by Kate Hubbard
This put Elizabeth in an impossible position. In the short term, she dispatched Sir Francis Knollys to Carlisle to take charge of Mary. But what to do with her thereafter? She was unwilling to send her back to Scotland, to certain death. But nor did she want to go to war with Scotland on Mary’s behalf. It was too dangerous to let her go to France or Spain, and equally so to leave her at liberty in England, especially in the predominantly Catholic north. As usual, Elizabeth prevaricated: the question of whether or not Mary should be restored to her throne was made contingent upon that of her guilt of Darnley’s murder. To this end an inquiry opened in October in York, not far from Bolton Castle, where Mary had been moved.
The evidence that Mary had committed adultery with Bothwell and conspired in Darnley’s murder was based on the Casket Letters, which, produced by the Earl of Moray who had every reason to see her condemned, were almost certainly forgeries. When the inquiry failed to reach any conclusions, it was moved south, to Westminster, and five more commissioners appointed, including Cecil and his brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bacon, both of whom were determined on Mary’s guilt. On 6 December, Mary, allowed neither to defend herself nor to see the Casket Letters, had her advocates withdraw. The Queen, who wanted her found innocent, now intervened. The inquiry was suspended once again and yet more judges added, including the Earl of Shrewsbury, with Elizabeth herself overseeing proceedings at Hampton Court. The Casket Letters were examined for the last time. Mary demanded an audience with Elizabeth and was refused.
On 13 December, Shrewsbury wrote to Bess again, still full of yearning: ‘me thinks time longer since my coming hither without you, my only joy, than I did since I married you, such is [the] faithful affection which I never tasted so deeply of before’. The inquiry had failed to reach any kind of verdict – nothing could be proved against Mary, but nor could Elizabeth allow her her liberty. ‘Things fall out very evil against the Scots Queen’, wrote Shrewsbury, ‘what she shall do yet is not resolved of.’ And then, later that day, came a hasty postscript: ‘now it is certain the Scots Queen comes to Tutbury to my charge’.1
The custodianship of the Queen of Scots would have seemed an honour to the Shrewsburys in 1569, a mark of Elizabeth’s regard and trust. The Earl would never have imagined that his charge would continue for fifteen years, to the detriment of his fortune, his health, his peace of mind and his marriage. In the eyes of Elizabeth, Shrewsbury was the ideal candidate for the post – thoroughly Protestant and utterly loyal. He also, crucially, owned several properties that were both suitable for accommodating a queen and also in the geographically secure Midlands, at a safe distance from London, Scotland and the English ports. And he was newly married, and thus, it could reasonably be expected, less susceptible to Mary’s fabled charms.
Shrewsbury, who was still at court, received his instructions from Elizabeth: the Scots Queen was to be treated with proper reverence and allowed all ceremony, but most definitely not to escape; none but her immediate retinue were to see her, and Bess might do so only if Mary was sick, or asked to speak to her, and then ‘very rarely’; no other gentlewoman should visit; unnecessary members of Mary’s household were to be dismissed.2 Bess, waiting anxiously at Tutbury, was unsure as to when to expect Mary, finally receiving a letter, on 20 January from the Earl of Leicester, with information about her arrival. She replied the next day, grumbling that his letter hadn’t reached her sooner: ‘I was much grieved because there was no more haste with delivering of the said letters considering the weight and great causes depending thereupon.’ Tutbury, she felt, was ‘unready in many respects for the receiving of the Scottish Queen coming at sudden’. She had put men to work and was raiding Sheffield for furnishings and hangings for Mary’s quarters – ‘I will lack furniture . . . for myself’ rather than fail ‘the trust reposed by the Queen’s Majesty’.3 In fact the Queen stepped in too, sending ‘Turkey carpets’, beds, chairs, linen and plate from the Tower of London.4
While marooned in Derbyshire, Bess relied on family (Gilbert Talbot, Elizabeth Wingfield) and friends (Leicester) to keep her informed about events in London and at court. But she had private informants too. One such was Hugh Fitzwilliam, a distant relation, who wrote regularly, with both national and foreign news. On 23 January, Fitzwilliam told Bess that Shrewsbury had been made a privy councillor and that Mary was on her way to Tutbury, ‘something against her will’.5 Her journey, from Bolton Castle southwards to Tutbury on the Staffordshire/Derbyshire border, took a painfully slow ten days – ‘the ways being long and foul’ and one of her ladies falling ill. She finally arrived on 4 February, to be received by the Shrewsburys.
