Darnley was greatly flattered by the attention of the glamorous Elizabeth that summer. She made a great show of enjoying his lute playing, and on 29 September he was given a prominent role in the ceremonies in which Elizabeth raised Robert Dudley to the royal title, Earl of Leicester: a necessary move if Dudley was to be considered seriously as an attractive groom for Mary, Queen of Scots.25 Darnley preceded Elizabeth in the procession at St James’s Palace, carrying the sword of state before her into the room where the ceremonies were to take place. There was something spoilt and effeminate about Darnley; ‘a polished trifler’ was the verdict of the French court.26 The Scottish emissary agreed. His view, shared with Elizabeth, was that this tall boy ‘was more a woman than a man, being very lusty, beardless and lady faced’. Mary would surely prefer Robert Dudley as a husband, Elizabeth believed, and when Dudley knelt before her and bowed his dark head, she could not resist ‘putting her hand in his neck to kittle him smilingly’.27
Elizabeth was confident that Margaret Douglas had been tamed by her imprisonment. Cecil agreed and Margaret had used her considerable charm and intelligence to build up a relationship of mutual respect with him, even playing co-godparent to his daughter, Elizabeth Cecil, in July 1564.28 Margaret also appeared to have befriended Robert Dudley, whom she had earlier accused of being a pox-ridden wife-killer. Events suggest that it was, in part, at Robert Dudley’s persuasion that Elizabeth permitted the trifling Darnley to join his father in Scotland. Elizabeth soon realised, however, that she had made a disastrous miscalculation. Margaret and Robert Dudley had become, if not true friends, then political allies. Dudley was making it evident he had no intention of leaving England, and his supposed match with Mary, Queen of Scots was dead in the water by early 1565. England needed a successor, and Robert Dudley had come down on the side of the Queen of Scots, while leaving open the possibility that he might one day marry Elizabeth.
As it dawned on Elizabeth that she had been persuaded to grant Margaret’s son a passport so that she could be pressured into allowing him to marry Mary, Queen of Scots and name them as her co-heirs, she panicked. To make it quite clear that she would not be bullied into naming any heir, Elizabeth delivered the devastating news to Mary that she had decided not to name a successor until ‘she shall be married or shall notify her determination never to marry’. In doing so, however, she had lost her leverage over Mary, who noted icily, ‘I . . . fear it shall turn to her discredit more than my loss.’ The English ambassador begged Mary’s advisers to dissuade her from acting hastily, but they cut him short. Mary would marry soon and to her own choice, they told him: ‘The die is cast.’29
36
MURDER IN THE FAMILY
QUEEN ELIZABETH HAD ENJOYED HER EVENING AS SHE SAT DOWN to supper at court, on 5 March 1565. Her cousin, Margaret Douglas, had joined her to watch a joust and a tourney on horses. The combat, with twenty-four challengers and opponents, had been organised by Robert Dudley, who had also taken part in what had proved an excellent competition. He had planned more entertainments to come, and following supper all the guests congregated for a comedy he had set up in the queen’s apartments. It featured two goddesses debating the virtues of marriage over those of chastity. ‘All this is against me’, Elizabeth commented wearily. It was only when the dancing began that Elizabeth’s good spirits returned. There was a masquerade of men dressed as wild gods and satyrs who danced with the ladies, as did the men who had taken part in the combats, still wearing weapons. The evening ended with everyone flushed with excitement, hungry again, and eating from a huge table laden with snacks of herring and other small fish, cakes and sweets.1
When the latest Spanish ambassador, Don Diego Guzman de Silva, saw Elizabeth nearly three weeks later, she spoke again about the pressure to marry: ‘I promise you, if I could today appoint such a successor to the crown as would please me and the country, I would not marry. It is something for which I have never had any inclination. My subjects, however, press me to do so. I must therefore marry or take the other course, which is a very difficult one. There is a strong idea in the world that a woman cannot live unless she is married, or at all events that if she refrains from marriage she does so for some bad reason. They said of me that I did not marry because I was fond of [Robert Dudley] the Earl of Leicester, and that I would not marry him because he had a wife already. Although he has no wife alive now I still do not marry him . . . But what can we do? We cannot cover everybody’s mouth, but must content ourselves with doing our duty.’2
When the conversation moved to the saga of Margaret’s son Darnley seeking to marry the Queen of Scots, Elizabeth assured Silva that the boy would be returning to England in May, along with his father. Margaret, however, had already told the ambassador Darnley had ‘no such intention’.3 Mary, Queen of Scots had realised that she could not trust Elizabeth and that she needed a party of supporters in England if she wished to inherit the English crown. Margaret Douglas had spelled out to her the advantages of marrying her son in this respect. The tract on the succession written by the MP John Hales, with its claims that a foreigner could not inherit the English throne, had also made Darnley’s English birth more attractive to Mary. Margaret told Silva that negotiations were far advanced, and she was sending rich jewels into Scotland to secure the support of key figures.
It was sometime over the next few days that Elizabeth and Cecil discovered that a marriage between Darnley and Mary, Queen of Scots might actually take place. They were appalled. Cecil believed the majority of English people saw Mary as Elizabeth’s rightful heir. A marriage to Darnley would strengthen Mary’s candidature still further, and Elizabeth feared this would interfere with her policy of ensuring there was ‘no certain successor’ to her crown.4 She sent increasingly frantic messages to Mary warning her not to marry Darnley. Come late April, with Mary still ignoring her messages, Elizabeth decided the time had come to remind Darnley that his mother was at her mercy.
