Lady Mary Grey hoped that Elizabeth would forgive her actions, because in marrying a commoner she had ruled herself out of the succession. But she too had been kept in country-house prisons, while Keyes was crammed in a tiny cell in the Fleet prison. It had been the porters in charge of palace security who had saved Mary I when St James’s Palace came under attack from the Wyatt rebels in 1554, slamming shut the palace gates, while the guard had fled. Elizabeth felt betrayed by Keyes and he was cruelly treated in prison. As for Lady Mary Grey, although she posed no threat, Elizabeth intended to use her fate to act as a warning to any of the next generation of Tudor blood to obey her in the matter of their marriages, or expect severe punishment.
As one head was cut from the hydra of royal cousins another, inevitably, grew stronger. Elizabeth, aged thirty-four, was increasingly unlikely to have children, and now the future of England lay once again with the twenty-five-year-old Queen of Scots. But four months after Katherine’s death, in May 1568, Mary made another miscalculation. Having escaped her island prison in Scotland she sailed for England, from where she sent Elizabeth a letter. Mary had little doubt her fellow queen would help restore her to her throne and expressed ‘the confidence I have in you, not only for the safety of my life, but also to aid and assist me in my just quarrel’. She also looked forward to their first ever meeting: ‘I entreat you’, ‘Mary continued’ ‘to send to fetch me as soon as you possibly can, for I am in a pitiable condition, not only for a queen but for a gentlewoman, for I have nothing in the world but what I had when I made my escape’. Her adventures, riding across country and travelling at night, ‘I hope to declare before you, if it please you to have pity’, Mary concluded.
Elizabeth did not want Mary, Queen of Scots at court since she would have been obliged to treat her as a visiting sovereign, and so raise Mary’s profile as her heir. But it was useful to have Mary in her power, and that is how Elizabeth intended things should stay. She ordered that Mary be kept under guard in the north, while her council debated what they thought she should do next with her reluctant royal guest. Mary hoped the moderate Protestant establishment who had supported her in the past would do so again, and so they did – at first. Robert Dudley was amongst those who continued to take the pragmatic view that England’s long-term security demanded a named successor. They believed they could still resolve the difficulty of Mary’s Catholicism by marrying her to England’s premier nobleman, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. The great-grandson of the victor of Flodden, he was Protestant, as well as young, handsome and popular. Mary responded positively to the suggested marriage and even began using the Protestant Book of Common Prayer for spiritual contemplation. It was certain that Cecil’s political ruin would follow if Mary was named as Elizabeth’s heir, but many believed it was time he was cut down to size. Unfortunately, Elizabeth was not among them.
When it emerged that Elizabeth would never allow Mary to marry Norfolk, the court campaign behind the proposal collapsed. As Cecil emerged victorious his opponents assumed he would wreak revenge. Most fearful were Norfolk’s allies in the north, the Catholic Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland. Rather than risk dying in prison, and encouraged by their wives, the earls raised a rebellion in the north ‘against a new-found religion and heresy’ and ‘for the preservation of the person of the Queen of Scots’. Elizabeth had long feared a revolt in favour of her successor. Now it was happening. Yet this northern rebellion was no Pilgrimage of Grace. In November 1569, when the rebel earls took Durham, their force of around 4,000 foot soldiers and 2,000 horse was already dwindling. Within six weeks it was over. But it had touched a raw nerve with the queen, and her vengeance was to be on a scale unmatched by any of her Tudor predecessors.
Elizabeth ordered hangings in every village involved in the revolt. On 23 January 1570 one of her officers in the North Riding of Yorkshire reported ‘six hundred and odd’ executed, and that the people were ‘in marvellous fear so that I trust there shall never such thing happen in these parts again’; twelve days later another official confirmed they had ‘already executed above five hundred of the poorer sort’.23 The estimated total is around 800–900. This was four times more than Elizabeth’s father had hanged, beheaded and burned in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, which had seen 30,000 rebels in the field. It was also nine times the number her sister Mary I had executed after the Wyatt revolt, which had come so close to overrunning the court. In 1570 Elizabeth, too, had earned the sobriquet ‘Bloody’.
