A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  Cecil, of course, was beside himself. Impotently watching Elizabeth shower honours, money and gifts on Dudley in September 1560, he told the Spanish ambassador that he was staring at ‘the ruin of the realm’ through Dudley’s ‘intimacy with the queen who surrendered all affairs to him and meant to marry him’. For Cecil this was tantamount to handing over England to what he believed was a self-serving dynastic faction. (Robert’s brother Ambrose was also a member of council, but so was Cecil’s brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bacon.) Secretary Cecil stopped at nothing to thwart the love match, spreading malicious stories that Dudley was actually poisoning his wife. And two days after he had poured out his chagrin to the Spanish ambassador his worst nightmare seemed to have come true. Amy Dudley had been found at the bottom of a staircase in the house of friends, dead of a broken neck. Suicide seems a distinct possibility, for she must have been in dreadful pain and had insisted that her hosts leave the house some hours before her life ended. The coroners called it accidental death. It was said that the advanced breast cancer from which she had been suffering had made her bones so brittle that a fatal fall was likely. But to those who had a dim view of the Dudley-Elizabeth romance, an accident of that kind seemed much too convenient to be credible. This was the golden age of gossip, and gossip did not believe Amy Dudley had fallen. Gossip believed she had been pushed.

  Without wasting any time, the queen ordered the court into mourning and sent Dudley away to Kew until he was cleared of any sinister suspicion, which officially he was. But although Elizabeth loyally insisted that he had been completely vindicated from anything untoward, she well knew that what had happened had made their marriage impossible. She very badly wanted, even in 1560, to be a sovereign loved by her people. And a marriage with a suspected accomplice in marital murder guaranteed (as the history of Mary of Scotland would demonstrate) a public relations disaster.

  Even so, neither the queen nor, especially, Dudley himself was quite ready to give up. In 1561, the Spanish ambassador was asked on to a barge from which Dudley and Elizabeth were happily watching a water pageant, and he reported that: ‘She, Robert and I being alone on the galley, they began joking which she likes to do much more than talking about business. They went so far with their jokes that Lord Robert told her that if she liked I could be minister to perform the act of marriage and she, nothing loath to hear it, said she was not sure whether I knew enough English.’ But this may have been a lot less comical than the ambassador thought. For Dudley was so desperate to see the marriage come about that he planned something unthinkable. He held out the promise that he and Elizabeth would return England to Rome if Philip II would lend his support to the marriage and help deal with the guaranteed disaffection. The plan went so far that soundings were actually made of the pope.

  It would have been the most shocking irony of all: the English Church as the plaything of the Tudors’ marriage bed. The mother’s desire had brought about the break with Rome. Now the daughter’s passion would repair it.

  But Cecil was not about to let this happen. He made sure to leak the story, and the storm of outrage he had been counting on broke immediately, both among the older nobility, who did not much care for Dudley, and the people in the cities. Anti-Catholic riots seemed close. The partners hastily backed off, denying that there had ever been any plans to restore the old Church or to do any kind of deal with Spain.

  Even though the danger was past, William Cecil never quite relaxed on the subject of the Master of the Horse. Pushing his own favourite nominee, the Archduke Charles of Austria, he made a list of ‘pros and cons’ in which Dudley (created Earl of Leicester in 1564) came off worse in every category of comparison.

  Charles Dudley

  In degree Archduke born Earl MADE

  In wealth By report 3000 a year All of ye Queen and in debt

  In knowledge All qualities belonging to a prince Meet for a courtier

  In reputation Honoured of all, named to ye empire Hated of many, his wife’s death

  Perhaps Cecil need not have worked quite so hard, because the truth is that Elizabeth herself was not quite sure that Dudley was grand enough for her. In 1565 she told the French ambassador that: ‘As for the Earl of Leicester, I have always loved his virtues but the aspiration to greatness and honour which is in me could not suffer him as companion and husband.’

  Perhaps, though, he might still father an heir to the throne – but not by her. For by 1563 Elizabeth was seriously prepared to offer him up in marriage to Mary Stuart, the queen of the Scots.

