Another intended murderer was a member of the House of Commons. William Parry looked to be above suspicion. He was not only an MP but an employee of Walsingham's, and in fact his connection with the intelli-
gence network makes his guilt somewhat problematical. Still, he bragged of his plans to kill the queen, and an accomplice denounced him, telling how the two of them had decided to surprise her as she rode in her coach. They would ride alongside her, one on each side, and shoot at her head; she would be an easy target, either out of doors or in the palace, where Parry as a trusted royal servant could assault her during the course of a private audience.
A story was told later that Parry had actually gained his private audience, and had come to it with a knife hidden in his sleeve. He lost his courage, otherwise there would have been regicide and chaos.
True or not, the story added to the general apprehension, and supported the common people's view of their ruler as an endangered, beleaguered treasure whose safety was a matter for grave concern. They imagined her, overwrought and weeping, walking in her garden and lamenting ''that she would fain know why so many people sought her life." She tore her breast, the tale went, and said she was "defenseless and unarmed, a miserable woman," yet she "trusted in the Lord God to have compassion on her." 6
This was the account a traveler heard in London, the romantic, tender fabrication of a worried citizenry. People had told similar stories about Mary Tudor many years earlier, their chivalrous feeling for a woman in peril taking precedence over their respect for their sovereign's courage.
In the fall of 1583 there were revelations of a Catholic plot for an invasion force to land in Sussex and proceed to the liberation of Mary Stuart. The Spanish ambassador Mendoza was heavily implicated, and was expelled. Just as the danger was coming to light and the conspirators, under torture, were revealing what they knew Elizabeth was riding under guard from Hampton Court to London, with the French ambassador Mauvissiere beside her. They were deep in conversation, with Elizabeth talking effusively about the Jesuit plots that threatened her.
"Just at this moment," Mauvissiere afterward recalled, "many people, in large companies, met her by the way, and kneeling on the ground, with divers sorts of prayers wished her a thousand blessings, and that the evil-disposed who meant to harm her tonight be discovered, and punished as they deserved."
As always Elizabeth stopped her horse to acknowledge the good wishes, and broke off her talk of the Jesuits. It was clear, she remarked to the Frenchman tartly, "that she was not disliked by all."
The prayers of the people were echoed in Parliament. Just before the Christmas recess in 1584 the queen thanked the Commons for their care and concern, and then Hatton spoke. He had with him a prayer, he said, written by "a godly man." It was a prayer "for the queen's preservation,"
and he asked if he could read it aloud. He began to read, and as he did so the members fell reverently to their knees and repeated the words after him, as if they had been the words of a psalm or a response from the Book of Common Prayer.
In a more militant vein was.a movement to circumvent assassination by undercutting its potential benefits. In the summer of 1584 the royal council had prepared a document called the Bond of Association which pledged its signatories to pursue to the death any person on whose behalf an assassin might act. Since any attempt on Elizabeth's life (save the random assaults of madmen) was bound to be undertaken on behalf of Mary Stuart the Bond of Association was in effect a vast counter-conspiracy against her, and as the number of signatures grew—there were many thousands, from every part of the realm—the depth and strength of popular opposition to Mary became more and more clear.
Of all the dark clouds that overshadowed the decade the menace of Mary Stuart was the most abiding, and the least tractable. Would Elizabeth outlive her, or not? The nine-year difference in their ages, and the hazards to which Elizabeth was subjected, suggested that Mary might one day rule England, even if the plotters she so fervently encouraged never managed to bring off the grandiose schemes they concocted to sweep her onto the throne.
The days were long past when the two queens were rivals for admiration. Vanity, wigs and cosmetics aside, they were old women, their bones and temperaments brittle and their facade of mutual gentility worn thin. Mary, in her forties, looked ten years older; captivity had turned her hair white and left her "poor, languishing, sickly body" stiff and aching. Her letters to Elizabeth were querulous, yet not so full of complaints as to risk anger or irritation in her royal relative. It was essential to Mary—indeed to them both—that a semblance of goodwill be preserved. Indeed Mary was full of proposals. Why not make her co-ruler of Scotland with her son James, now entering young manhood? Elizabeth considered the proposal, sent negotiators to Scotland to look into it, and concluded that it was completely impractical. In addition to the risk to England in releasing Mary from captivity, the Scottish lords refused to have their dishonored, deposed queen back—and her son too was most unfilial in his negative response. But the correspondence continued.
