by Susan Ronald
Elizabeth knew that England represented the strongest (albeit still weak) Protestant realm. She also recalled that it was the Huguenot desertion of the English at Newhaven in 1563 that lead to England’s rout. Where only four years earlier they had abandoned the English and joined forces with the French Catholics, the Huguenots would now pay for their betrayal by her tacit support for Catherine. Moreover, Elizabeth would refuse exit visas to English Protestants sympathetic to their cause.
After all, Elizabeth could hardly argue with Moray in Scotland that subjects should not rise up against their anointed monarch, then say the opposite to Charles and Catherine in France. In Cecil’s acknowledgment of Catherine’s plea to the English ambassador in France, Sir Henry Norris, he confidently wrote, “Her Majesty much mislikes of the Prince of Condé and the Admiral.”19
In reality, Elizabeth breathed more easily when France was in turmoil. Not only would France be unable to undertake any foreign enterprise against England while tackling its own divisions, but it had to be vigilant on its northeastern border with the Low Countries against incursions by Netherlander Calvinists seeking to help the Huguenots. At the back of Catherine’s mind was Parma’s malevolence.
Consequently, during that harsh winter of 1567–68, Paris froze and starved. The Huguenots had received succor from German Reiter (mercenary cavalry), yet even their resources had dwindled to precarious levels. Condé had taken Chartres but had to halt his campaign due to lack of supplies and money to pay his mercenaries. The countryside had been laid waste, with the land ravaged and its peasantry starving. With both sides unable to continue, peace was the only solution. This was signed by Condé and the king at Longjumeau on March 23, 1568. Still, the Protestants refused to leave all the towns they had taken, mostly for fear of reprisals. They had burned churches, destroyed religious ornaments and statues, and desecrated relics. Similar barbarity and murder had occurred where the Catholic government forces had taken towns. Though peace had broken out, Catherine would never again follow the road of clemency with the Huguenots.
TWELVE
An Ill-Conceived Escape and Rebellion
Within this realm a practice [is] in hand for the alteration of religion and the advancement of the Queen of Scots to the crown.
—Franchiotto, an Italian spy, to Francis Walsingham, 1568
So, by the spring of 1568, England was the most peaceful country in northern Europe. Though friction existed between Protestant and Catholic, and the godly were on the increase in London, England seemed a relative haven when compared to the “hot wars” affecting Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, the Low Countries, Ireland, and Scotland.
Then, on May 2, everything changed. Queen Mary escaped from her gilded prison at Lochleven. The Scots Queen immediately prepared for battle, having written to her Guise cousins and Elizabeth on May 1, signing, “Have pity on your good sister and cousin.”1 Cecil had heard of Mary’s escape through his well-honed network of agents within a few days and sent a messenger by return with a simple statement to Moray—deal with Mary decisively and quickly.
Moray had hardly needed Cecil’s urging. Within five days, Mary had raised an army of some six thousand men to help her reclaim her throne, many from the loyal Hamilton clan. Moray mustered his men, meeting Mary’s at Langside. The queen’s forces were utterly routed. Over a hundred were slain and three hundred taken prisoner. Moray suffered very few casualties. Meanwhile, Mary rode off from the battle with a few loyal supporters, hoping initially to reach Dumbarton and from there board a ship bound for France. However, Moray’s men had swept ahead, blocking her way. Forced to flee across desolate passes in the Glenkens along the River Ken, Mary and her followers rested at the head of the valley of the Tarff, now called “Queen’s Hill.” At their final resting place of Maxwell Castle at Terregles, the decision was taken, for good or ill, to flee farther southward instead, across the Solway Firth and into England.
In borrowed clothes, covering her shorn head with a cloak, Mary made her way by fishing boat toward the small port of Workington. It was seven in the evening when her party of some twenty people stumbled ashore. Lord Herries, one of the four noblemen who had accompanied her, sent word to Sir Henry Curwen of Workington (whom he knew) claiming that he had eloped with a Scottish heiress and hoped to find refuge there. Fortunately, Curwen’s servants replied that though Sir Henry was away, the group would be most welcomed. Still, despite her disguise, Mary was immediately recognized by one of the servants. The following morning the deputy governor of the region, Lord Sheriff, Richard Lowther, greeted the party with four hundred horsemen to take Mary to Carlisle. There she was installed in Carlisle Castle to await Elizabeth’s pleasure.
