Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

A literal explosion: the astonishing blast of gunpowder that awakened the good citizens of Edinburgh at two in the morning on the 10th of February 1567 reduced to rubble a house known as Kirk o’Field that stood by the city walls.

  It was a magnificent but in the end slightly wasted effort, for the intended target of the blast, the increasingly irksome second husband of Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley, had apparently become alarmed by the noise of those coming to light the charge and had managed to clamber out a window and through a gate into the garden by the time the gunpowder went off. The assassins had, in the end, been forced to dispatch Darnley, rather anticlimactically, by strangling him.

  Mary had chosen to absent herself that evening from Kirk o’Field. It was she who had selected the house for Darnley’s recuperation from a bout of illness—widely rumored to be syphilis; it was she who had entreated him to return with her there from his father’s house in Glasgow. But that night the Queen was staying at Holyrood Palace, the official seat of the Scottish monarch, a few miles away in the center of Edinburgh. Brought the news of her husband’s death, Mary immediately declared that the assassins had obviously meant to destroy her as well; she had had a miraculous deliverance.

  Within a fortnight, another story reached London. In Edinburgh, placards had boldly appeared accusing Mary of complicity in the murder, and naming the chief assassin: James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, a violent, ambitious, vainglorious adventurer who had been on a remarkably intimate footing with the Queen of late. One poster depicted a mermaid and a hare; the mermaid, for which no one could have failed to read the intended meaning harlot, wore a crown; the hare, the family crest of the Hepburns, was surrounded by a circle of swords.

  Elizabeth, even while surreptitiously aiding Mary’s opponents in the miasma of Scottish politics, had carried on a courteous royal correspondence with her sister sovereign; now she sent a stern letter (addressing her coldly as “Madame”: not her customary “My dear sister”), warning that if Mary failed to take action against the murderers she would confirm the suspicions of those who thought the worst.

  It was likely that anyone who had already lived a life of such melodrama and defiance of the odds as Mary had in her twenty-four years would have acquired a sense of fatalism, if not self-destructiveness. Her father, James V of Scotland, had dropped dead in the throes of a nervous collapse a week after her birth; from infancy she had been a trophy in the rough game of Scottish feuding and factionalism: promised by treaty at age seven months as wife to Henry VIII’s son Edward, taken by Catholic lords and crowned Queen of Scots at nine months, shipped off to France at age six (sold to the devil, declared the Scottish Protestant fury John Knox), betrothed to the Dauphin of France at fifteen, Queen of France at sixteen, widowed at eighteen when her young husband the King died, from an abscess on the brain.

  No one had expected her ever to return to Scotland, that “arse of the world” as one traveler had called it, not after her upbringing in the magnificently civilized court of Paris, not after having been Queen of France, not after having been flattered as to her claims to the crown of England. The Scottish Parliament in her absence had made Protestantism the state religion and outlawed the mass. If the Catholic Queen of Scots actually returned to take up her throne, “Here will be a mad world!” said one Scottish lord. But return she did, in August 1561, with reciprocal promises that she would be permitted to exercise her own religion but would do nothing to alter Parliament’s religious settlement for the rest of the country.

  A mad world indeed. She had then married Darnley, an English nobleman with his own ancestral claim to the English throne: like Mary, he was a grandchild of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister; the marriage infuriated Elizabeth. She needn’t have worried. Darnley, a young and none-too-bright Adonis, was not the stuff great things are made of. He was easily manipulated by a group of resentful Scottish lords—there was always a group of resentful Scottish lords—into believing that Mary’s secretary, an Italian singer named David Rizzio, was bedding her, and so led a band that invaded Mary’s supper room at Holyrood and stabbed the Italian to death before her. The balladeers had their field day, telling of the Queen’s alleged revenge upon her husband:

  … for a twelve month and a day

  The king and she would not come in one sheet… .

  Then the Queen’s displeasure with her husband had finally been resolved on a more permanent basis by the explosion at Kirk o’Field, or, rather, would have if it had not also proved necessary to strangle the syphilitic, scorned, and usually drunk Darnley, which was a bit more of a giveaway.

