Heretic Queen

by Susan Ronald

  * * *

  On a personal level, it was tragic. Though Mary was six months pregnant, she rarely saw Darnley. The bloom of her infatuation had wilted. For company, she replaced him with other courtiers like Rizzio and the “vain, glorious, rash and hazardous” James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, to whom “his adversaries should have an eye,” in the words of Nicholas Throckmorton. Only a month earlier, Mary had given Bothwell’s bride, Lady Jean Gordon, eleven ells of cloth of silver for her wedding dress and joined in the sumptuous celebrations. Yet Lady Jean had no illusions about her new husband, or indeed about herself. She had married him loving another man, Alexander Ogilvy. Lady Jean knew that Bothwell had always been a man with an eye to the main chance. The queen, well aware that Bothwell and her half brother Moray were bitter enemies, advanced Bothwell to a position on her Privy Council, in part as a sign of favor, in part for her physical protection. Bothwell had been at Mary’s side during the Chaseabout Raid and had made himself invaluable in organizing her motley army.

  * * *

  Then, as expected, when Parliament convened on March 7, Mary failed to put forward Darnley for the crown matrimonial. Two days later, on Saturday, March 9, the plotters struck. Their targets were David Rizzio, Bothwell, and Bothwell’s new brother-in-law and friend, the fifth Earl of Huntly. Darnley entered the queen’s supper chamber through the privy stairs of his apartments to see Huntly, Bothwell, David Rizzio, and Mary’s ladies at the supper table with the queen. Mary, outraged at his presumption to come to her rooms unannounced, was soon stunned to see some of the Chaseabout plotters enter behind him. The most unsavory of these men, Patrick, Lord Ruthven, launched into a sordid tirade about Mary’s supposed relations with Rizzio, while five more of his fellow conspirators followed closely, wielding pistols and daggers. Rizzio grabbed hold of Mary’s skirts, pleading for his life. Ruthven wrenched the diminutive Italian away from her while another of the plotters steadily pointed a pistol at her swollen belly. Rizzio screamed and kicked, begging for his life to be saved, but to no avail. According to the various accounts of Rizzio’s murder, his body was stabbed between fifty-three and sixty times. Darnley’s own dagger was used for the bloody deed to ensure his loyalty.

  Yet somehow in the melee, Bothwell and Huntly had escaped through a back window. The queen’s attendants fought to enter the suite of rooms to protect Mary, but to no avail. They swiftly alerted the people of Edinburgh that there had been an almighty disturbance at the Palace at Holyrood and the queen needed help. The city’s alarm bell sounded, and the people rushed into the grounds of the palace.

  Seeing the swelling crowd, Darnley coolly stepped up to the balcony window of the room where the slaughter had taken place moments before to reassure the people that the queen’s “attackers” had been dealt with, that all was again well, and that they should return to their homes. Mary grasped how dire her situation was and so, stifling her revulsion at what had just transpired, played up to Darnley. He was a drunk and a weakling in her eyes, having taken her enemies as his friends in the murder of poor Rizzio—only to gain the crown matrimonial.

  Mary set about persuading Darnley that his “friends” had effectively succeeded in a coup d’état that would leave him just as vulnerable as she. Before daybreak, Darnley had seen the error of his ways. What Mary hadn’t known at this juncture was that Moray had been involved in the plot as well.

  At midnight on the second evening after Rizzio’s murder, Mary and Darnley quietly made their way down the same privy staircase by which the plotters had entered the supper room. They were met outside by Lord Erskine and two or three loyal soldiers with horses, in the shadow of Rizzio’s newly dug grave. Under the cover of a cloudy night, they made good their escape to Dunbar Castle in a furious five-hour ride. Despite the shock of the attack, Rizzio’s murder, and the helter-skelter ride, Mary showed no signs of miscarrying.

