by Simon Schama
Leicester, now a little stout for a Master of the Horse, presided over all this with rosy-faced satisfaction. It was just because he could no longer be taken seriously as a suitor that he became an object of public affection, naughty Uncle Robin. It was quite different, though, with the Duke of Alençon, who was the youngest brother of Henry III, the king of France. Elizabeth took Alençon’s suit seriously enough to invite him to England. She was in her forties. A physician pronounced her, even at forty-five, capable of bearing children. Historians have mostly thought that her calculations, first in 1572–3 and then again in 1579–81, were essentially political and diplomatic – a way to press France to intervene against the Spanish in the Netherlands, thereby relieving England of the trouble and expense. This was certainly Cecil’s calculation. But in the teeth of much opposition in the council and among the public, the queen made public displays of affection towards Alençon in 1579 – notwithstanding the fact he was very short and hideously pock-marked – and called him ‘her frog’ (an ominous sign when someone received a coveted nickname). Leicester had just married again, to one of Elizabeth’s court ladies, Lettice Knollys, so it is not beyond all possibility that she was, in fact, seriously fond of Alençon and thought him possibly her last chance.
For the first time, England became jealous. Hatton sent a ring to the queen, guaranteed to expel ‘infectious airs’ provided she wore it ‘betwixt the sweet dugs – the chaste nest of pure constancy’. Leicester and Hatton, both experts in wounded sensibility, proceeded to orchestrate a tremendous campaign of patriotic opposition, featuring songs like ‘The Most Strange Marriage of the Frog and the Mouse’, and broadsides and sermons were printed. In August 1579 John Stubbs published A Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf wherein England is like to be Swallowed, warning that the entire Valois dynasty was infected with disease as God’s punishment and that the queen had no business contaminating herself and by extension the body politic. His reward was trial for libel and a sentence (along with his printer and distributor) to have his right hand cut off. The printer was spared, but when Stubbs’s hand was amputated with a cleaver, driven home with a mallet, he managed, with his good hand, to raise his hat in the air and cry ‘God Save the Queen’ before passing out. William Camden, who witnessed the gruesome spectacle, wrote: ‘The multitude standing about was altogether silent; either out of horror of this new and unwonted punishment, or else out of pity toward the man, being of honest and unblameable report, or else out of hatred of the marriage which most presaged would be the overthrow of religion.’
Not surprisingly, the queen’s reputation suffered badly as she toyed both with Alençon, the council and the public. On Accession Day 1581 she finally exchanged rings and announced a betrothal, but only to rescue the duke’s honour and get him out of England. By the end of the year there was no more talk of a French marriage. Now, whether she wanted it or not, she was certain to stay the Virgin Queen.
Around twilight on 6 April 1580 there was an earthquake in England. Its epicentre was the east coast of Kent, but at the Tower of London the shock was strong enough to set the lions in the royal zoo roaring. In theatres like The Curtain playgoers were frightened enough to jump from the gallery. The previous October a comet had appeared, followed in the winter by massive snowfalls, the likes of which no one could remember. The queen put a brave face on these omens. To the horror of her courtiers she opened her window to see the sallow flare of the comet more clearly. Everyone else knew God had sent these things as a warning of dark times to come.
But, for better or worse, England had its own dark angel to see it through the worst: Francis Walsingham, swarthy and melancholy enough for Elizabeth to call him her ‘Moor’. ‘Intelligence is never too dear,’ was Walsingham’s motto, and his entire career was an applied demonstration of the modern truism that knowledge is power. In his person, the notion that ‘intelligence’ could mean both understanding and espionage was made real. Walsingham, who was related to the queen through his stepfather, had been made one of the two secretaries of state in 1572 when Cecil had been promoted to lord treasurer. Thereafter, the two of them were the bookends of Elizabeth’s Privy Council: able to work together but always leaning against each other in judgement and temper.
The differences between Cecil and Walsingham were not just personal. They reflected different views of the world and England’s place in it. Cecil was a Socratic pragmatist, who always managed to see two sides of any issue and then struggled, optimistically, to reconcile them. This is how he saw the greatest division of his day: the war of faiths. Cecil thought that the Church settlement of 1559, with its requirement that people attend Anglican churches and occasionally take communion, but without being forced to swallow the whole of Protestant doctrine, was gentle enough to bring the majority of the country, slowly but surely, round to the new order.
Walsingham, on the other hand, was not interested in reconciliation. He was interested in winning. The ways of power, he thought, might be complicated but the world was really very simple, divided cleanly between the good and the bad, Protestants and Catholics. He had been in Paris in 1572 during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and he was under no illusions. Treaties and alliances were all very nice but they were tactics. The strategic reality was a war to the death. To see both sides of the question, to compromise with anti-Christ, was to guarantee you would lose. And if Walsingham had anything to do with it, England was not about to lose.