With her letters Mary sent Elizabeth wigs and embroidered cuffs and caps ornamented with her own needlework, a reminder of her tedious and empty hours. The damp and drafts in her apartments, she informed the queen, were putting her in "danger of her death," yet she hoped Elizabeth's own health was good. Meanwhile, in secret, she read the letters of English
Catholics in France and Spain, letters full of plans for raising armies of liberation, and wrote them commanding, impassioned, traitorous replies.
Elizabeth, for her part, sent Mary wigs in return and bolts of satin and taffeta and, to improve her health, sent her own physician as well. Elizabeth signed herself "your good sister and cousin," and affixed her royal seal. In her council chamber, however, she wondered aloud what to do with her untrustworthy relative, and saw only too clearly that she would never be able to free her. "Her head should have been cut off years ago," she once remarked to an Italian visitor. 7 As the years went by the queen of Scots' execution seemed imperative, and at last inevitable.
To Elizabeth's advisers and to Parliament, the elimination of Mary Stuart was long, long overdue. She was the "monstrous and huge dragon" that menaced England's security, the lodestar of rebellion and treachery and danger from abroad. Her morals were as low as any woman's could be; she had murdered her husband, she was an adulteress, she had seduced her jailer Shrewsbury (according to Shrewsbury's spiteful wife Bess of Hard-wick) and borne his child. She had shown herself to be faithless where Elizabeth and her government were concerned. "It is evident," the fair-minded Cecil concluded, "that the Scottish queen has never entered into any treaty but only of purpose to abuse the queen of England with some treacherous attempt or other." In fact there was more to Mary's story than this, but by the mid-1580s only the broad outlines mattered.
Then in 1586 a trap was set for her, leading her to provide the evidence needed to find her guilty of treason. She approved, in writing, a plan for Elizabeth's assassination, and when in October of 1586 she was tried at Fotheringhay Castle by a group of commissioners appointed by the queen her guilt was confirmed.
As sovereign, as guardian of her people's lives and her nation's safety, Elizabeth had no choice but to order the issuing of the proclamation setting forth Mary's death sentence and to sign the warrant authorizing her execution. But something held her back. The fears that gathered around her people clutched at her as well, adding to the deep personal misgivings she fought as the year came to a close.
It had been a hard year, a year of bitter disappointment and failure. War had taken Leicester from her for many months, and had led to conflict and ill feeling between them. War had been waged, and the cost had been great, yet save for the minor triumph at Zutphen there had been no victory. Now a decision had to be made about the Scots queen.
The political hazards in sending Mary to her death were substantial. First, Scotland, and the succession. With Mary dead, her claim would pass to her son James; what was to prevent h
im from attracting to himself all
the powers that had previously supported his mother's claim, then using their forces to conquer England? True, James had only recently signed the Treaty of Berwick, pledging himself to an alliance with England and accepting an annual pension from Elizabeth. He was her presumed successor, and he might be content to wait for the crown to come to him in the course of nature. But what if he chose to betray the treaty? What better excuse could she give him than to put his mother to death?
Then there was France, where Mary was still recognized as queen. French envoys had come to Elizabeth's court to ask that her life be spared, and with war at hand the English could not afford to drive the French, already submissive to Spain, into King Philip's camp. The creation of a Catholic martyr in Mary Stuart might well have that effect.
And what of Spain, and King Philip? Would the death of the woman he looked on as England's rightful queen abate Philip's determination to crush England in battle? Or would it merely shift the explanation of his warmaking, from conquest on Mary's behalf to a war of vengeance, a war to punish Mary's murderers?