Tutbury had been chosen for reasons of security – it was surrounded by high walls, with only one entrance, and was therefore easy to defend. Despite Bess’s best efforts to instil a little comfort, it remained a deeply cheerless place. Mary herself was scathing: ‘I am in a walled enclosure, on the top of a hill, exposed to all the wind and inclemencies of heaven. Within the said enclosure, resembling that of a wood of Vincennes, there is a very old hunting lodge, built of timber and plaster, cracked in all parts . . . situated so low that the rampart of earth, which is behind the wall, is on a level with the highest point of the building, so that the sun can never shine upon it on that side, nor any fresh air come into it. For which reason it is so damp that you cannot put any piece of furniture in that part without its being, in three or four days, covered with mould.’ Her own apartments consisted of ‘two little miserable rooms . . . excessively cold’; the ‘garden’ in which she was allowed to exercise was no more than a ‘potato patch’; and the privies had no drains, which meant ‘a continual stench’.6
A visitor to Tutbury, Nicholas White, one of Cecil’s minions, did not paint quite such a dismal picture. White reported to his master that he’d found Mary in one of her two main rooms, sitting beneath the canopy of her cloth of state, which was embroidered with the words ‘In my end is my beginning’ (her mother Mary of Guise’s motto). When asked how she passed the time, ‘she said that all day she wrought with her needle, and the diversity of colours making the work seem less tedious, she continued so long at it till the very pain made her to give over, and with that laid her hand upon her left side, and complained of an old grief increased there’. Embroidery, at which Mary excelled, became a distraction and consolation during captivity, and the pain in her side one of several persistent ailments. White, like most men, found Mary fascinating: ‘she had withal an alluring grace, a pretty Scottish accent, and a searching wit, clouded with mildness’.7
Was Shrewsbury similarly allured? Without being a classic beauty – her nose a trifle too long – Mary, now twenty-six, was immensely attractive. Even John Knox, the fiery Scottish minister and reformer, and hardly one of Mary’s admirers, recognised in her ‘some enchantment whereby men are bewitched’.8 She was unusually tall – just under six foot – slim, glamorous and beautifully dressed. Her complexion was creamy, her eyes almond-shaped and her hair somewhere between chestnut and auburn. But her appeal resided in manner as much as looks – she was warm and winning; she knew how to listen. Adroit deployment of feminine wiles had become Mary’s principal strategy for survival.
In his instructions from the Queen, Shrewsbury had been explicitly warned to steel himself against Mary’s charms, though Bess, in later years, affected to believe that he’d succumbed. This seems unlikely. But the Earl was far from cold-hearted, and while he might declare Mary to be ‘a stranger, a Papist and my enemy’, in letters to Cecil, he could not but be moved by her plight, nor, over the course of fifteen years, fail to respond to her personally. In the early years, relations between the Queen of Scots and both Shrewsburys were decidedly cordial.
Mary presented them with a number of expensive gifts – bejewelled pomanders, a collar of gold set with agates and pearls, gold and pearl bracelets, partlets with bejewelled ruffs.9 She and Bess spent many hours gossiping over their embroidery. The Earl, while assuring Cecil and the Queen of the sternest vigi
lance, tried to allow his charge what diversions he could – occasional rides, perhaps, or visits to the baths at Buxton. Tutbury was admittedly a dismal place, but Shrewsbury’s other properties – Wingfield Manor, Sheffield and Chatsworth, between which Mary was shunted – were comfortable and well furnished, indeed grand, and she was kept in some style. Mary may have been a prisoner, but she was quite insistent that she be treated as a queen. Throughout her long years of captivity, she dined in state, at her own table, with her ‘diets’ maintained at two courses for dinner and supper, each consisting of sixteen dishes, all prepared by her own kitchen staff. She had a large household, she kept her own horses, though she was rarely allowed to ride them, and her sheets were washed by her own laundresses.