The simple test of how seriously anyone thought about England’s survival in the years of an apparent Catholic crusade was how they felt about the war in the Netherlands, which had begun in 1568 and showed no signs of ending. Was it some far-off incomprehensible civil war that was none of England’s business, or was it the struggle on which the island’s fate would ultimately depend? Walsingham knew that Cecil and the queen wanted no part of it and thought it a battle between two parties of equally deplorable fanatics. Many in the council saw no compelling need to rush to the aid of the Dutch when they had been attacking English ships peacefully trading with Spain. But Walsingham was adamant that if Spain succeeded in crushing the Dutch revolt, England would be next. Cecil’s response was a grudging acceptance of the need to do something, but to have that something done by proxy, by the French; hence his hope that a French marriage would somehow work out.
But neither the marital nor the military strategy succeeded. Within a few years all the barriers between England and its moment of truth had fallen away. The French proxy campaign in the Netherlands collapsed. In 1584 the great hero of Dutch resistance, William the Silent, was assassinated on the staircase of his residence at Delft. The armies of the Duke of Parma moved rapidly through Flanders to the sea. By 1585 they controlled Antwerp and faced the coast of England.
Both inside the government and throughout the country, the crisis produced a soul-searching debate; it was the first time that England was confronted with a question that would return many times in its history: is Europe our business? Are the blood-lettings of continentals our concern or our interest? Cecil and Walsingham had opposite answers. With Dutch resistance apparently crumbling and the North Sea and Channel threatened, Cecil conceded that it was only a matter of time before England and Spain confronted each other directly. But all his instincts were deeply insular. Why fritter away men and money ‘over there’ when both were needed to build Fortress England? Stand or fall, it had to be done on our own. For Walsingham this was, literally, self-defeating. Stand aside from the fray in Europe, doom the Dutch to go down and you merely postpone the evil day and make the enemy a hundred times stronger. Hit him now, and hit him with everything you’ve got and everywhere you can: on the high seas, in the Netherlands, in America and in the English shires where Catholic gentry hid Jesuits. Make him scatter and run and you have a fighting chance.
Leicester, whose Protestantism grew stronger as the years passed, agreed with Walsingham, and as the situation across the North Sea became grimmer and intelligence reports confirmed that Spain was
planning an invasion launched from the Netherlands, finally, with many misgivings, so did the queen. A total of 8000 troops were to be sent to Antwerp, with Leicester himself as their commander. But the queen, as usual, was not about to issue any kind of blank cheque. She had barely made the decision before she was making contingencies for countermanding it. From the outset Leicester was hamstrung by his orders to fight a strictly defensive war, and since the queen had turned down the offer of sovereignty of the United Provinces after the death of William the Silent, Leicester was ordered emphatically not to accede to any kind of request to become their governor.
Needless to say, within months he had done just that and had been solemnly invested as governor-general at The Hague. His justification for countermanding his commission was that some sort of commanding authority was needed in the notoriously disunited Netherlands if they were to fight an effective war. But when Elizabeth heard the news she became apoplectic with rage. ‘We could never have imagined, had we not seen it fall out in experience, that a man raised up by ourself, and extraordinarily favoured by us above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment, in a course that so greatly toucheth us in honour . . . ’ It was all Walsingham could do to prevent the queen from shutting down the campaign then and there. When he heard of the queen’s fury, Leicester quailed with contrition. All he could hope for now, he said, was to find a job in her stables ‘to run the horses’ heels’.
But Elizabeth could still be brought round to see things the hawks’ way by being reminded of what might happen if Spain won the battle of the North Sea: invasion, Catholic rebellion, Mary Stuart liberated and enthroned at Westminster. Walsingham was now fighting his war at home as well as abroad, and he had taken the gloves off. He knew that the pope, Pius V, had not only excommunicated ‘that guilty woman of England’, but promised ‘whosoever sends her out of the world . . . not only does not sin but gains merit in the eyes of God’. Against this invitation to regicide, Walsingham created Bonds of Association: vigilante organizations of gentlemen sworn to destroy anyone threatening harm to the queen. The second step was to expel Jesuit missionaries, now redefined as accomplices to murder. If they stayed they were to be automatically treated as traitors. Any person found sheltering a Catholic priest or receiving mass would be guilty of a felony. Thousands upon thousands of Catholics were now forced to a terrible choice: disobey the Church or disobey the law. From now on, the idea of a loyal Catholic (though there were many who protested they were just that) was treated as a dangerous absurdity.
Elizabethan England became Walsingham’s national security state. Infiltrators and double-agents were kept busy, and the rack and the thumbscrew were in full operation. One over-zealous sadist called Topcliffe (himself imprisoned for exceeding his commission) kept a rack inside his own house where he regularly tortured suspects, including a priest named Portmort, who took revenge by denouncing Topcliffe for having boasted of feeling the queen’s breasts and belly. The Privy Council even discussed the government of the country were the queen to be killed and came up with an interesting solution. Parliament would be sovereign and the government run by a ‘grand council’. But if Walsingham was ferocious he was not paranoid. Underground plots were being organized in France, Rome and Spain, and they were all working to one end: the death of Elizabeth and her replacement by Mary Stuart.