  Mary made no move to rebut the rumors about who the murderers had been; by March 1567, it was bruited that she and Bothwell were to marry. In April, when Bothwell theatrically abducted and, presumably, ravished the Queen, everyone assumed it was an act staged with her full foreknowledge and consent. In May they were married.

  Self-destruction was not long delayed. Mary’s scandalous behavior was both an outrage and an opportunity to the lords of Scotland, and within a month they had risen against her and forced Bothwell’s outnumbered army to surrender near Edinburgh. Bothwell fled to Norway: not the best choice, since he had left both enemies and debts from earlier adventures there, and he soon found himself in a Danish prison cell, where he rotted away the rest of his life.

  Mary was arrested. As she was led through Edinburgh to be taken to the fortress of Lochleven, soldiers in the streets jeered, “Burn the whore!” On the 24th of July, she abdicated in favor of her infant son, James, whose custody the Protestant lords had made sure of. A Protestant regent, Mary’s illegitimate half-brother the Earl of Moray, was appointed.

  The following spring, the half-brother of Mary’s keeper at Lochleven, in “a fantasy of love” with her, lifted the keys of the castle and let her escape. Again the army she summoned to her aid was routed, this time in a battle near Glasgow. On the afternoon of the 16th of May 1568, Mary made her way to the shores of the Solway Firth, on Scotland’s west coast, embarked on a fishing boat with a small band of followers and attendants, and made the four-hour crossing to England.

  Elizabeth had for months been expressing her outrage over the Scottish lords’ affront against “nature and law” in deposing their sovereign. Whatever Mary’s alleged offenses, the lords had certainly acted contrary to what is “ordained by God and received for a truth in doctrine in all Christian governments.”

  The Queen’s affectation of taking her fellow sovereign’s part was not pure hypocrisy; she did fear the precedent of acknowledging that it was acceptable for monarchs to be dealt with in such a fashion. She also hoped that, through the feudal chaos of Scottish politics and its quagmire of personal and family alliances, she could find a winding channel that might yet lead to every desired end: nominally restore Mary’s right position, or at least her liberty; punish Darnley’s murderers; keep the French out; and secure the safety of the young Prince James, thereby insuring that the real political power in Scotland would remain in the hands of the pro-English Protestant party. Mary’s arrival in England was rather an embarrassment to such overcleverness, for it called Elizabeth’s bluff.

  Cecil, in his usual thorough way, prepared a long memorandum cataloguing the realities of this new and exceptionally thorny situation. It had been one thing to press the lords to grant Mary’s liberty while they still firmly held the upper hand, quite another now to support a triumphant return of Mary to Scotland from exile. In so doing the English party would surely be “abased” and the Catholic and pro-French forces immeasurably strengthened. It was equally impossible to allow Mary to go to France; if she regained the Scottish throne with the aid of the French, all of the old dangers of a renewed Franco-Scottish alliance would return with even greater menace. And, finally, it was unthinkable that she should be welcomed at Court, or even allowed to remain at liberty in England, for it was absolutely obvious that here she would become a rallying point for all of those unrepentant Catholics and others within England who backed her cl
aim to the English throne: and did so not merely as Elizabeth’s successor, “but afore her.”

  Those who wished to see Mary replace Elizabeth, Cecil observed, were a disparate lot; some supported Mary “for religion, some for affection to her title, others from discontentation and love of change.” But the prize of the English throne would be too much for any to resist; here, as a rival claimant on English soil, Mary would surely be able to draw them all together in common cause: “no man can think but such a sweet bait would make concord betwixt them all.”

  Mary was no intellectual, no grand strategist. Elizabeth read Latin and Greek, Mary did embroidery. But, like many who were adventurous even to the point of self-destruction, she had charisma and an ability to attract and inspire. They said she was beautiful; they always said that about queens, but what she undeniably had, besides her good points of being tall and auburn-haired and her bad points of sharp and aquiline features, was “some enchantment, whereby men are bewitched,” as one who had seen her put it. John Knox accused her of unseemly levity: precisely. She had poise and grace, but also that knack of convincing whomever she happened to be speaking to at any particular instant that she had no greater pleasure in the world than his company. Men, garden-variety egotists that they mostly were, found it irresistible; only a supreme egotist like Knox, who was not to be flattered by intimate chats with a queen since he enjoyed intimate chats with God, was immune.

