The two queens exchanged expensive gifts in anticipation of their summit in the north of England. Mary sent Elizabeth a ring with a diamond shaped like a heart, saying “that above all things I desire to see my good sister and next that we may live like good sisters together.” Elizabeth, for her part, sent Mary a huge, rocklike diamond.
Plans for the encounter were well under way when Elizabeth received the news that peace efforts in France had failed and the nation was now embroiled in a savage religious war. With the Duke of Guise poised to seize control of the kingdom, there could be no question now of Elizabeth leaving London. The meeting would have to be canceled. When Mary received the queen’s decision “it drove her into such a passion as she did keep her bed all that day,” reported Sir Henry Sidney, who had traveled to Scotland with the news. And though Elizabeth assured her cousin that they would meet at a more fortuitous time, they never did.
It was bad enough that Elizabeth still had to worry about a neighboring queen with designs on her throne. Worse, however, would be a married queen, with a husband powerful enough to enforce her claims. And the widowed Mary was giving every indication that she was ready to wed again. Such a desire was lost on Elizabeth, who, despite all the pressure for her to marry and produce an heir, was absolutely determined to remain single.§ (Thus she became known as the Virgin Queen.)
The Queen of Scots tried to reassure her cousin that her intentions were nonthreatening. “I shall be guided by your wishes,” she wrote soothingly, “and shall be careful not to marry any man of so high a rank that my position, my well-beloved sister, will overshadow yours.” Meanwhile, though, Mary was in negotiations with Philip II of Spain (Elizabeth’s former brother-in-law) to marry his son Don Carlos. Sure, the prince was a lunatic, with a streak of the sadist in him, but he had the power of Catholic Spain behind him.
Aware of the Scottish queen’s machinations, Elizabeth made an inspired—some said outrageous—offer to Mary. The queen told Maitland “that if his mistress would take her advice and wished to marry safely and happily, she would give her a husband who would ensure both … one who had implanted so many graces that if she [Elizabeth] wished to marry him she would prefer him to all the princes of the world.” And that husband would be Robert Dudley, one of Elizabeth’s favorite courtiers, who was also whispered to be her lover.‖ In fact, many believed Dudley had killed his wife, Amy, so that he might marry the queen.a
It was a brilliant proposal as far as Elizabeth was concerned. She could reward her rejected suitor Dudley with a valuable consolation prize—the queen of Scotland—and at the same time ensure that Mary had a husband loyal to his English sovereign, one who could neutralize the Scottish queen’s ambitions.
In Scotland, however, the idea landed with a thud. “Is that conforming to her [Elizabeth’s] promise to use me as her sister?” the indignant Queen of Scots asked Thomas Randolph. “And do you think it may stand with my honor to marry a subject?” Don Carlos of Spain was the prize as far as Mary was concerned—certainly not the English queen’s insulting offer of her Master of the Horse, even if Elizabeth did try to sweeten his appeal somewhat by elevating Dudley to Earl of Leicester.
Elizabeth warned Mary that the Spanish match would cause her to “judge that no good is intended toward us,” but it was Philip II who finally scotched the proposed union with his imbecilic son, leaving the Scottish queen with few prospects but Dudley.
Though Elizabeth had earlier dangled the prospect of naming Mary her heir if she cooperated by marrying Dudley, it proved to be an illusionary enticement. Whenever Mary’s representatives sought tangible assurances that would secure their queen’s position, a key condition for Mary, Elizabeth always managed to wiggle away without making any promises. The stalemate drove the Queen of Scots to despair, and in a tearful outburst to the English ambassador she vented her feelings: “I accuse not your mistress, though she be loath to give unto me my desire in that which perchance any would be loath to do; but, so long a time to keep me in doubt, and now to answer me with nothing, I will find great fault, and fear it shall turn to her discredit more than to my loss.”
The queen “wept her fill,” as Randolph reported, then she did something entirely unexpected: She took a husband of her own choice—a Catholic so close to the English throne that his claim combined with Mary’s made them a formidable pair indeed. He was the Scottish queen’s first cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley,b a spoiled, grasping lightweight who happened to be incredibly handsome. Mary was smitten from the moment she met him. “Her Majesty took very well with him,” reported Sir James Melville, “and said that he was the properest and best-proportioned long man that ever she had seen.”