  Scotland had always mattered desperately to the Welsh Tudors. Something about the kingdom to the north provoked their characteristic combination of arrogance and insecurity. That something was, of course, the ‘auld alliance’, in which the English imagined themselves attacked simultaneously on two fronts, by the French and the Scots. But the relationship between cause and effect depended, naturally, on which side of the Tweed you stood. From the Scottish side it was the (largely correct) suspicion that the Tudors clung to the old Plantagenet fantasy of imposing their ‘overlordship’ on Scotland that left them no alternative but to seek help from France. The Stone of Destiny, after all, was still in Westminster Abbey. So the two paranoias bounced off each other, generation after generation, with invariably tragic results.

  The Tudors had two Scottish strategies, neither of them enormously subtle: whackings and weddings. Henry VII’s preference had been for weddings, and he married his elder daughter, Margaret, to the Stewart king James IV. But this did not stop Henry VIII from going to war with Scotland twice, at the beginning and end of his reign, both times with equally devastating results for Scotland. Among the indirect casualties of the battle of Solway Moss in 1542 was Henry VIII’s nephew, James V, who survived the slaughter of his own nobles and soldiers, but died shortly after in a state of traumatized misery. James left behind two Marys: his French widow, Mary of Guise, as regent and their infant daughter, Mary, already the baby queen of the Scots.

  Two possible courses of action were open to Mary of Guise and her councillors. She could cut her losses by a reconciliation with England, based on the marriage Henry VIII was offering between his infant son, Edward, and the little Mary, or she could plump for her enemy’s enemy, her own countrymen, the French, and continue the war for as long as it took. The difficulty with the pro-English solution was that the regent was sister to both Henry II, the king of France, and the Cardinal of Lorraine, both of them the most implacable enemies of the Protestant Reformation. However conservative and quasi-Catholic Henry VIII might have appeared at the end of his reign, he was still a heretic who had usurped the authority of the Holy Father in his realm. To send her little Marie south to be brought up as a bride for a Protestant prince was, in the end, too much to stomach. And there was the additional suspicion that the enticing vision of a peaceful union of the realms promised by Henry Tudor would, somehow, not turn out to be an equal partnership. So the infant princess was shipped back to France to grow up at the French court, with the understanding that one day she would be queen to a good Catholic Valois.

  Henry took the rejection personally and began his ‘rough wooing’ by burning down most of the Scottish lowlands. But not all the Scottish nobility were, in fact, affronted by the strong-arm tactics. There was an important party led by Princess Mary’s illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, who saw the English as saviours not bullies. And the reason was that many of them had converted to Protestantism. An English alliance was a way to get the French troops imported by Mary of Guise out of Scotland and bring the country to the true Kirk. Fired up with the Calvinist righteousness provided by John Knox and his fellow preachers, in 1557 the Scottish Protestants made a covenant among themselves, binding themselves as the ‘Lords of the Congregation’. Their aim was the overthrow of Mary of Guise and the irreversible establishment of a reformed Scotland. Two years later, the Lords of the Congregation made an alliance with the English government (heavily promoted by Cecil) in which Eng
lish intervention was promised to ‘restore the ancient liberties and freedom of Scotland’. This sort of thing, of course, sets off alarm bells in nationalist history as a tactic of transparently disingenuous imperialism, but at the time neither side saw the alliance as a Trojan horse for English annexation. Cecil’s aim was just to secure a friendly, Protestant neighbour to the north. During a period when England was virtually encircled by Catholic armies – in France, in the Netherlands and in Spain – it would simply be one headache less.

  So there was yet another campaign in the spring of 1560. But Elizabeth (as so often was the case when it came to military matters) was chronically indecisive, kept fretting about whether she should put the whole thing into reverse and was ruinously conservative when it came to providing adequate supplies of men and money to do the job. For their part, her commanders, like the Duke of Norfolk, felt they had to do something swiftly before she could pull out. So they botched a siege of Leith in which, to add insult to injury (and there were many injuries), a company of Scottish whores, unhappy about the imminent expulsion of their steady French clientele, threw burning coals down on the attacking English troops. An embarrassing fiasco was forestalled only when Mary of Guise died unexpectedly, leaving her many enemies to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh. To sweeten the peace, Cecil added something momentous even if as yet unofficial: that it might be possible to recognize Mary Stuart as the presumptive heir to the throne of England should the queen herself remain unmarried and childless. Britain was in the offing.