  From the north there were already warnings of the excitement that her arrival had set off among the largely Catholic population of the northern counties. The Earl of Northumberland had hastened across the hills to personally offer his protection to the Scottish Queen; only the government’s prompt dispatch of Sir Francis Knollys, a deft courtier but staunch Protestant, had headed him off. Knollys was utterly reliable as her keeper, but even he showed signs of being addled by Mary’s charms. “Surely she is a rare woman!” he exclaimed, and driveled on about her “stout courage” joined to “a liberal heart.”

  Elizabeth maintained the courtly fiction that her dear cousin was a guest in her realm, but the Queen’s obvious vexation over this unwelcome presence embarrassed even Knollys when she sent a bunch of her least attractive cast-off dresses as a gift to Mary; Knollys, resourceful courtier that he was, smoothed things over by explaining that it was a misunderstanding, that a servant had picked out the items under the mistaken impression that they were intended as a gift merely for one of Mary’s attendants. A small incident, but a telling one; Elizabeth had been forced to bow to the awkward but inescapable logic of the Council’s decision regarding Mary’s keeping, and she didn’t like it, and she took it out in petty petulance. “Her Majesty can neither aid her, permit her to come to her presence, or restore her, or suffer her to depart,” the Council had decided, at least not while the matter of the Scottish Queen’s guilt in the Darnley murder remained unresolved.

  It was Cecil’s master stroke to make sure it remained forever unresolved. Mary had sent letter after imploring, affectionate letter to her dear sister sovereign asking that she just be allowed to plead her case in person. In July, Mary finally acceded to a compromise proposal, that agents representing Mary and the Scottish Regent both present their cases before a commission of English councilors and lords that would assemble at York and decide how Mary should be restored to the Scottish crown. To Mary’s party, Cecil and Elizabeth offered assurances that the commission would surely uphold her claims. The Regent would be the defendant, called upon to explain his rebellion against his anointed sovereign; if he and the lords refused to be reconciled to Mary, then Elizabeth would “absolutely set her in her seat regal, and that by force.”

  To Moray a very different message was quietly conveyed. Cecil had carefully set out in a memorandum the legal and propaganda groundwork for what was, in truth, to be an elaborate but extremely deft dirty trick. The Queen’s Majesty of course “never meant to have any come to accuse” the Queen of Scots before the commission, Cecil explained. But in seeking to reconcile her and her subjects, Elizabeth was by justice bound “to hear what they can say for themselves.” The point was that, the previous winter, Moray had already shown the Privy Councilors copies of letters that were alleged to have been written by Mary to Bothwell, and which thoroughly stained her with the guilt of the Darnley murder. Now Moray was instructed that if he brought them forth before the commission it would certainly be sufficient to absolve Elizabeth of any further obligation to aid Mary.

  Whether the letters were real or, as Mary’s defenders maintained, clever forgeries was never resolved; not that it really mattered. Moray presented the letters before the commission in late November; they caused the public sensation expected; the commission quickly found itself at an impasse when, as also expected, Mary refused to answer the charges unless she was permitted to do so in person, this request was denied, and Mary’s agents withdrew. Elizabeth declared that, given this outcome, she was unable to rule either for or against the Queen of Scots; but while this grievous accusation remained unanswered, she surely could neither restore Mary to her throne nor receive Mary in her presence.

  It was the perfect outcome: Elizabeth avoided having to condemn or violate her duty to a fellow queen; what had been mere scuttlebutt the year before was now a matter of formal charges that had been laid before a great body of the realm; and, without actually denying Mary’s sovereign rights, her claims to them had been cast into the limbo of perpetual abeyance.