* * *
The north of England had a large Catholic population, and the presence of the Scots queen there, hotly pursued by Scotland’s regent, was far from a pleasurable prospect. Elizabeth swiftly called an emergency council meeting to discuss the unprecedented matter. Cecil and Leicester feared that Elizabeth’s loyalty to her cousin Mary would win out over the political and religious imperatives of the past ten years.
For the council, leaving Mary in the north of England was nonsense, as she would be seen as England’s future Catholic queen. Moving her south suggested coercion and possible long-term imprisonment, which would offend France, Spain, and the pope. Then, of course, there was the open question of why she had been imprisoned on the island fortress of Lochleven in the first place. Had Mary knowingly conspired with Bothwell to murder her own husband, the king of Scotland and an English subject? It was a tricky situation.
Much of their discussion centered on how Elizabeth should react. Mary requested a face-to-face meeting with England’s queen to set out her woes. Moray insisted that Mary should be returned to Scotland and prison. Cecil led the council discussions. Was Mary guilty of conspiring to kill Darnley? It seemed to him that only by answering this query in the Scots queen’s favor should Mary be restored to her throne. Yet if Mary were guilty, then her treatment must be commensurate with the crime. The only way to determine the way forward, Cecil argued, was to evaluate the evidence supporting her guilt or innocence. Only then could a popular uprising in the north be avoided.2
The council agreed to send Sir Francis Knollys, Elizabeth’s cousin by marriage, and the Duke of Norfolk northward to parlay with Mary. There they would be joined by the warden of the West Marches, Lord Scrope, to deal with Mary and her advisers. They proposed that there be no formal trial or judgment, merely an airing of the evidence both for and against the Scots queen. Reluctantly, Mary agreed; it was obvious she would not be allowed the freedom to continue to journey onward to France, as she maintained she wanted to, unless she did. Elizabeth doubted Mary would be welcomed in France, after the near-cataclysm of the second religious war.
Time rumbled on. It was mid-July before it was decided to keep Mary in England. Elizabeth insisted that all allegations against Mary must be proven false before she could be released. Moray traveled south and produced the Casket Letters—named after the gilt and silver casket-shaped box holding them—which the Privy Council and Elizabeth read. Mary claimed that these were forgeries perpetrated by Moray. Of course, she would, wouldn’t she? The evidence in these letters seemed to compromise Mary beyond doubt. Mary, to prove her innocence, would have to refute their authenticity in a manner that would convince the English.
Instead, Mary first tried to bribe Cecil. She sent word to him that if he helped her regain her throne, she would agree to the establishment of a Protestant church in Scotland “after the English pattern.”3 It was an act of desperation too far and rebounded against her. So, in an about-face, Mary withdrew from the proceedings. She refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Privy Council to judge her in the matter as Scotland’s anointed queen and refused to participate any further in the process.
Elizabeth wrote to Mary that the proceedings were merely examining the evidence to help her regain the throne. Of course, Elizabeth added, this could only occur
if Mary were innocent of killing Darnley. Moray, too, received a letter allaying his fears that England’s queen had been swayed to Mary’s cause. Still, Mary would not be dissuaded. She rejected Elizabeth’s viewpoint that in not responding, the stain would remain on her honor. Mary simply refused to plead.
By mid-October, it seems, Elizabeth had made up her own mind as to Mary’s innocence. “The Queen’s Majesty is now at the pinch so careful of her own surety and state as I perceive the Queen of Scots shall not be advanced to greater credit than her cause will serve. And I think,” Cecil added conspiratorially, “that is rather to put her back than to further her.”4
So the last opportunity Mary would have to speak out in her own defense passed. Elizabeth refused to sit in judgment on her cousin without Mary’s answer to the charges set forth by Moray. The result was that the Scots queen was sent to the Earl of Shrewsbury at Tutbury for safekeeping, and supposedly out of harm’s way.
