to end their days in the cruellest of deaths, portrayed as traitors intent on delivering England into the hands of Spain to rekindle the fires of Mary Tudor. Also, the intensity of belief displayed by these agents at their deaths helped to strengthen the siege mentality in the country. And Burghley found it easy to identify the principal enemy within the walls as Mary Stewart.

  Mary had now been the unwelcome guest of Shrewsbury for eleven years and his financial complaints were becoming more and more extreme. The consumption of wine, spices and fuel were costing him £1,000 annually, on top of which ‘The loss of plate, the buying of pewter and all manner of household stuff which by them is exceedingly spoiled and wilfully wasted, standeth in me one thousand pounds by the year.’ In August 1580 he asked if he had in some way offended Elizabeth and if her refusal to pay him was some kind of punishment, to which he got a sharp reply reminding him of his duty. Although he had reduced Mary’s
expenses almost to a starvation level, Shrewsbury was quietly warned by Leicester that rumours of his overromantic liaisons with Mary were circulating.

  James angered Elizabeth by rebuffing an embassy at Berwick – most probably an administrative error of which he knew nothing – and the incident was used by Elizabeth, in association with Robert Beale, the secretary for the ‘Northern Parts’ and clerk to the Privy Council, a bitter anti-papist, to impose more restrictions on Mary. She would be allowed to write to James only on the condition that she made an open demonstration that ‘she would have no dealings with papists, rebels, fugitives, Jesuits or others which might go about to trouble that estate of the policy and religion now established, or would seek alteration of the same’. She was to cease all dealings with foreign princes and to persuade James that Elizabeth was his best friend, ‘being herself diseased and not like to continue long’. This demand was too crude and was quietly dropped.

  What was not dropped was a proposed association whereby Mary and James would rule Scotland jointly, Mary would renounce all her claims to the English throne, would join a league against France, renounce the Papal Bull of excommunication, give amnesties in England and Scotland for all misdeeds, and even consent to remain in England as a sort of hostage, ‘in some honourable sort’. In other words, under twenty-eight different clauses, Mary would have to agree to a total rejection of everything she had claimed in exchange for a limited freedom. However, Mary had been secretly advised to agree to anything at all if it bought her freedom, and, in any case, it had been suggested to her in confidence by the Spanish ambassador that she remain in England. Should Philip, in alliance with the Duc de Guise, manage to launch the ‘Enterprise’ – an invasion of England – then Mary was already in place to stand at the head of the army. Unfortunately, Elizabeth realised that she could rely on James’s loyalty without granting his mother anything at all and the matter was not pursued.