For a time Elizabeth took counsel with Cecil on this most difficult of her decisions, but before long she ceased to ask his views and pondered the matter alone. Parliament had shouted for Mary's death, begging the queen to "take away this most wicked and filthy woman" before it was too late. But however unanimous the views and feelings of her advisers Elizabeth could not bring herself to acquiesce. William Davison, recently made a secretary of state because of the increasing burden of office on Secretary Walsingham, believed that it would take more than intellectual and political logic to persuade the queen to sign the death warrant. She would never take Mary's life, Davison said, unless compelled by "extreme fear."
Among the prophecies being spread abroad in 1586 was one concerning the queen of Scots. Once she came to harm, it was said, there would be horrible results. An army of invasion would sail to England and land at Chester. Queen Elizabeth, abandoned by her quarreling Parliament, would become a fugitive seeking safety in Wales. The people would rebel; a rising of "clubs and clouted shoes" would end in victory for the peasants, and meanwhile the Tudor crown would be lost and won by a series of claimants. 8 It was a long, intricate vision of disaster, encompassing most of Elizabeth's worst fears. And it would all come about the moment Mary Stuart's head was severed from her shoulders.
Alone with her thoughts, was Elizabeth haunted by this dire prediction? Did it deepen her already strong reluctance to send a female relative to her death? ("What will they not now say," she asked a parliamentary delegation, "when it shall be spread that, for the safety of her life, a maiden queen
could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman?") As a highly educated woman, and one who had more than a slight interest in the occult, Elizabeth believed in the doctrine of correspondence—the teaching that every created thing was linked to every other by a powerful psychic force. To disturb one element in the carefully balanced whole was to send shock waves through the rest of creation. For Elizabeth to authorize the taking of an anointed queen's life was a sacrilege of sorts, a rending of the web which encompassed all; it might well bring death back on her.
There may have been another theme in Elizabeth's tortured musings, made up of antiquarian curiosity and long-buried memories. A queen had been executed in England, fifty years earlier. Anne Boleyn had stood accused of treason, as Mary Stuart was now; like Mary, Anne had been denounced as a wicked, unrepentant woman, faithless to her husband, an adulteress who had plotted the death of her lord and lawful sovereign. Was there in Anne's daughter a superstitious dread of replicating her father's terrible revenge against Anne? Or did Elizabeth merely note the parallels, nod with interest, and then return to her efforts to calculate the reaction Mary's death was likely to produce at foreign courts?
In January of 1587 fresh alarms swept the country. Rumors sprang from one another, creating unprecedented panic and breeding ever more fantastic news of imagined events.
The Spaniards had landed. They were at Milford, thousands strong, their huge cannon rumbling through the Welsh countryside and their grim legions of cutthroat troops marching ever closer to the capital.
The north was in revolt. It was a rising as stubborn and as ill-disposed toward the queen as the rising of 1569, only this time the Spaniards would aid the rebels and nothing could stop them.
London was in flames. The queen—was she still living, or had she been assassinated, as some said?—had had to flee. In all the confusion, the queen of Scots had escaped. She was on her way to the northern rebels. Spaniards were moving toward the burning capital, their crested helmets silhouetted against the red glow of the night sky. Surely, these were the last days of the world.
The whirl of rumor engulfed the court. The image of a realm in chaos shimmered in the air like a horrifying mirage, unreal yet threatening. Elizabeth fought toward her decision, pressed as much by the wildfire of panic as by the urgent necessity for action on a matter of great import.
'Tor mine own life," she insisted, "I would not touch her." Yet Mary had to die. There was no escape—unless, as a number of people hinted darkly, Mary's jailers took it upon themselves to carry out the pledge of death they had sworn to in the Bond of Association. Elizabeth asked it of
them, but the deed was not done. She cursed them, blasting "the niceness of those precise fellows who in words would do great things but in deed perform nothing." 9
Then came word of yet another plot against her life—on Mary's behalf. The French ambassador and others made plans to kill Elizabeth, though when their conspiracy came to light they had not yet determined whether to poison her stirrup or her shoe, in the Italian manner; or to kill her "by laying a train of gunpowder where she lieth." 10
There was no longer any reason to stay Mary's execution in order to placate the French. As for James Stuart, she would have to gamble on his coldheartedness toward his mother and his often asserted, carefully protected succession rights.
