by Helen Castor
Mary was safe for now, shielded by her ‘cousin that wishes you a better mind’, as Elizabeth told her in February that year.11 But still, religious division within England was growing deeper, harder-edged, more brutal. Now that the pope had absolved all Catholics of their allegiance to Elizabeth, her ministers saw all Catholics as a potential threat, a silent cancer spreading poison through the body politic. In their minds, Catholicism and sedition were becoming one, and they were in no mood to wait for the appearance of a plot more competently organized than Ridolfi’s before taking action. After all, as Walsingham had observed in 1568, ‘there is less danger in fearing too much than too little’.12 Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects found themselves caught on the horns of a horrifying dilemma: whether to betray their God or their queen, to put at risk their immortal soul in the next life or their bodily safety in this one.
Elizabeth herself saw no advantage in forcing this choice any further than she had to. In 1571, parliament proposed a crackdown on Catholic recusants, those who had so far sought an accommodation between their country and their faith by staying away from church on Sundays, as well as ‘church papists’, who sat through services but kept their own active participation to a minimum. The plan, approved by both Lords and Commons, was to narrow these loopholes by ratcheting up fines for non-attendance and requiring all the queen’s subjects to take communion at least once a year. The queen herself then vetoed the bill – but not, for all her ministers’ complaints, because she was reckless about her own security. Elizabeth preferred not to meddle with the means by which her people might satisfy their inward conscience. What mattered to her was their outward loyalty and obedience. The acts to which she did assent, therefore, were those aimed at Catholicism in its radicalized form. Now, it would be high treason to ‘compass, imagine, invent, devise or intend the death or destruction’ of the queen; to question or challenge her right to the throne; to call her ‘heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or an usurper of the crown’; or to ‘move or to stir any foreigners or strangers with force to invade this realm’.13
But, as the world turned darker, the line between personal and political Catholicism was not easy to hold. On 24 August 1572, St Bartholomew’s Day, Huguenot leaders were assassinated in Paris by ultra-Catholics within the French regime. Over the next days and weeks, a ghastly carnival of mob violence spread throughout the capital and into the provinces. By the time the slaughter ended, perhaps 10,000 Protestants had lost their lives. France had been the bulwark against all-out religious war in Europe; now the formation of an aggressive alliance of great Catholic powers seemed inevitable. ‘Can we think that the fire kindled here in France will extend itself no further?’, wrote Walsingham, who as English ambassador had witnessed the horror on the streets of Paris.14 Elizabeth and her court dressed in mourning black, coastal defences were reinforced against the threat of imminent invasion, and the Bishop of London spoke for many when he concluded what else ought to be done to ensure the safety of the realm: ‘Forthwith to cut off the Scottish queen’s head.’15
The English queen, however, had other ideas. Until a Catholic league existed in reality rather than merely in prospect, everything remained to play for in diplomatic affairs. By the winter of 1572 it was clear that, for the time being, the French would continue to immolate themselves instead of turning their fire on their neighbours across the Channel. Not only that, but the apparently inexorable slide into open enmity between England and Spain was halted, temporarily at least, by Elizabeth’s refusal to be drawn into military support for the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands. Revolt against an anointed sovereign, even if it were Philip – like the execution of an anointed sovereign, even if it were Mary – was not action she was willing to endorse.
All the same, the fact that the queen was still unmarried and childless as she passed her fortieth birthday in the autumn of 1573 meant that, for her loyal advisers, contemplating the political future felt like staring into the abyss. And still Elizabeth would not decide nor even discuss the issue of the succession. She, who had been the ‘second person’ in her sister’s reign,16 knew all too well that acknowledging an heir would provide a talismanic focus for the disaffected among her subjects, while alienating those who disagreed with her choice. As she said to parliament in the spring of 1576, ‘let good heed be taken lest in reaching too far after future good, you peril not the present, or begin to quarrel and fall by dispute together by the ears before it be decided who shall wear my crown’.17 Her ministers were left clinging to the hope that taking a husband might yet bring Elizabeth an heir of her own flesh and blood.
In July 1575, Robert Dudley tried one last roll of the dice. For nineteen long days he entertained the queen in extravagant style at his castle of Kenilworth. There were fireworks and feasts and all manner of choreographed amusements, from bear-baiting to acrobatics to dramatic interludes peopled by gods, goddesses, nymphs and, in one eye-catching case, a swimming mermaid eighteen feet long. Among them all, a persistent theme was marriage and its benefits, even when compared to the evident virtues of virginity. But, much as she adored her ‘Eyes’, Elizabeth was neither impressed nor amused. The most elaborate and least subtle masque – a debate between Diana, goddess of chastity, and Juno, queen of the gods – was clear in its conclusion: ‘How necessary were for worthy queens to wed, that know you well …’18 This particular worthy queen, however, had vetted the script in advance and refused to sit through it. Instead, she left Kenilworth early, with the disconsolate playwright, George Gascoigne, running beside her horse in an attempt to deliver an extemporized soliloquy on a similar theme. Dudley had his answer. Rumours already whispered that his attention had been caught by one of the queen’s cousins, Katherine Knollys’s beautiful daughter Lettice, the Countess of Essex. Three years later, the pair married discreetly, though not discreetly enough to avoid Elizabeth’s rage when the news finally reached her.