The Earl made regular attempts to cut back Mary’s retinue, beginning, on her arrival at Tutbury, by reducing her servants from sixty to thirty, besides her women. Mary reluctantly agreed, whilst at the same time asking for more horses and grooms. But Scottish supporters and hangers-on endlessly gravitated to her. By May 1569, numbers had crept up to eighty and the Earl was protesting to Cecil that this was far in excess of his allowance, not to mention the fact that more Scots meant more guards.10
The large number of people that the Earl was expected to accommodate was not just expensive, it also placed immense strain on sanitation and supplies of water, food and fuel. The lack of a sewage system, or plumbing, meant houses quickly became noxious – ‘noysome’, as the Earl put it – needing to be vacated in order to be ‘sweetened’: the stinking business of carting away the contents of the latrines. By the end of February 1569, the well water at Tutbury was ‘evil and scant’, fuel was scarce and Mary had a fever. The Earl asked for, and was granted, permission to move her to Wingfield, and Bess was sent ahead to prepare the state apartments.
South Wingfield Manor, built in the fifteenth century, on a hilltop site, around two courtyards (the state apartments, accommodating Mary, were in the inner court), has long been ruined, but even in outline it is possible to appreciate how grand and impressive a house it once was. However, in little over a month, Mary was complaining about the ‘very unpleasant and fulsome savour’ in the room next to her chamber, which was ‘hurtful to her health’, and the Earl was asking permission to move her once again, this time to Chatsworth for a few days, so the Wingfield apartments could be ‘made sweet’.11 Over the fifteen years of Shrewsbury’s custodianship, Mary was moved forty-six times, and each move meant packing up and trundling her retinue, wardrobe, dogs, jewels and canopy of state over the ruts and potholes of the Derbyshire byways.
Shrewsbury reported faithfully on his prisoner to Cecil and the Queen. Mary was ‘quiet’ on arrival at Tutbury, but for much of the time she was ‘unquiet’. There were frequent storms of tears, much dreaded by the Earl. She wept when any of her servants, to whom she was very attached and who were equally attached to her, were dismissed. She wept ‘exceedingly’ when Alexander (‘Sandy’) Bog, one of her servants, who had been sent on a reconnaissance to Scotland, returned with the news that there was little or no support for her return. She complained constantly of her treatment at the hands of the Queen, of unsavoury smells, of lack of exercise, and of ill health – variously the pain in her side (probably a gastric ulcer), neuralgia, headaches, digestive problems, swollen legs and rheumatism. Some of these ailments were neurotic and most likely due to too much food and too little exercise. For a young woman as physically energetic as Mary – she adored riding, dancing, archery, even golf – confinement was a particular torment. However, what the Earl did not report were the times when Mary was merry and light-hearted and at her most charming, out on a ride, perhaps, or gossiping with Bess.
In March 1569, the Earl told Cecil that Mary ‘daily resorts to my wife’s chamber, where with Lady Leviston [Agnes Livingston] and Mary Seton [the only one of the ‘Four Marys’, Mary’s childhood playmates, still with her], she sits working with the needle, wherein she much delights and devising works – her talk altogether of indifferent trifling matters, without any sign of secret dealing or practise I assure you’.12 This was of course in violation of Shrewsbury’s orders – Mary was not supposed to be fraternising with Bess in the ordinary way of things. But during the early days of her captivity, the two were very much together. This was hardly surprising. Mary was naturally gregarious and welcomed company. She was also avid for information about Elizabeth, the cousin she would never meet and in whose hands her fate lay. The two women may have talked of ‘trifling matters’, but as Mary would later claim in her ‘Scandal Letter’ (of which more later), such matters included a great deal of scurrilous gossip about the Queen. Nor were they averse to a bit of ‘secret dealing’.
Bess was a source of information for Mary, and Mary an object of fascination for Bess – a figure of glamour and romance, but also one hung about with intrigue. Her twenty-six years had been shadowed, even by the standards of the age, by an unusually high quota of tragedy and brutality. She’d lost a kingdom, a son, and three husbands, in the murder of one of whom she had quite possibly connived and another by whom she had been abducted and raped. Here was a woman who was everything Bess was not – impulsive, reckless, fatally lacking in good judgement. Something they shared, however, was a love of ‘working with the needle’.
Needlework, using silk or wool on a linen canvas background, was a sociable, communal activity, practised by the lady of the house together with her gentlewomen and servants. More complex techniques – metal-thread embroidery or appliqué work – were undertaken by men. (Bess employed various professional male embroiderers throughout her life, including Angell and Barnett during the years of marriage to William Cavendish, and later on, Thomas Lane, a man known as ‘old Freake’ and John Webb, who had his own room in Hardwick Old Hall.) Needlework was extremely popular in France, and Mary an accomplished needlewoman. Bess was less skilled, but she supervised the large-scale production of embroidered cushion covers, panels, table carpets and hangings during the 1570s, originally made for the adornment of Chatsworth, and eventually finding their way to Hardwick.