  On March 15, Mary wrote an impassioned letter to Elizabeth about her ordeal. She described the butchery of David Rizzio before her very eyes and appealed to Elizabeth to beware of such unforeseen betrayals herself. Meanwhile, Bothwell and Huntly joined the queen and Darnley at Dunbar along with Atholl and other loyal noblemen. Two days later, she had four thousand men at her command. By the time Mary retook Edinburgh at the head of an army of eight thousand men on March 18, 1566, Darnley rode beside her, reduced to the standing of a surly cipher. The murderers fled for exile in England. Sir William Maitland, who had known everything in advance but said nothing, made for Dunkeld. The fire-and-brimstone leader of the Scottish Kirk, John Knox, exiled himself to Ayrshire, for fear of being cut down in the swathe of retribution which he was sure must follow.

  Yet in a stunning tour de force, Mary decided to pardon all rebels who had lined up against her in the Chaseabout Raid. Moray, too, was forgiven despite Mary’s previous intransigence. Only Darnley would have a fitting end reserved to him for his treachery. As Maitland reported in October 1566, “he [Darnley] misuses himself so far towards her that it is an heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband.”9

  PART II

  The Catholic Ascendancy, 1566–1580

  NINE

  Betrayal amid Dreamy Spires

  I feel by myself, being also here wrapped in miseries and tossed … in a sea swelling with storms of envy, malice, disdain, suspicion.

  —Sir William Cecil to Sir Henry Sidney, 1566

  It seemed that everyone besides Darnley knew his days were numbered. Undoubtedly, the situation in Scotland also played a discordant tune to Philip II’s and Pius V’s ready ears. Still, just how the Scottish affair would end—and when—was a mystery, one that England would need to watch closely for its own security. Though Mary claimed to her subjects that Moray’s rebellion had not been religiously inspired, she had been quick to demand aid from the pope on religious grounds. The murder of Rizzio, whether a papal agent or not, fueled Pius’s ire against Elizabeth for the simple reason that the perpetrators (save Lennox and Darnley) were Protestants.

  That June, through their own secret channels, Elizabeth and her councillors were made aware that Pius V had sent “a Nuncio to Scotland and ample aid in money to enable the Queen to cope with the insidious designs of her rival of England and to keep the realm Catholic.”1

  England itself was in turmoil, too. That same spring of 1566, dissent had been rife. London’s godly had drawn a line in the sand, refusing to accept Elizabeth’s decree, or advertisement, on clerical dress. The demand was simple enough to her clergy. Wear conforming dress, which included the surplice. London’s preachers and bishops had rebelled, breaking “the gracious knot of Christian charity” at their Convocation of 1566. The English church had developed a well-organized left wing that was bent on having its own way. The previous Christmas, London’s pulpits swayed with preachers attacking the decking of churches with holly, cardplaying, and overindulgence in food and flesh on fish days. At St. Peter’s Cornhill, John Gough preached that it was wrong “to do also what we lust, because it is Christmas.” He preached abstinence, for if we “give but an inch, they will take an ell.”2

  Just before Holy Week, the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker gave these rebellious preachers an ultimatum: Conform or be suspended. Thirty-seven declined and were duly punished. Without the Word to stir up emotion, it was hoped that the revolt would soon lose its impetus. Neither Parker nor Elizabeth had expected that the wayward preachers would publish a tract entitled Briefe discourse against the outward apparel—the first Puritan manifesto. Nor did they believe that Robert Crowley, the printer of Piers Plowman, would join forces with John Philpot and John Gough to preach to London’s multitude in the open air when they were deprived of their churches.