Nothing could dissuade the queen from her single-minded ambition to marry her cousin—not the objections of her own Protestant subjects, and certainly not those of the English queen. Mary made it quite clear that she was tired of Elizabeth’s “overlordship” and said that for too long she had been “trained with [Elizabeth’s] fair speeches and beguiled in her expectations.” Now she had found a man she loved, and insisted she would have him.
Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador, wrote despairingly of the Scottish queen’s headlong behavior. He actually liked and respected Mary but now found her “so altered with affection towards the Lord Darnley that she hath brought her honour in question, her estate in hazard, her country to be torn in pieces.… The Queen in her love is so transported.… What shall become of her, or what life with him she shall lead, that already takes so much upon him as to control and command her, I leave it to others to think.”
As it turned out, Mary’s marriage was an epic disaster. Not only did it provoke rebellion in her kingdom, but Darnley himself was a crushing disappointment—behind his good looks was a swaggering weakling with a penchant for booze and brothels, who quickly earned Mary’s total contempt. “He could not be persuaded upon to yield the smallest thing to please her,” Randolph reported. “What shall become of him, I know not, but it is greatly to be feared that he can have no long life among this people.” Indeed, he would not.
Mary’s hatred of her husband culminated with his involvement in the brutal murder of her Italian secretary, David Rizzio, whose close relationship with the queen made Darnley insanely jealous. Less than a year later, Darnley was killed in his turn—assassinated, some said, with the queen’s complicity. Though Mary professed to be horrified by her husband’s violent demise, she did nothing to find or apprehend those responsible for it. Her cousin Elizabeth was appalled by her inaction.
“I cannot but tell you what all the world is thinking,” the English queen wrote. “Men say that, instead of seizing the murderers, you are looking through your fingers while they escape; that you will not punish those who have done you so great a service, as though the thing would never have taken place had not the doers of it been assured of impunity.”
Elizabeth went on to assure Mary that she did not believe the monstrous accusations and wished her cousin “all imaginable good, and all blessings which you yourself would wish for.” Thus, the queen continued, “for this very reason I exhort, I advise, I implore you deeply to consider of the matter—at once, if it be the nearest friend you have, to lay your hands upon the man who has been guilty of the crime—to let no interest, no persuasion, keep you from proving to everyone that you are a noble Princess and a loyal wife.”
But far from arresting the chief suspect in Darnley’s murder—James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell—the Queen of Scots married him. The blustery Lord Bothwell, who had served as a close advisor to the queen, was, according to one contemporary description, “high in his own conceit, proud, vicious and vainglorious above measure, one who would attempt anything out of ambition.” Just six weeks after Darnley’s death, Bothwell staged an abduction of Queen Mary and allegedly raped her. Then, after securing a quick divorce from his wife, he and the queen were wed.
Elizabeth was utterly revolted by her cousin’s actions. Randolph reported that she had “great mi
sliking of that Queen’s doing, which now she doth so much detest that she is ashamed of her.” For a woman who believed as fervently as Elizabeth did in the divinely ordained nature of majesty, who sacrificed so much personal happiness for the welfare of her own kingdom, Mary’s base behavior was inexcusable—a monstrous betrayal of monarchy. Nevertheless, she would never countenance the dethroning of an anointed queen, as the rebellious Protestant lords in Scotland planned to do with Mary, replacing her with her infant son, James. It was, Elizabeth declared, “a matter hardly to be digested … by us or any other monarch.”
“Elizabeth was outraged by the notion that a queen could be divested of her regal dignity as if it were no more than a tattered old cloak,” wrote her biographer Anne Somerset, “and felt that by accepting so profane a concept, she herself would be eroding the very foundations of Kingship.”