The Elizabethan bishops pressed the queen to go further. They informed Elizabeth it was her duty to execute the Queen of Scots, along with all those who threatened the security of the Protestant religion. Elizabeth refused. Mary’s situation was a little too reminiscent of her own position under Mary I, when her name was repeatedly linked to plots against her sister. ‘I have’, she recalled, ‘tasted of the practices against my sister’, and she remembered well, ‘There were occasions in me at that time, I stood in danger of my life, my sister was so incensed against me.’24 Imprisoning her female cousins had served Elizabeth well enough in the past, and she believed she had no need to set a dangerous precedent in the execution of a monarch. Mary, Queen of Scots realised, however, that she was now as trapped as a deer at bay, the hounds barking at her throat awaiting only the huntsman’s signal to end her life.
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EXIT MARGARET DOUGLAS
A HEART-SHAPED LOCKET KNOWN AS THE LENNOX JEWEL IS TODAY one of the most important pieces in the royal collection. Commissioned by Margaret Douglas and her husband, it tells the story of their happy marriage, of their grief for Darnley and of their determination to protect the interests of their grandson, King James. The case is gold, studded with precious stones, and has a white enamel border which reads in Scots: ‘Who hopes still constantly with patience shall obtain victory in their claim’: that is, their claims to the thrones of Scotland and England, united in James.
Opening the locket reveals two hearts pierced by arrows and the initials MSL for Margaret and Matthew Stuart Lennox. Only ‘Death will dissolve’ their marriage, it says, and a further motto in Scots forewarns ‘What we Resolve’. On the back is the image of the fallen Darnley with a crown at his side. This is the crown of Scotland, which he had worn as king consort. From it springs a sunflower – James – turning towards the sun, which represents the English crown. A further image known as the Pelican in its Piety depicts a bird drawing blood from its own breast to feed its young, just as Margaret and Lennox will do everything possible to nourish James until he is King of England.1
Margaret and Lennox had good reason to be anxious for James’ future. There was a sharp reminder of Scottish violence on 23 January 1570, when Elizabeth’s ally, the regent Moray, was shot and killed in Scotland. Margaret and Lennox had come to see Moray as James’ protector. Now Moray was dead Margaret was determined they should take control of James’ care. ‘I doubt not you know partly how many sorrowful grieves I have passed’, Margaret wrote to Cecil, and shared her fears that she faced more losses. She had been married to Lennox for twenty-six years, she reminded Cecil, yet she could not calm her husband in his distress because ‘he sees plainly the destruction of that innocent little king near at hand’. She urged that any anxieties concerning their religious affiliations be put out of the queen’s mind, and Lennox be given permission to return to Scotland for James’ protection.2
It was a mark of how remarkably persuasive Margaret could be that Cecil and Elizabeth allowed Lennox to return to Scotland to replace Moray as James’ regent, while Margaret remained in England as his ambassador at court. The couple kept in close touch, with Lennox relying on his ‘Good Meg’ for her advice and intelligence. But the following year, 1571, Lennox was shot in the back during a raid on Stirling made by supporters of Elizabeth’s prisoner, Mary, Queen of Scots. The five-year-old King James would never forget seeing his grandfather brought back into the castle with his ‘bowls cut’. As Lennox lay bleeding he begged the Scots lords to protect
James. ‘If the bairn’s well, all’s well’, he said, and with his last breath he sent his love to Margaret: ‘Thus treason bereft me of my son and my mate’, a memorial verse about Margaret Douglas later recalled.
Elizabeth too was soon to be threatened with assassination. Only a few months later William Cecil – by now granted the title of Lord Burghley – uncovered a plot that shocked Elizabeth to the core. It involved a Florentine banker and double agent called Roberto di Ridolfi, and a plan to capture Elizabeth during her summer progress, then replace her on the throne with Mary, Queen of Scots, and Norfolk, backed by an invading army of 6,000 Spaniards. The Duke of Norfolk was tried and convicted of treason in January 1572 and executed early in the summer morning of 2 June. Elizabeth continued in her refusal to execute Mary but she had undergone a sea change in her attitude to her fellow queen. Mary had been the focus of the rebellion of the northern earls, and now of the Ridolfi plot. Elizabeth had no doubt there would be others, and in verse she described Mary angrily as ‘The daughter of debate, That discord aye doth sow.’