  An official reply was prepared, A briefe examination … of a certaine declaration, most likely written by Archbishop Parker himself, in which he referred to the situation as “superfluous brawling of men perverse in heart, from whom the truth is withdrawn.” Crowley was determined to have the last word and publi
shed An answer for the tyme to the examination.3

  More tracts followed from one side, then the other. Cries of “repentance” and “deformation of the English Church” or shouts against “this filthy ware” (meaning the surplice) were bandied back and forth between England’s men of the cloth in pamphlets, broadsides, and ballads. Two Oxford preachers, Laurence Humphrey and Thomas Sampson, wrote pleadingly to the Puritan divine Heinrich Bullinger in Switzerland, but they were given short shrift as harboring a “contentious spirit under the name of conscience.”4

  Elizabeth was left little alternative. The order went out to Archbishop Parker and the church commissioners to end the discontent forthwith. Parker acted swiftly, exiling the agitators from London and scattering them around the country like seeds on the wind. Robert Crowley was sent to the bishop of Ely in Cambridgeshire. Gough and Philpot were exiled to the Diocese of Winchester. Miles Coverdale, to whom the Reformation in England owed so much, resigned his living. Others went back to whence they had come. Without their rebellious leaders based in London, the movement seemingly crumbled.

  * * *

  Having won the battle, the queen judged that the time was ripe to enshrine the church vestments into a new law. Yet however much the Privy Council and Elizabeth may have wished otherwise, the only way to achieve this was to reconvene her troublesome Parliament prorogued in 1563. The same men who had proved so reticent to accept the royal will with respect to the succession and the settlement of the Church of England three years earlier would once again stand judge over her.

  Times were hard. Aside from the controversy over church vestments, harvests had been poor and the previous winters bitterly cold. Shane O’Neill’s rebellion in Ulster continued unabated and had already cost the treasury some £26,000 in the previous two years alone. A fresh Irish policy by England to settle the northeast coast of the country was seen as “the surest and soonest way” to handle the mercenary Scots and to “inhabit between them and the sea whereby … all hope of succor may be taken from them.” There was a palpable dread among the privy councillors that the unstable Scottish situation would spill over into England’s realm of Ireland.

  To make circumstances worse, English shipping had been curtailed for “quarrels of matters of religion without cause.” English merchants stood accused of unprovoked attacks against Spanish shipping on the high seas in response to the “strange and pitiful” treatment of Englishmen in Spain. It seemed trade with the English, who were now branded as Luteranos, had ceased to be a respectable affair. From Spain’s viewpoint, the English had infringed on the seventy-five-year-old Spanish and Portuguese division of the world granted by Pope Alexander VI by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the New Worlds yet to be discovered between them. For Philip, England was nothing more than an interloper.5

  In an effort to help calm all nerves, Elizabeth pulled out her well-worn marriage card once again in favor of the Archduke Charles, the third son of the Holy Roman Emperor, and an Austrian Hapsburg. She hoped that this would head off any rumblings Parliament might wish to make over her marriage plans and issues touching the succession, as well as calm Philip and Pius V. Over the summer, negotiations were reopened, and Parliament was notified that it would officially reconvene in September.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the queen would also put her summer progress to good use and observe the state of the realm. With so many godly ministers dispersed back to the countryside, Elizabeth needed to ensure that her nobility would remain watchful for signs of seditious preaching. She was well aware that some of these troublesome preachers had found their livings and solace in her nobles’ and merchants’ homes as the doors to the parish churches were closed to them. There, in the privacy of the domestic setting, they not only found sanctuary but also circumvented the queen’s will. “London is a city,” Elizabeth complained, “where every merchant must have his schoolmaster and nightly conventicles, expounding scriptures and catechizing their servants and maids,” so that servant girls could “control learned preachers and say that such a man taught otherwise in our house.”6

  Since many of the Puritan preachers exiled from the capital had been trained at either Oxford or Cambridge, it made sense to include the most troublesome of these cities on her progress. Though it was not previously on her route, Elizabeth decided she should visit the university city of Oxford, ostensibly to show her support for its educational prowess. In fact, it was to gauge the mood of the students and their masters and allow them to see firsthand the magnificence and munificence of their anointed queen, particularly since two of the rebellious preachers who had recently been denied their benefices in London had just come down from Oxford. Besides, the Earl of Leicester had confirmed privately that there were other contentious souls to be found. Elizabeth’s decision to travel there was not so much a whim as a matter of state security.