On June 15, 1567, the Queen of Scots was taken prisoner by her own subjects after a standoff between her forces and those of the dissident Scottish lords.c Instead of celebrating the downfall of a rival who had threatened her since her accession, Elizabeth was horrified by the fate of a fellow sovereign. Majesty was at stake, and that made the English queen impervious to the advantages of a defanged Scottish queen—at least for a time. She was determined to defend not so much Mary the woman, whose behavior put her almost beyond redemption, but Mary the anointed monarch.
“Now for your comfort in such adversity as we have heard you should be in … we assure you, that whatsoever we can imagine meet to be for your honour and safety that shall lie in our power, we will perform the same,” Elizabeth wrote to Mary; “that it shall well appear you have a good neighbour, a dear sister, a faithful friend; and so shall you undoubtedly always find us and prove us to be indeed towards you.”
To ensure Mary’s safety and the preservation of her rights, Elizabeth sent Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to Scotland with a stern warning to the rebel lords that if they deposed their queen, “we will make ourselves a plain party against them, to the revenge of their Sovereign, for example to all posterity.”
Yet despite Elizabeth’s threats, the Scottish lords forced their queen’s abdication on July 24, 1567, and continued to keep her captive. Mary was twenty-five at the time and had just miscarried the twins she had conceived with Bothwell. Five days later, her thirteen-month old son was crowned King James VI.
The English queen was incensed when she received the news and, according to her chief advisor, William Cecil, “increased in such offence towards these Lords that in good earnest she began to devise to revenge it by war.” Angry though she may have been, Elizabeth was still a practical politician who soon recognized the need to deal with the new regime in Scotland—a Protestant government that was, after all, far friendlier to her than Mary had been. So, while the queen maintained outward demonstrations of outrage over her cousin’s treatment, she quietly allowed her representatives to deal with the Scottish lords behind the scenes. James Stuart, Earl of Moray, the illegitimate half brother of the deposed Queen of Scots who now served as regent for her son, James VI, perceptively noted that “although the Queen’s Majesty seems not altogether to allow the present state here,” he was certain “but she likes it in heart well enough.”
Such was the situation when, on May 2, 1568, Mary Stuart managed to escape her castle prison with the assistance of Moray’s younger half brother George Douglas, who, it was said, “was in a fantasy of love with her.” The fallen queen then gathered an army of supporters and confronted her half brother Moray’s forces outside of Glasgow. The ensuing Battle of Langside was a bitter defeat for Mary, who was forced to flee the field and spend the next three days as a hunted fugitive before finally crossing into England, where she found herself a most unwelcome guest.
Mary came to England fully expecting her cousin’s assistance in regaining her throne. “I am now forced out of my kingdom and driven to such straits that, next to God, I have no hope but in your goodness,” she wrote to Elizabeth. “I beseech you, therefore my dearest sister, that I may be conducted to your presence, that I may acquaint you with all my affairs.”
To receive Mary was highly problematic, however. That would signal tacit approval of the refugee queen’s behavior and thus obligate Elizabeth to help restore her to her throne. The English queen was inclined at first to help her cousin, but her counselors convinced her that aiding Mary would not only alienate the friendly Protestant regime in Scotland but open the way for an enemy to regain power. And even in her diminished state, Mary remained a dangerous adversary who had still not renounced her claim to Elizabeth’s crown.
Almost as dangerous as Mary Stuart’s restoration was her continued presence in England, where, besides enticing disaffected Catholics to her cause, she could invite foreign intervention as well. Indeed, she seemed to be plotting almost from the time of her arrival. In a note smuggled to the Spanish ambassador, she wrote, “Tell your master [Philip II] that if he will help me, I shall be queen of England in three months, and mass shall be said throughout the land.”
The former Queen of Scots was proving to be a most vexing problem for Elizabeth. She could not keep her cousin too closely confined for fear of retaliation from the Catholic powers in Europe, nor could she allow her to roam free and cause untold havoc within the realm. It was Mary’s half brother, the regent Moray, who offered a solution of sorts when he produced the so-called Casket Letters—a series of missives purportedly written by Mary to Bothwell in which she implicated herself in Darnley’s murder.