* * *
Once again, Elizabeth underestimated the pull of the international Catholic League initiated all those years before at the Council of Trent. Luckily for England, by the end of 1568, France had erupted once more into civil war between the Huguenots, the Guise family, and the court faction.5 Charles IX, fearing the intervention of Alba and the unwanted support of the Huguenots by Calvinist Netherlanders now living in France, found himself fighting extremists on all fronts.
Spain, though preoccupied with its own internal troubles from the Moriscos in the south and saber-rattling from the Ottoman Turk in the Mediterranean, remained committed to reconverting northern Europe to the true faith. What was needed in England was a man who could carry out any Machiavellian plan devised to that end. Incredibly, Philip chose this precise moment to replace his affable and intelligent ambassador Guzman de Silva with the archplotter Guerau de Spes.6 Of course, de Spes lost no time inserting himself into the captive Queen Mary’s network of servants and informants, zealously rooting out weak spots in Elizabeth’s regime. By October 1568, he was regularly transmitting correspondence from Mary to Philip.
De Spes’s ardent desire to be in the thick of things was plain from the outset. “In the neighborhood [where Mary is kept], which is the part of the country where there are most Catholics,” de Spes wrote shortly after his arrival in London, “she has many sympathizers, and it will not be difficult to release her, and even raise a great revolt against this Queen [Elizabeth]; but it will be more prudent that your Majesty should not appear in this, and I will do nothing unless I receive orders from your Majesty or the Duke [of Alba].”7
De Spes’s correspondence with Spain and Alba in the Low Countries proved to be a source of illumination and controversy, aimed at deposing Elizabeth and enthroning Mary as queen of England. Nonetheless, at the end of November, when four small coasters from Spain were forced by storms and “French pirates” into harbor at Plymouth, de Spes requested that the cargo be brought to safety by Elizabeth. As the Channel had been teeming with pirates of all nationalities for some time, Elizabeth ordered the cargo ashore, initially in good faith, to transport to Dover overland. It transpired that the “cargo” was £85,000 in gold—about one-third of the amount Elizabeth had received from her last parliamentary subsidy—and was destined to be used by Alba to pay his troops for enforcing the Council of Troubles in the Low Countries. To ensure its safe arrival in the Netherlands would result in the death of many Protestants; to keep it might result in war.
Yet on closer examination, it seemed that the money still belonged to the Genoese banker based in London, Benedict Spinola, and not the king of Spain. Spinola, when approached, agreed readily that Elizabeth represented a better credit risk than Philip and Alba. Papers were drawn up quickly for the loan of the money to Elizabeth instead.8
Naturally, de Spes was incandescent with rage. So much so that he had forgotten the first rule of an Elizabethan ambassador: to write only in guarded terms. He fired off a ranting missive to Alba at the end of December saying that the queen “wishes to declare herself openly against his Majesty [Philip], in the belief that if she makes herself mistress of the sea, and another army goes by land to attack the States, the task will be easy … I pray your Excellency do not doubt this determination … This is the reason that has moved me to write so urgently that you should seize all English property and advise the King, in order that the same step be taken in all his dominions.”9 The letter was intercepted.
At the heart of Elizabeth’s supposed desire to declare herself “openly” against Spain was de Spes’s mistaken belief that both Cecil and Leicester were itching to become involved in the religious affairs of the Low Countries. Unfortunately for Spain, the Netherlands, and England, de Spes’s advice was heeded by Alba, and all English property was seized. Five days later, on January 10, 1569, Elizabeth retaliated:
Her Majesty commands all and every, her justices and officials within her towns, cities, ports, and other places under her government, to take steps to detain and arrest with all their goods, chattels, and ships, all subjects born in the dominions of the King of Spain, in order that they may be held as security and pledges for the damages and loss received, without just or apparent cause, by the subjects of Her Majesty, and for other reasons which may appear.10
Further letters were intercepted, leading to de Spes’s house arrest. Within two weeks, Alba realized that he had acted precipitously and sent his own ambassador, Christophe d’Assonleville, to try to patch things up. While the queen and her councillors were more than happy to avert open war with Spain, Cecil’s spies warned him of an even more treacherous plot involving de Spes and the Catholic earls of the north of England. The plan was for them to rise up against their anointed queen. The year 1569 began as momentously as it would end.