By then, she had embarked on another courtship of her own. In 1574 the Duke of Anjou had succeeded Charles IX as King Henri III of France, and now their next brother François, Duke of Alençon, stepped into Anjou’s shoes as a prospective husband for the English queen. By 1578 a French alliance once again seemed to offer reinforcement against the threat of spreading conflict in the Netherlands, and for Elizabeth a preferable alternative to the military intervention her councillors were urging upon her. She dallied first by proxy with the French ambassador, Jean de Simier, her ‘Ape’, and then – when he arrived in England in the summer of 1579 – with her ‘Frog’, twenty-four-year-old Alençon himself.19 The duke was badly scarred by a childhood bout of smallpox, but beguilingly attentive, and soon he and Elizabeth were playing out a courtly romance of startling intensity. When he left ten days later, Alençon protested (at least by Simier’s report) that the queen’s ‘divine beauties’ had made her ‘gaoler of his heart and mistress of his liberty’.20
The prospect of this French match was deeply controversial both within Elizabeth’s government – Cecil cautiously in favour, Walsingham and Dudley emphatically against – and beyond the confines of the court. In the month of Alençon’s visit, a pamphlet by a lawyer named John Stubbs was secretly printed and widely circulated. The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage argued fervently that the ‘paradise’ of Elizabeth’s realm would be lost entirely if a ‘serpent in the shape of a man’ were to ‘seduce our Eve’, a peril to be feared all the more because this Eve ‘is also our Adam and sovereign lord or lordly lady of this land’.21 And Stubbs – whose right hand was chopped off as punishment for inciting sedition – was not the only one transfixed by the fact that the human incarnation of England’s body politic was female.
Cecil, whose interaction with his sovereign seemed at times to be an exercise in willed suspension of disbelief, still insisted that Elizabeth could give birth to an heir – an assertion he supported in 1578 with an astonishingly detailed memorandum on the physical condition of the forty-
five-year-old queen: ‘considering the proportion of her body, having no impediment of smallness of stature, of largeness in body, nor no sickness nor lack of natural functions in those things that properly belong to the procreation of children, but contrary wise, by judgement of physicians that know her estate in those things and by the opinion of women, being more acquainted with her majesty’s body in such things as properly appertain, to show probability of her aptness to have children, even at this day’.22 And while this intimate level of physical scrutiny could be justified by English affairs of state, Catholic hostility on the continent generated ferociously salacious speculation about Elizabeth’s bodily depravities. The bastard daughter of the great whore Anne Boleyn was, after all, a Jezebel and a she-wolf, whose ‘unspeakable and incredible variety of lust’ defiled and corrupted her kingdom.23
That damning phrase was William Allen’s – or would be, when his rhetoric reached its rousing peak in the 1580s. Allen was the inspirational leader of those English Catholics who had chosen to live in exile rather than in Elizabeth’s Protestant England. The English Colleges he founded in 1568 at the Flemish town of Douai (relocating ten years later to Reims in France) and at Rome in 1576 were training young English priests to be smuggled back into their homeland, in order to minister in secret to the English men and women who were attempting to remain faithful to Rome. They were also – at least in the eyes of Elizabeth’s alarmed advisers – the menacing advance guard of a coming Catholic invasion.
Allen’s first missionaries reached England as early as 1574. Three years later a priest named Cuthbert Mayne became the mission’s first martyr when he was hanged, drawn and quartered for the treason of upholding papal authority in England. By 1580 there were 100 of Allen’s seminarians clandestinely at work among Elizabeth’s subjects. In that year, they were joined by two charismatic Jesuits – members of the militant Catholic order founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540 – named Robert Persons and Edmund Campion. Campion’s arrest, interrogation under torture and eventual execution in December 1581 served to intensify fears on both sides: among the queen’s ministers that the English state was under assault from an enemy within; and among English Catholics that they now faced a campaign of brutal repression. By then, parliament had already returned to the question of the means that might now be necessary to deal with the Catholic threat. The 1581 Act ‘to retain the queen’s majesty’s subjects in their due obedience’ defined anyone converting to Rome or seeking to convert others as a traitor, while increasing the penalties for saying and hearing Mass, and for refusing to attend church, to levels that would overstretch the pockets of all but the wealthiest of Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects.24
The queen’s attempt to build a Church on the principle of enforcing obedience to her sovereignty without making ‘windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts’ (as Francis Bacon, son of the Lord Keeper, later put it)25 was foundering for lack of allies on either side of this yawning divide. The Jesuit missionaries would not countenance any compromise in the practice of their faith. Elizabeth’s Protestant advisers, spiritual and temporal, continued to push for further doctrinal reform and ever more draconian reprisals. The former were clearly dangerous; the latter a source of deep irritation to their monarch. ‘There is an Italian proverb’, she told her bishops in 1585, ‘which sayeth, “From mine enemy let me defend myself, but from a pretensed friend, good Lord deliver me.” ’26 Her councillors could hardly have been more devoted to the cause of her safety and her kingdom’s security: in Cecil and Walsingham, her ‘Spirit’ and her ‘Moor’,27 she had two servants of rare ability who were prepared to exhaust themselves (and, in the case of the network of spies Walsingham was now developing, his own coffers) in her defence. But they were just as frustrated with Elizabeth as she was with them. Walsingham, who had become the queen’s Principal Secretary after Cecil gave up that office to become Lord Treasurer in 1572, made oblique reference to his mistress in 1577 as ‘us who are in a deep sleep and heedlessly secure’.28 He could not see that his insomniac queen, whose life had never been safe, had developed a different understanding of where the route to personal and political security might lie.