  But there were two crucial conditions. First, the claim (made by Henry II of France on Mary Tudor’s death) that Mary of Scotland was the rightful sovereign of England and that Elizabeth was still illegitimate had to be formally renounced right away. Second, now that Mary’s husband, the next French king, Francis II, had died (of the worst ear infection in European history) and she was free to remarry, Elizabeth should have the right to ensure that any future husband would not be a threat.

  There was, of course, one handy solution to both these problems, which began as a joke made by Mary herself, and then developed into a rich fantasy by Elizabeth’s ambassador to Scotland, Nicholas Throckmorton. ‘Methinketh it were to be wishes of all wise men and Her Majesty’s Good Subjects that one of these two queens of the Isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man to make so happy a marriage as thereby there might be a unity of the whole.’

  No one even bothered to ask, of course, which of the two would play the man. (Robert Cecil would later remark that Elizabeth was ‘more than a man and, in truth, less than a woman’.) Lurking beneath the fantasy was the sense, instinctively felt by many in both countries, that the queens were, in fact, the two halves of a single personality. It wasn’t just that Tudor blood ran in both their veins – they shared the same great-grandfather, Henry VII, and the same long nose – it seemed, somehow, that their histories were, for better or worse, already fatefully connected.

  They had grown up quite differently. For the most part Elizabeth had lived in aristocratic, but relatively modest, provincial houses; sternly educated, her routine had been punctuated by elation when things went well, and terror when they went wrong. By the time of her accession she already had the skills of a survivor and was suspicious of fair-weather friends. Mary, on the other hand, had been treated as the darling of the most glittering court of Europe precisely at the moment when at Fontainebleau, Amboise and Chenonceau it was creating the greatest masterpieces of Renaissance palace architecture. The fact that her mother was off in Scotland governing as regent only made her uncle, Henry II, cosset her more lavishly: the fair-faced little Scottish doll cultivated as a northern flower amid the heavily perfumed lilies of the Valois court. So la belle des belles, as Mary was called, grew up in a culture of gallant desire. With her heart-shaped face, creamy complexion, auburn hair and almond-shaped, heavy-lidded eyes, she evidently had the stuff to make men, especially poets, pant with dreams of possession.

  She was, however, not just a pretty face. When she arrived in Scotland in 1560 it was Mary, not Elizabeth, who might well have seemed the more serious and responsible of the two queens. She, after all, was not deep in a reckless flirtation. Elizabeth had behaved badly, almost irrationally, towards her cousin, denying her safe-conduct through England and forcing Mary to sail the long route offshore to Scotland. Elizabeth’s point (as it would be for years to come) was that Mary had not yet signed the treaty removing the offensive claim to the English throne. But Mary responded to Elizabeth’s harshness with the brand of theatrical self-pity that would colour the relationship between the two women. Before her departure she told Elizabeth’s envoy in France: ‘I trust the wind will be so favourable as I shall not need to come on the coast of England and if I do, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, the Queen your mistress shall have me in her hands to do her will of me and if she be so hard-hearted as to desire my end, she may then do her pleasure and make sacrifice of me, peradventure that casualty might be better for me than to live.’ It did not, of course, come to this. There was a passing of royal galleys on the high seas with nothing more serious exchanged between them than a salute. Once in Scotland, Mary wrote many times in an attempt to meet Elizabeth, hoping that the tantalizing matter of the succession could be settled face to face. But although this was never far from Elizabeth’s mind, the more she thought about it, the less she liked the idea of a public statement making Mary her heir. Already feeling insecure and threatened, such an announcement would, she thought, be an invitation for her removal. In Elizabeth’s own words it would be to ‘require me in my own life to set a winding sheet before my own eyes. Think, you, that I could love my own winding sheet?’