* * *
The following month, de Spes, still under house arrest, received a message in “a safe cipher” from the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Arundel, assuring the Spanish ambassador that they were biding their time to free him from “Cecil’s impertinences” while they garnered their resources. “They will be able to turn out the present accursed Government,” de Spes wrote to Alba on February 29, “and raise another Catholic one, bringing the Queen to consent thereto. They think your Excellency will support them in this, and that the country will not lose the friendship of our King … I have encouraged them.”11 The plot was intended to dethrone Elizabeth and imprison Cecil in the Tower. The messenger delivering the “safe cipher” was a long-term resident of London, the Florentine banker Roberto Ridolfi.
As the spring wore on, Norfolk’s aspirations to marry the Scottish queen became generally known and gained momentum in the council, with Leicester cited as its foremost champion.12 Moray, as Scotland’s regent, thought that the marriage had a great deal to commend it. Mary herself was evidently in favor of anything that would release her from her drafty prison at Tutbury. Leicester thought it was an elegant solution to Mary’s perpetual imprisonment that should satisfy both Spain and France. The only problem was that the plan became a “plot” with each week it remained carefully concealed from Elizabeth and especially Cecil. By June 1, it was no longer a secret.
It was September before Elizabeth broached the subject hotly with Leicester. It seemed Norfolk’s plans had progressed to the stage where Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fénélon, the new French ambassador, and de Spes had heard that if Elizabeth did not agree to the match, Norfolk intended to liberate Mary willy-nilly.13 Yet none of them seemed to be troubled by the fact that Mary was still the wife of the Earl of Bothwell. Though Bothwell had escaped the wrath of Moray and “the king’s party” in Scotland, he had been a political prisoner in increasing squalor in Denmark since Mary’s defeat. Nonetheless, Bothwell was alive and for now remained Mary’s husband.
Another point Elizabeth’s councillors seemed to discount was that the Protestant heir to the throne, Catherine Grey, had died fifteen months earlier. Catherine’s younger sister, Mary, had been in disgrace since 1564, putting the Protestant succe
ssion in disarray. Queen Mary’s proposed remarriage to a Protestant English nobleman made the specter of the Scots’ queen as an “acceptable” Catholic queen of England both a real possibility and alarming. Elizabeth was not amused that the issue of her successor should be raised again in such an oblique way.
So Elizabeth made inquiries that autumn. Leicester admitted on bended knee that it was a plan, not a plot, to find a resolution to indefinite imprisonment for Mary, which also threatened Her Majesty personally. Elizabeth was infuriated. Mary’s papers were searched, specifically for material proof against Leicester and Norfolk’s friends on the council, Arundel and Pembroke (William Herbert, 1st earl of Pembroke, Leicester’s man in the council). None was found. Even Cecil was censured for not advising her earlier about the proposed marriage. Norfolk was her maternal cousin and England’s only duke. It was sedition for him to marry without her approval, and just the sort of plotting she abhorred.
Elizabeth felt personally threatened, seeing once trusted friends within her council through betrayed eyes. She angrily decamped to her fortress of Windsor. From there Elizabeth commanded Norfolk to attend her. He refused, pleading sickness. Elizabeth insisted. Still he refused. Finally, on October 2, 1569, Norfolk was taken to Paul Wentworth’s house in Burnham and from there to Sir Henry Neville’s home.14 Cecil called upon a man who had helped him a few years before on other “silent” endeavors of a clandestine nature to investigate the affair. It was the first official assignment Francis Walsingham would take on behalf of the government.
Walsingham had written his first significant political pamphlet in the spring of 1569, evidently with approval from Cecil and possibly Elizabeth. In the pamphlet, he described Mary as “an evil papist vying for the English throne” and a leading member of the league for the destruction of Protestantism. His dedication to the Protestant cause was unshakable, making him the perfect man to discover the truth behind the veil of lies.