In a nod to please the backers of the Grey claim, Elizabeth had permitted the widowed Hertford to return to court in the aftermath of the Northern rebellion. A few days after Norfolk’s execution she also now released Hertford’s sister-in-law, Lady Mary Grey, from her long imprisonment. Thomas Keyes, her husband, had died the previous September and Mary Grey’s bitterness at being freed only when she was a widow is recalled in her portrait, which hangs today at the prime minister’s country residence, Chequers. In her hair Mary Grey wears carnations and gillyflowers for love, fidelity and remembrance, while her hand is raised to show her wedding ring to the viewer. She would live quietly for a handful more years before dying, childless, in 1578 during an outbreak of plague.
Only one of the grandchildren of Henry VIII’s sisters still remained unmarried – Margaret Douglas’ youngest son, Charles Stuart. Margaret was desperate to find him a bride, but after the harsh treatment of the Grey sisters and their spouses, not to mention the execution of Norfolk, no nobleman was willing to cross Elizabeth by agreeing to a match. Margaret hoped Cecil might help her and hinted to him that her teenage son needed a father figure.3 She hoped he would agree to become the boy’s guardian, so taking on some of the responsibility of arranging a marriage. Cecil declined to take the bait, but in 1574 one of the most upwardly mobile women in Elizabethan England, Bess of Hardwick, did approach Margaret.
The clever red-haired Bess had once served as a lady-in-waiting to Frances Brandon, the mother of the Grey sisters. She had married her second husband, Sir William Cavendish, at the Grey family seat in Leicestershire, and at least four members of the Grey family had played godparent to their children. She treasured a portrait of Lady Jane Grey, as well as her letters, almost as if they were holy relics. Bess was currently on her fourth and richest husband: George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, the jailor to Mary, Queen of Scots. She had married her eldest son and daughter to two of Shrewsbury’s children. But she couldn’t find anyone she considered suitable for her third daughter, Elizabeth Cavendish, and so Bess had decided to use the immense wealth she had acquired through her marriages as bait to catch Charles Stuart, the unmarried heir of Tudor blood. Margaret responded positively to Bess’s approach. Bess was no fool, she knew, and Elizabeth had always liked Bess, which would help when news of the marriage emerged.
The two mothers laid their plans around the midsummer of 1574 and in October they were ready to carry them out.4 Margaret set off with her nineteen-year-old son from London, ostensibly travelling north to her home in Yorkshire. The bells were rung in villages as Margaret’s train approached, and people came out from their homes to see Henry VIII’s last niece and her son pass by. When the horses, carriages and carts reached Nottinghamshire, a messenger was sent to Bess, who was staying ‘by chance’ at her husband’s seat at Rufford Abbey. She rode out to meet Margaret and Charles, and invited them to stay. A little while later Shrewsbury received a letter from his wife. Bess told him that Margaret had fallen ill shortly after arriving at Rufford and had spent five days in bed, during which time Charles Stuart had fallen in love with her daughter. The love was so intense, Bess warned her husband, that Charles was sickening and she believed it was necessary for his health that he should marry the girl as soon as possible.5 Shortly afterwards – certainly before anyone could intervene – they were, indeed, married.
Charles Stuart’s marriage to a commoner was far less threatening to Queen Elizabeth than his elder brother Darnley’s marriage to Mary, Queen of Scots had been. But Elizabeth did want to know if Mary had played some hand in the marriage. Margaret had been in touch with some of Mary’s close allies since at least the midsummer of 1574 and when she had expressed an interest to Elizabeth in visiting Bess, Elizabeth had warned her not to go to Sheffield Lodge where Mary was imprisoned.6 If she did people might think she ‘did agree with the Queen of Scots’, Elizabeth had explained pointedly. To this Margaret had retorted that she was ‘made of flesh and blood and could never forget the murder of my child [Darnley] . . . for if I would, I were a devil’.7 Margaret now explained to Cecil that as Rufford was only a mile out of their way on the road north, and Bess had invited her and Charles to stay in person, she could hardly have refused her friend. She assumed Rufford was not considered off limits by Elizabeth, it ‘being near thirty miles from Sheffield’ where the Queen of Scots was held.
Elizabeth eventually concluded that the arrangement of the marriage between Margaret’s son and Bess’s daughter had only ‘money at the ground of it’, and, with nothing else ‘that may cause twitch’, Margaret was released after a few months of house arrest at her home in Hackney.8 As for Bess, she managed to buy back the queen’s good favour with little more than the gift of an expensive cloak she embroidered for Elizabeth as a New Year’s gift.