For years, under the watchful eye of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his terrifying wife, Bess Talbot, Mary had been leading the life of a country gentlewoman, permitted to hunt and hawk and to keep a decent, if not extensive, household. Physically, she had deteriorated, the slender beauty thickening. But she had never become reconciled to her captivity, nor had she ever forgiven the cousin whom she had imagined to be her friend and ally. Horrified when her son James made a treaty with England that repudiated his own mother, Mary signed her own rights of succession over to the king of Spain. This only confirmed Walsingham in his pessimistic view that with a native-born heir to the throne no longer a possibility, the mere existence of Mary Stuart was a dagger pointed at the heart of Elizabeth.
So he designed an elaborate entrapment to take care of the matter. In December 1585, without telling Cecil, Walsingham made an important change in the conditions of Mary’s captivity. She and her household were suddenly packed up and sent to Chartley Hall near Stafford and provided with a new and much harsher jailer, the puritanical Amyas Paulet, who made no attempt to hide his intense distaste for his prisoner. At Chartley the conditions of her confinement could be minutely monitored and if necessary engineered to bring about her destruction. Imagine Mary’s happiness when she discovered that a new and ingenious method had been devised by parties working on her behalf to smuggle letters to and from her agent in Paris and to her latest sworn avenger and champion, the wealthy London merchant Anthony Babington. The coded letters were put in a watertight pouch and slipped through the bung hole of beer casks delivered and removed from Chartley. What Mary did not know was that it was Walsingham who had thought this up and whose cipher clerks were busy decoding her messages hours after they had been sent off. The entire Chartley regime had been rigged as a set up designed to nail Mary once and for all.
Nail her it did. Babington obligingly supplied Mary with details of his plot: the six gentlemen who would murder Elizabeth; how she would be freed; the expected invasion and rising. On 19 July 1586 Mary replied, encouraging the plotters but as usual putting her own liberation at the top of their priorities. If anything should go wrong, she gratuitously warned Babington, just imagine my fate. Hours after they left her hand they were being copied and decoded by Walsingham’s cipher clerks before being sent on their way to Babington.
In Westminster Elizabeth suddenly became inexplicably distraught about her security, imagining the assassin’s knife behind every shadow and curtain. She knew what had happened to William the Silent. They had got to him. Whatever Walsingham said, they could get to her. She fell deathly ill.
At Chartley Mary felt the skies lighten; her liberty and vindication were close after twenty years of unjust imprisonment. On 11 August 1586 Paulet actually suggested she go for a ride. Good for the old lungs don’t you know. From a distance Mary saw a small group of riders approach. This was it, she must have imagined: deliverance.
It was, in fact, the warrant for her arrest. Babington and his fellow-plotters had been arrested and under torture had confessed. Mary was taken away, while her rooms at Chartley were searched, turning up hundreds of incriminating documents and the keys to sixty different codes. In London Elizabeth wrote an ecstatic letter to Paulet: ‘Amyas, my most faithful and careful servant. God reward thee treblefold for the most troublesome charge so well discharged.’ She spoke of Mary as a ‘wicked murderess’. Hanging and live disembowelment, she told Cecil, was not good enough for traitors as evil as the Babington plotters.
There was just one more stop, one more castle in the tragic career of the wandering Mary, Queen of Scots: Fotheringhay, the great Yorkist pile in Northamptonshire where Richard III had been born. If anyone expected her to pen a tear-stained confession, though, they evidently had something to learn about her. Faced with the endgame, Mary drew on some inner resource that made her disconcertingly lofty, as if raised above the squalid charades of power. Asked to own up to her crimes, Mary stood on her sovereignty. To Paulet’s hectoring demand that she confess, she replied: ‘As a sinner I am truly conscious of having often offended my Creator. I beg him to forgive me. I beg him to forgive me. But as Queen and sovereign I am aware of no fault or offence for which I have to render account to anyone here below.’
Her second tactic was to lie her head off, denying all knowledge of the Babington plot until, that is, she was shown the letters to him bearing her signature. But Walsingham had overreached himself by adding forged statements to the genuine article, and this allowed Mary to accuse him of having set the entire conspiracy up in order to be rid of her. This was, after all, not far from the truth, and she was even
closer to the mark when she reminded her interrogators on the Privy Council that she had come to England freely and in response to a promise of aid against her enemies in Scotland. ‘I was at once imprisoned,’ she added bluntly.
Elizabeth didn’t exactly see it that way. She wrote to Mary as if the queen of the Scots had been an ungrateful house-guest who, instead of writing thank-you notes for the hospitality, had made off with the towels. Mary ‘had planned in divers ways and manners to take my life and ruin my kingdom by the shedding of blood. I never proceeded so hastily against you. On the contrary I have maintained you and preserved your life with the same care which I use for myself.’
On 15 October 1586 the formal trial began in the great hall of Fotheringhay. In a typical gesture, half plea, half threat, Mary had warned her prosecutors to look to their consciences and ‘remember that the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England’. It was to that audience – worldwide and across the ages – that she now played out her part, centre stage.