  In January 1569, Mary was moved away from the Borders to the far more secure keeping of the Earl of Shrewsbury, whose Midlands domain was safely Protestant; from here her chances of securing local support were greatly diminished. Tutbury was a dilapidated, drafty, damp castle, plagued with “nasty old carpentry,” Mary complained. She hated it, as much for the place itself as for the unmistakable message that, whatever pretenses were still respected, she was no longer a guest but a prisoner. From the time of her arrival in England she had been restricted in her movements, accompanied by a guard of a hundred men whenever she wanted to go for a walk or a ride. But Tutbury was dreary, uncomfortable, with foul drains and stinking middens below her very window: it not only functioned as her prison, but had the air and odor of one as well.

  A prisoner, but far from a spent force: as Cecil well knew. It would later be known that from the moment the Scottish Queen had arrived on English soil she had begun weaving conspiracies and approaching foreign powers to come to her aid. In September 1568, she had written the Queen of Spain promising that if France and Spain provided the slightest help she would see Catholicism restored in England, or die trying. In January 1569, she sent a message to the new Spanish Ambassador, an arrogant ideologue named Guerau de Spes, who had arrived in September and already succeeded in making himself unwelcome by openly insulting Cecil and Elizabeth; Mary would have the ambassador know that with King Philip’s assistance she would be Queen of England in three months, “and mass shall be said all over the country.”

  De Spes was at that particular moment confined to the embassy by order of the Council: one of the increasingly frequent diplomatic crises between the two countries. French pirates, and a providential wind, had chased four small coasters from Spain into Plymouth Harbor in November 1568. On inspection, they were found to be carrying some chests crammed with £85,000 in gold coins. The money was being sent to the Spanish Netherlands to pay Alva’s troops there, but upon further investigation it turned out that the money did not strictly speaking belong to Spain: it was the possession of Genoese bankers who were lending the money to Spain, and the bankers quickly sent word to England that they would be quite happy to lend it to Elizabeth instead, at a suitable rate of interest. While Elizabeth was still thinking that over, de Spes raised a furor, insisted the ships be released at once, and called upon Alva to retaliate by seizing English ships in the Low Countries. In response, the Queen said she would, after all, take the money; and the Council placed de Spes under house arrest for stirring up trouble and, they said, to protect the Spa
niard from the uncontrollable and quite understandable fury of the London mobs. Cecil had come in person to deliver the news to de Spes, and had enjoyed the additional pleasure of mentioning in passing, when de Spes protested that he needed to order food and drink, that his predecessor Bishop de Quadra had left his grocery bills unpaid and perhaps the ambassador ought to see to that little matter first.

  But despite the isolation from outside communication that both the Queen of Scots and the Ambassador of Spain were at the moment experiencing, there were other, alarming hints of schemes being hatched that tied the two: Mary’s fatal and quite undimmed attraction for the forces of opposition, both internal and external, was considerably more than a mere theoretical concern of Cecil’s cautious imagination.

  And it was here that Francis Walsingham began leaving small traces of the ways in which a literate, well-traveled, multilingual man of discretion could be of use: a wholly appropriate introduction to the world of secret affairs for Walsingham, given the central part that Mary would play in nearly every plot and counterplot that Walsingham the spymaster would be involved in for most of his life and career to come.

  It began thus: In August 1568, the English ambassador in Paris warned of reports that the Cardinal of Lorraine was sending some Italians to London to practice against the Queen. He suggested that Cecil get in touch with a certain Italian Protestant now in London, one “Captain François,” also known as Captain Thomas Franchiotto, who could look into the matter. Francis Walsingham, fluent in Italian and French, was the man Cecil chose to make the initial contact with Franchiotto.

  Franchiotto was but the first of the many slightly shadowy, slightly disreputable characters from whom Walsingham would glean and pass on details of doings that were all but invisible to less shadowy and more reputable men of affairs. Franchiotto had been in the pay of the French Court for forty years, but obviously his services were for sale elsewhere as well. He soon gave Walsingham a list of suspicious travelers who had arrived in England in the past three months and details of a conversation he had had with the Bishop of Rennes, a recently arrived envoy from France, whom Franchiotto skillfully milked for news of the Guises’ schemes by goading him into an angry admission: Lorraine was contemplating raising troops to free Mary and launch a rebellion against the English crown.