The Duke of Norfolk advised Queen Elizabeth that the letters described “such inordinate love between Mary and Bothwell, her loathsomeness and abhorring of her husband that was murdered, in such sort as every good and godly man cannot but detest and abhor the same.”
Mary, on the other hand, insisted that the letters were forgeries (as have some historians), but she refused to defend herself before a commission that had been gathered by Elizabeth to examine her case. It was beneath her dignity as a queen, she maintained, to answer to men with no authority over her. Thus, without her cooperation, the commission closed with the verdict that nothing had been proven.
It was a victory for Elizabeth. Mary was publicly disgraced by the Casket Letters, freeing the English queen from any obligation to help her. At the same time, the inconclusive verdict allowed her to avoid actually condemning her cousin while giving her an excuse to hold Mary under more restraint as the cloud of suspicion lingered. Still, as Cecil warned Elizabeth, “the Queen of Scots is and always shall be a dangerous person to your estate.”
Mary Stuart justified Cecil’s alarm time and time again, involving herself in any number of plots to depose Elizabeth and place herself on the English throne. “The poor foolish woman will not desist until she loses her head,” declared Mary’s former brother-in-law, Charles IX of France, when she was found complicit in one of the more serious conspiracies against the English queen.d “She will certainly bring about her own execution. If she does so, it will be her own fault.”
Prescient as Charles’s remark would later prove, the last thing Elizabeth wanted was to execute her cousin. Mary had flown to her realm “as a bird that had flown to her for succor from the hawk,” as the queen put it, and no matter how pernicious her cousin’s plotting, she could not consider the judicial killing of another queen. It was her continued adherence to this principle that would cause Elizabeth so much agony years later when she was confronted with the most diabolical of all Mary’s schemes against her.
Averse as she was to killing her cousin, Elizabeth showed no such reluctance in keeping Mary under increasingly close confinement until, in 1585, she was sealed off from the world entirely at a fortified manor house called Chartley, under the vigilant eye of Sir Amias Paulet. The austere jailor took great pride in the security measures he devised to keep the former Queen of Scots utterly isolated, ensuring that no secret correspondence could ever be smuggled in. “I cannot imagine how it may be possible for them to convey a piece of paper
as big as my finger,” Paulet boasted.
But despite all Paulet’s precautions, Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s secretary of state and so-called spymaster, still feared that Mary would find a way to communicate with her allies and foment trouble. Therefore, he wanted her to be able to send and receive correspondence in a controlled way so that he could better monitor her schemes. To that end he used a shady character by the name of Gilbert Gifford, described by one acquaintance as “the most notable double and treble villain that ever lived.” Gifford had been in Paris, where he agreed to be a courier for Mary’s agent there, but upon his return to England he was apprehended and used by Walsingham to serve the secretary’s own purposes.
Gifford was sent to the French embassy, where most correspondence intended for Mary was sent in the hopes that the ambassador could find the means to deliver it. There he announced that he had found a way to surreptitiously slip correspondence into Chartley and offered to act as courier. The ambassador agreed to test Gifford’s system, and soon enough Mary was thrilled to receive a letter from him. In a return post, also smuggled out by Gifford, she urged the ambassador to trust the courier and rely on his system.
What Mary did not know was that each letter sent to her was first delivered to Walsingham’s office, where it was opened, decoded, and examined for content, then meticulously resealed and sent north by messenger to a cooperative local brewer, who would hide it within the bunghole of a beer barrel he delivered to Chartley. There Mary’s steward would retrieve it and then send out Mary’s letters in the empty barrel, which started the whole process again in reverse. It was a lethally efficient system that would soon ensnare the Queen of Scots.
As it turned out, a Catholic priest named John Ballard had received assurances from the Spanish ambassador to France that Philip II would send troops to England if Queen Elizabeth was assassinated first. Armed with this encouragement, Ballard sought out Anthony Babington, a wealthy Catholic Englishman known to be sympathetic to Mary. Babington, in turn, gathered a group of trusted associates who would work together to kill Queen Elizabeth, then free Mary in anticipation of the Spanish invasion.
Behind the Palace Doors Page 6