It is impossible to determine precisely the extent of Mary’s involvement. But here was an activity she adored and excelled at – her knowledge and taste, acquired and refined at the French court, could be put to good use, as Bess was quick to note and exploit. Mary had fabric and sewing silks sent to her from France. She had at least one highly skilled embroiderer among her gentlemen, Bastian Pagez, a valet. It was Mary who introduced the practice of embroidering flowers, or ‘slips’, on canvas, which were then cut out and applied to a fabric background.13 She may well have taught Bess and her ladies particular techniques, such as coloured cut-work, a painstaking process where embroidery forms a lacy effect against a contrasting background.14 And she certainly had input when it came to design.
Designs were often taken from books of engravings, or woodcuts, and herbals – scenes from the Old Testament or classical mythology, prints of animals, plants and flowers. Bess probably owned some such books herself, and Mary certainly did – Conrad Gesner’s Icones Animalium, for one, with its woodcuts of animals, birds and fish, published in 1560. Once chosen, designs were drawn onto canvas, which was stretched over frames, known as ‘beams’ or ‘tents’, then filled in using cross- or tent-stitch.* An embroidered panel, still at Hardwick, of ‘A Catte’ shows a marmalade cat – a sly allusion to Elizabeth’s red hair – wearing a coronet, keeping a beady eye on a mouse (Mary). Neither coronet nor mouse is in Gesner’s original – embroidery allowed Mary to indulge her love of coded messages, ciphers and emblems. Together she and Bess worked on a series of octagonal panels of plants and flowers, copied from a herbal by the botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli.*15 Mary’s French sophistication and eye for design must have helped form Bess’s own tastes.
The hours spent by Bess and Mary closeted over their needlework soon gave rise to talk, and the Earl found himself firing off assurances to Cecil and the Queen. Surely, he pointed out, ‘no man of understandi
ng can think that I or my wife “wittingly” should be glad of such tedious hourly attendance to the want of our own liberties, as we fain would have, and where none of us can talk or hear without suspicion!’ He was all too aware though of ‘the perils of envious tongues’.16
In fact, there was nothing enviable about the Earl’s position. If ever there was a man caught between a rock and a hard place, it was he. On the one hand, there was Elizabeth, with her suspicions, her stinginess, her paranoia about Mary, her insistence that her cousin be treated with the respect her rank demanded but kept in conditions of the strictest restraint; on the other, Mary, with her intrigues, her complaints and her blandishments. To please both Queens required immense diplomacy and was a task the Earl felt increasingly unequal to. And then of course there was a third demanding woman in the mix – Bess, determinedly pursuing an agenda of her own.
9.
A Dubious Honour
Shrewsbury found himself as much a prisoner of the Queen of Scots as she of Shrewsbury: required to be in permanent attendance; required to ask permission every time he needed to move her to another property (not always granted), or to come to court (usually refused), or simply to entertain his own children. That their children were not supposed to live under the same roof as Mary was a source of regret for the Shrewsburys – ‘it seems her Majesty has no liking our children should be with us . . . a great grief unto us’.1 It meant that the Earl had to fund separate establishments for his sons, as well as maintaining two households, his own and Mary’s.
The size of Mary’s household fluctuated alarmingly and its costs were a constant bugbear. Officially Shrewsbury had a weekly £52 for Mary’s ‘diet’ – her expenses – with an extra sum for those of the guards. But this was paid intermittently, and was anyway insufficient, as the Earl repeatedly and plaintively pointed out. Mary had a pension from the French Crown, but she had no intention of using this to fund herself whilst in captivity. It soon became abundantly clear that Elizabeth expected Shrewsbury to defray Mary’s costs from his own pocket. By 1574, the Earl reckoned that he was spending an extra £300 a year on wages alone. In 1580, he set out the ‘hidden charges’ involved in keeping Mary: £1,000 a year on wine, spice and fuel; another £1,000 on the plate, pewter and ‘household stuff’ that was routinely ‘spoiled’ and had to be replaced; £400 on bonuses to his servants to ensure their loyalty.2