At the end of January Elizabeth wrote to James. Mary, she said, is "the serpent that poisons me." If she saved Mary, she would herself be destroyed. The agony of decision had passed. Only one simple, fateful course was open to her.
On February 1, Elizabeth summoned Davison, signed the death warrant, and sent Davison off with it to the bedside of the sick Walsingham. It was a solemn moment, but she added a grim joke. "The grief thereof," she said, referring to the document in his hand, "would go near to kill him outright."
Wfyen after Christs birth there be expired, Of hundreds fifteene, yeares eighty eight, Then comes the time of dangers to be feared, And all mankind with dolors it shall freight, For if the world in that yeare doe not fall, If sea and land then perish ne decay, Yet Empires all, and Kingdomes alter shall, And man to ease himselfe shall have no way.
T
he Most Fortunate Armada rocked at anchor in Lisbon harbor, its white sails with their bright red crosses fluttering in the chill wind. There were well over a hundred ships, half of them towering galleons and galleasses and hulking armed merchantmen that loomed "so high that they resembled great castles." These monstrous vessels were meant to frighten the enemy as much by sheer size as by force of arms or firepower, and as the tiny supply boats darted in and out among them, rising and dipping in the strong chop of the harbor waters, they seemed to stand, stately and majestic, like grandees attended by their scurrying valets.
In command of the vast flotilla on this spring day in 1588 was Don Alonso Perez de Guzman, duke of Medina Sidonia, Lord of San Lucar, and Knight of the Golden Fleece. King Philip had made him Captain General of the Ocean Sea only two months before, and in the interim he had struggled to learn what he could about ships and guns and naval warfare, about which, when appointed, he knew virtually nothing. He watched now as the ships were loaded with chests of muskets and pikes, corselets and morions, cannon balls and powder. Horses and cattle were slung aboard in nets and stowed below decks, along with ca
sks and barrels of salt meat and fish, rice, cheese, and other provisions, wine and water. In accordance with the captain general's orders, more men were being put aboard the ships
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along with the beasts and provisions, sailors kidnapped from other ships in Lisbon harbor, invalids from the hospitals and criminals from the prisons, even laborers who had never before seen the sea, taken from their fields and put to work for the king aboard the great Armada.
There was a shortage of men. Some months earlier, when word of a vast expedition had first gone out, men had come to Lisbon from all over Spain and Portugal, eager to sail with the fleet. But since then, epidemics had reduced the size of the crews and desertion too had become a problem, and as the time for departure neared it had been necessary to make up the losses by commandeering all the men to be found, no matter how unsuitable.
Medina Sidonia had other worries. The gigantic ships carried too few guns, and there were nothing like enough gunners to man them. Many of the vessels leaked, or responded badly under sail, and there were far too few smaller craft to act as a proper escort for the greatships. Food and water were bound to be a problem, for the purveyors to whom the task of provisioning had been entrusted were notorious for supplying tainted meat and sour wine. In addition, it had not been possible to buy enough seasoned barrel staves to supply the entire fleet; most food, wine and water were stored in casks and water butts made from green wood, which were not watertight and in which perishables spoiled quickly.
For this, Drake was to blame. A year earlier, in the spring of 1587, the daring Englishman had raided the harbor at Cadiz, then supply center for the Armada, and in the course of his raid he had burned tens of thousands of seasoned barrel staves—along with some thirty-seven warships and smaller vessels. To Elizabeth's great satisfaction, he had also seized a merchant ship whose cargo of spices, silks and jewels was worth many fortunes. But in the long run, the lumber was the greater loss to the Spaniards, for though the ships could be replaced, the lumber could not.
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