  The ill-will would evaporate, though, into cousinly warmth once Mary made a choice of husband that Elizabeth deemed politically friendly: hence her willingness to serve up Robert Dudley. But if Elizabeth thought Dudley too much her social inferior to marry him, why should Mary feel differently? And in any case, since the death of his wife he was damaged goods. To accept the queen of England’s compromised cast-off was not exactly what la belle des belles had in mind. On the other hand, Lord Henry Darnley, the poster-boy of the Scottish nobility, seemed quite a different prospect. Unlike Dudley, his pedigree was impeccable, being a cousin of both queens, a grandchild of the sister of Henry VIII, Margaret Tudor, who after the death of James IV at Flodden had married the Earl of Angus. Their daughter Margaret married the Earl of Lennox, great-grandson of James II of Scotland, and Darnley was their son. Even by Renaissance standards, he was, as long as he kept his mouth shut, a walking work of art. One look at those finely chiselled cheekbones and the smoothly modelled calves and Mary was hopelessly smitten. It was only after the nuptials in 1565 that she discovered that, in addition to the blood royal flowing through his veins, there was a great deal of strong liquor. When he was not smashed, Darnley, who was supposed to be a working king of Scotland, was usually absent without leave, hunting, hawking or whoring and certainly not available for the tedious drudgery of state business.

  Left to her own devices, Mary increasingly depended on her own court circle and, in particular, on one of her private secretaries, the Italian David Riccio, who, much to the displeasure of the Scottish magnates, jealously guarded access to the queen. Worse still, the leader of the Protestant nobility, her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, suggested to the English government that Mary was considering a full counter-Reformation in Scotland. In fact, although much of the country, especially in the north and west, was still overwhelmingly Catholic, Mary was not that rash. Since returning to Scotland she had followed her mother’s careful distinction between private observance and public policy. She made no secret of her Catholic faith but equally professed she would never foist it on the country by force. This, of course, did nothing to satisfy the likes of Knox, who treated her to regular lectures on the abominations of papist idolatry. Barely a year before, the Protestant Scots had been dismayed by Mary’s serious consideration of marriage with Prince Carlos, Philip II�
�s son. And then she had insisted on marrying Darnley according to the Catholic rite. When they looked at France and saw the all-out war being waged by her Guise family on the Huguenots, it took very little to convince them that Mary was, indeed, planning a counter-Reformation.

  Darnley managed to whine about never being given enough dignity or responsibility and then whine even more when he got it. His increasing estrangement from his wife and his undisguised wish to be treated as a real, rather than as a titular, king gave the disaffected Protestant nobles an opening they eagerly took. A group of them – the Earl of Morton and Sir William Maitland in particular – approached Darnley and proposed a violent coup d’état. Get rid of the detestable Riccio, whom they said out loud was Mary’s lover, notwithstanding the fact that he was a hunchback and a half-size bigger than a dwarf. Everyone knew about the wicked lechery of hunchbacks. The revelation must have suddenly lit a candle in the dimness of Darnley’s pretty head. It would explain the queen’s hostility and surliness. She needed to be shown in no uncertain terms who was master and before the child she was carrying was born, or else there would be someone else to push him aside. So began a sequence of events as bloodcurdling as anything in the more gruesome pages of Elizabethan melodrama. On 7 March 1566 Darnley, who seldom showed up for dinner, burst into the chamber at Holyrood Palace where Mary was dining and began to harangue her drunkenly about Riccio. He was swiftly followed by a group of the conspirators, led by Lord Ruthven (whom most people had thought was on his own deathbed), ominously got up in full armour and shouting for ‘Davy’ to be brought forth. Riccio was dragged from his hiding place, screaming with terror. Brushing aside Mary’s infuriated demand that Ruthven leave or be arrested, Riccio’s clinging hands were torn from Mary’s skirts and he was stabbed to death in front of her. Between fifty and sixty wounds were found on his body after it was discovered, thrown down the privy staircase.