Margaret was, however, soon establishing a rapprochement with Mary, Queen of Scots, just as Elizabeth had feared she might. Margaret had not forgotten the murder of Darnley, but she had become convinced that Mary was innocent of any involvement in his death. Mary’s guilt had supposedly been proven in 1568 when a tribunal in York and Westminster had established the authenticity of a series of papers known as the Casket letters, sent by the Scottish government as ‘evidence’ of Mary’s role. We now know the letters had included a number of forgeries, but since there was no chance whatever of any independent forensic analysis at the time, the easiest way to debunk them was to retaliate in kind. This Mary’s friends had now done with a forged deathbed confession by Bothwell which exculpated Mary of any involvement in Darnley’s death, and pointed the finger instead at the nine-year-old King James’ latest regent, James Douglas, Earl of Morton.9 He had admitted knowing of the plot, and that was enough to convince Margaret, whose hatred was now directed at ‘the wicked governor’, rather than Mary, Queen of Scots.
James’ safety was a shared source of concern for his mother and grandmother, and in a letter to Mary dated November 1575, Margaret Douglas confided her fears that ‘our sweet and peerless jewel in Scotland’ was not safe in Morton’s care. But Margaret also now had another grandchild to think about: Charles and his wife had a baby daughter: Arbella Stuart. Mary had sent the little girl gifts and Margaret expressed the hope that Arbella ‘someday may serve your highness’.10 The two women continued thereafter to exchange tokens as well as letters. They included a piece of extremely fine and expensive needlework Margaret had worked with her own hair as a mark of her devotion. This remarkable turnaround in Margaret’s attitude to Mary had an important pay-off: Mary revised her will, naming Charles as the heir to his nephew, King James.
When Charles died of an unknown cause in 1576, Margaret had yet another ‘sorrowful grief’ to endure. But her pain at the loss of the last of her eight children was ameliorated when the little Arbella and her mother came to live with her. A picture she had painted of Arbella, aged twenty-three months, depicts a hazel-eyed infant clutching a fashionably dressed doll, and around Arbe
lla’s neck, hanging from a triple chain of gold, hangs a shield with the countess’ coronet along with the Lennox motto in French, ‘To achieve, I endure’. Arbella’s place in the line of succession was very similar to Margaret’s in the 1530s. Where, by the tradition of primogeniture, Margaret had been second in line to James V, but had the advantage of her English birth, so Arbella was second to James VI, but also had the advantage of being English-born. Nevertheless, as far as Margaret was concerned the English throne remained destined for James, and was rightfully his.
From her houses in Yorkshire and Hackney Margaret kept in contact with her growing grandson, sending James works of history, and on one occasion a pair of beautiful pearl-embroidered hawking gloves. But her servant, John Philips, recalled that by 1578, when she was aged sixty-two, Margaret seemed worn down by the loss of her beloved husband and children. Money was tight, too. Margaret had to pay £500 a year to Bess alone in interest on loans. Yet, despite everything, Margaret remained engaged in politics and continued to entertain the powerful and influential. At a dinner in February 1578 she had Robert Dudley as her guest. This was a woman who could remember Henry VIII intimately, and had witnessed the falls of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard from the close quarters of the queen’s Privy Chambers. But she and Robert Dudley also had memories to share, as well as a future to argue over.11
Robert Dudley was no longer a supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots. After the rebellion of 1569 and the Ridolfi plot, he had become, instead, a protector of the Puritans: those Protestants who wanted further reform in the Church of England. In this he had little in common with Margaret and it was later claimed that he poisoned her at this last dinner. Perhaps the food disagreed with her and she fell ill, just as her ancestress Margaret Beaufort had after eating swan almost sixty years before.
Margaret wrote her last testament on 26 February 1578, still in ‘perfect mind’ and ‘good health of body’. It asked that when she died the body of her son Charles be moved from his tomb at her house in Hackney, to be buried with her in Westminster Abbey. She had already chosen the spot for her tomb in the Lady Chapel where her grandfather Henry VII was buried. £1,200 was put aside for her funeral and burial expenses. She matched this with a gift of £1,200 for the poor. William Cecil was bequeathed a black enamel ring set with four diamonds, and Robert Dudley a chain of pomander beads netted with gold. She also left him her tablet picture of Henry VIII. Even in death it was important to grease the right palms – especially if you wanted a grand funeral in Westminster Abbey.
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