In the midst of what Christopher Hatton called ‘so great and apparent dangers’,29 Elizabeth was at her most febrile, unreadable not through mask-like opacity but through performative volatility. When the Duke of Alençon renewed his suit for her hand in 1581, her initial expressions of reluctance were followed, when he returned to her side, by an apparently unrestrained exhibition of affection and commitment. ‘ “You may write this to the king: that the Duke of Alençon shall be my husband”,’ she told the French ambassador at a public audience that November, before kissing the duke on the mouth and exchanging rings with him.30 But the Spanish ambassador, reporting the scene to King Philip, was unconvinced that she meant it; and when Alençon sailed away in February 1582, the queen’s last courtship was over. At forty-eight, Elizabeth would never give birth to an heir. Her refusal to marry could no longer be construed, by herself or anyone else, as a way of keeping options open. The poem she wrote on the duke’s departure ostensibly spoke of a vanished love, but seems also to offer a meditation – like Elizabeth herself, hiding in plain sight – on an imagined future now definitively lost, and the dissonant pressures she had always faced in the attempt to defend her autonomy:
I grieve and dare not show my discontent;
I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant;
I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.
I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.31
Now that Elizabeth was beyond doubt the last of the Tudor line, the unacknowledged heir she kept under guard at Sheffield embodied a yet more intractable dilemma and a yet more insistent threat. At almost forty, Mary of Scotland was struggling with deteriorating health and sore, swollen legs that made it difficult to walk, but she had lost none of the chaotic energy with which she continued to seek release or rescue. (‘I notice certain contradictory points in this communication’, one of Philip of Spain’s advisers observed diplomatically after receiving a message from Mary in April 1581.)32 What Mary did not know was that her letters were passing through the careful hands of Francis Walsingham before reaching their intended recipients. And in November 1583, with the arrest of a young Catholic gentleman named Francis Throckmorton, Walsingham uncovered a plot to co-ordinate an invasion of England by Mary’s ultra-Catholic French cousin the Duke of Guise, backed by Spain and the Vatican, with a simultaneous uprising of English Catholics in order to depose Elizabeth and put Mary in her place.
It was clear that Mary was involved. Through intermediaries, she had encouraged Throckmorton’s activities. For Walsingham’s purposes, however, her guilt was not clear enough. Without watertight evidence of her personal approval of Elizabeth’s murder, there was no hope of persuading the queen to sign a warrant for her death. But if there had been any uncertainty about the danger in which Elizabeth stood, it was dispelled in July 1584 when William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch Protestants, was shot dead at his home in Delft by a Catholic fanatic. The assassination was shocking, and the potential parallel plain. In response, the queen at last agreed to send soldiers to support the Dutch rebels, although she instructed Robert Dudley, who led the expedition in 1585, ‘that you rather bend your cause to make a defensive than offensive war’.33 Meanwhile, Cecil and Walsingham drafted an extraordinary ‘bond of association’ by which thousands of Elizabeth’s subjects swore to execute anyone who threatened her life or – a provision aimed directly at Mary – who claimed the throne if she were killed. In the parliament of 1584–5 the bond was then given legal force and process through an ‘Act for the Queen’s Surety’.34 The net was closing, for all that Elizabeth continued to resist these practical manifestations of her ministers’ fears: ‘I am so wounded with the late sharp and most heavy speeches of her majesty to myself’, Cecil wro
te, near despair, as the act was passed.35
But there was not much longer to wait. In the spring of 1586, a new conspiracy began to form around another well-born young Catholic named Anthony Babington. This time invasion by Spain, revolt in England and Mary’s glorious accession would all be heralded by Elizabeth’s murder. And this time Walsingham knew everything. He held back, watching the plot take shape, until on 19 July he got what he wanted: the decoded text of an encrypted letter Mary had dictated two days earlier, signalling her endorsement of Babington’s plan to kill Elizabeth. Under the statute of the previous year, a trial was both necessary and inevitable, and Elizabeth had to give in; but when Mary was found guilty and the sentence of death proclaimed, the queen refused to take the last and fatal step. That November, when parliament petitioned for Mary’s execution, Elizabeth spoke of the impasse in which she found herself trapped. ‘But now for answer unto you, you must take an answer without answer at my hands,’ she told her Lords and Commons. ‘I pray you therefore, let this answer answerless content you for this present, assuring yourselves that I am now and ever will be most careful to do that which shall be best for your preservation. And be not too earnest to move me to do that which may tend to the loss of that which you are all most desirous to keep.’36