  * * *

  Early in Elizabeth’s reign, the mayor of Oxford had advised the Privy Council that “there were not three houses in [Oxford] that were not filled with papists.” He was admonished by the queen’s councillors and told never to repeat such malicious gossip. Yet the mayor knew that at the Mitre Inn on the High Street and at the Catherine Wheel and the Swan Inn, Catholics swarmed into their cellars to meet secretly to celebrate forbidden Catholic rites.7

  Like London, Oxford had always been a reluctant follower of the Elizabethan settlement; hence Elizabeth had the Earl of Leicester appointed as its chancellor. Trusted eyes and ears were required in every corner of the realm, but nowhere more than in Oxford and Cambridge, and who better to keep a watchful eye in these university cities than Leicester in Oxford and Cecil at Cambridge? Besides, Leicester had been responsible for the promotion of at least eight of Elizabeth’s most outspoken émigré bishops from Geneva and Frankfurt and had been instrumental in making her vision for the Anglican Church a reality. Though the appointments of these bishops had run counter to the queen’s conservative instincts, Elizabeth was hardly in a position to be choosy at the outset of her reign. With most Marian bishops refusing to confirm their acceptance of the Act of Settlement, her selection list was rather slim.

  Still, Leicester was not the only privy councillor to put forward former exiles to carry out Elizabeth’s wishes in her new church. Sir Nicholas Bacon was equally involved in attempting to tame these Continental firebrands. Archbishop of Canterbury Parker lamented that Bacon “intruded into such room and vocation” as to finally break down his own reluctance to conform. Bacon found a willing helpmate at home with his second wife, Ann, who was also the sister of Cecil’s equally godly wife, Mildred.8

  * * *

  Yet Oxford, having suffered the Elizabethan purges of Puritan radicals and popish priests, remained a city of decidedly Catholic leanings. Though the “secret and forbidden” Mass was not heard in the city’s cathedral or churches, word of its hidden adherence to the “old faith” had spread widely. Heinrich Bullinger, the Swiss Protestant divine activist, had been told that the university was “as yet a den of thieves, and of those who hate the light,” and so declined to send his son there. The bishop of Salisbury, John Jewel, lamented that only two of the university’s colleges were of “our sentiment.” Nicholas Saunders, a fellow of New College, claimed that the college failed to ask for the Oaths of Supremacy and Uniformity required of graduates due to the overwhelming number of dissenters among its fellows.

  Oxford’s headmaster was a Marian survivor who eventually became a casualty of the Elizabethan “visitors.” At Corpus Christi, Magdalen, and Trinity, the bishop of Winchester, who had acted as their visitor, knew that a blind eye would be best for implementing the observance of the Elizabethan settlement. There was much “winking” among visitors at Oxford’s transgressions. Even more worryingly, it had been noted by Leicester that there was a steady exodus of Oxford’s students and its masters to other Catholic seminaries overseas.9

  Elizabeth had tried to visit Oxford two years earlier, but an outbreak of plague prevented her at t
he last minute. Now, with the world situation in turmoil, London in a Puritan mood, and her closest advisers questioning whether Catholics or the godly were the enemies of the state, it was essential for the queen to lay on a charm offensive to woo Oxford’s troublesome university population.

  * * *

  So, on Saturday, August 31, in the late afternoon, the royal procession was heralded into the city. The Earl of Leicester, in his gowns as chancellor of the university, and then the mayor and his aldermen led the queen’s procession. As Elizabeth entered the medieval city, her magnificence seemed heart-stopping to onlookers:

  Her head-dress was a marvel of woven gold, and glittered with pearls and other wonderful gems; her gown was of the most brilliant scarlet silk, woven with gold, partly concealed by a purple cloak lined with ermine after the manner of a triumphal robe. Beside the chariot rode the royal cursitors, resplendent in coats of cloth of gold, and the marshals, who were kept busy preventing the crowds from pressing too near to the person of the Queen … The royal guard … were about two hundred … and on their shoulders they bore … iron clubs like battle-axes.10