When Margaret Douglas next visited Elizabeth at Whitehall Elizabeth snubbed her. This was followed up with an order confining her cousin to her quarters. Margaret’s crime, she learned, was ‘having received letters from a foreign prince [Mary, Queen of Scots] without the queen’s permission and without conveying the contents to her’. Margaret insisted she had just been on her way to show these letters to Elizabeth when she was arrested. This time Elizabeth was not to be fooled. On 22 June Margaret was sent back to the Tower to which she had last been consigned nineteen years earlier in 1536, by Henry VIII.5
Elizabeth’s action did nothing, however, to alter Mary, Queen of Scots from her path. Darnley was proclaimed King of Scots and on 29 July 1565 he and Mary were married. The new royal couple gambled that Elizabeth would never dare harm Margaret, and together, as king and queen, they reiterated Mary’s promises to maintain the Protestant religion as established in Scotland. All they needed now was to have a son, and in due course the crown of England would fall into their laps. The prophecy that Margaret’s heir would one day unite the crowns of England and Scotland had never looked closer to being fulfilled, and Margaret rejoiced.
When Silva saw Elizabeth the following month she was under pressure from the French to release Margaret. Robert Dudley had asked if Silva ‘would go and see the park’ at Richmond. They duly wore out ‘three horses and saw a large quantity of game’. Returning, they ‘came round by the footpath leading to the riverside through the wood to where the queen lodges, and when we came to her apartments Leicester’s fool made so much noise calling her that she came undressed to the window’. Elizabeth once admitted ‘I am no morning woman.’ When business was urgent she might see officials before 10 a.m, but still wearing something akin to a dressing gown. Usually she liked to read for a while, or sit by her window to watch the world go by. Having seen them she came downstairs – though it took an hour and a half for her to get dressed – and together Elizabeth and Silva had ‘walked for a long while talking’.6 Elizabeth confirmed that she had no intention of bowing to French pre
ssure on Margaret just yet.
In the Tower, as the months passed, the servants who waited on Margaret Douglas whiled away the hours, engraving their names on the principal fireplace in the Queen’s House where their mistress was confined. Margaret also kept busy, corresponding with her contacts across Europe, England and Scotland in an effort to keep informed. Nevertheless, she could not see the disastrous turn her son’s marriage was soon taking. The nineteen-year-old Darnley found having to play second fiddle to his reigning wife intolerable, while she had concluded he possessed neither aptitude for hard work nor the wisdom required to rule a country as volatile as Scotland. As their marriage broke down, he began spending his nights in the brothels of Edinburgh, and she refused him the ‘crown matrimonial’ that would have given him an equal share of royal power. Darnley had done his duty as a king consort in one respect only: by the time he passed his twentieth birthday in December, Mary was pregnant.
Margaret, blinded by her love for her son and cut off from events, blamed Mary, Queen of Scots for the couple’s quarrels and wrote her furious letters, at which Mary was ‘greatly offended’.7 In Scotland Mary was facing a dangerous enough enemy in the form of her Protestant half-brother, James V’s illegitimate son the Earl of Moray and his allies. They had begun to play on her effete husband’s sense of impotence, using Mary’s trust in her Italian secretary, David Riccio, to make him jealous. The overthrow of ‘bad’ councillors was the traditional pretext for a noble seizure of power, and Riccio was being set up in that role to justify a coup. The first thing Margaret knew about this was when, in the spring of 1566, she learnt that Riccio had been murdered – and that her son Darnley was involved.
The details of the killing that reached England were horrific. Mary had been having supper with Riccio in her private rooms when Darnley had appeared with a group of men. She had tried to prevent them taking Riccio away, but she was held at gunpoint while Darnley prised Riccio’s fingers from her skirt. He had then held her back while Riccio was thrust out of the room. Fifty-five stab wounds were found in Riccio’s body, as was Darnley’s dagger, which his allies left embedded in the corpse to prove his involvement. Elizabeth was astounded: ‘Do you think the Queen of Scotland has been well treated to have armed men entering her chamber, as if it were that of a public woman, for the purpose of killing a man without reason?’ she asked Silva. He agreed ‘it was a bad business’, but he also believed that ‘if [only Margaret] had been in Scotland . . . her son would not have been led astray, nor would these disputes have taken place, as she is prudent and brave, and the son respects her more than he does his father’.8
Lennox was furious with Darnley, but also afraid what would happen next. He was hugely relieved when Mary, Queen of Scots chose to reconcile with his son and so forestall Moray’s intended coup. Margaret did her best to make up for her mistakes by encouraging the family reconciliation, and as the birth of her first grandchild approached she sent Mary gifts. On 19 June 1566 Mary, Queen of Scots bore a son. He was christened Charles James: Charles after his god father Charles IX of France, and James after his grandfather, James V of Scots. It was as James that he would always be known. Margaret promptly contacted the Pole brothers, who had been in the Tower since 1562, and persuaded them to pass on to Mary all the royal claims of their Plantagenet descent.9 This well-meant gesture was hardly necessary. James’ birth had greatly enhanced the virtues of Mary’s already strong claim to the English throne. ‘From what can be heard the people of this country are delighted at the good news of the birth of the Queen of Scotland’s child’ Silva reported. The same was certainly not true of the queen, although she put on a show of delight to the ambassador and suggested mischievously that she might send Cecil to the christening.10
If Margaret hoped that the birth of her grandson would also revive Mary and Darnley’s marriage she was to be disappointed. At the beginning of February 1567 Margaret was writing to the Spanish ambassador, telling him how it grieved her to see her son was quarrelling again with his wife.11 She was also, she said, desperate to leave the Tower, even if only to house arrest. The person most likely to persuade Elizabeth to allow this was Cecil, so Margaret was delighted when Lady Cecil arrived to see her on the 19th, along with a very old friend. Lady Howard was a sister-in-law of Lord Thomas Howard, the man to whom Margaret had been betrothed in 1536, and had been her confidante all those years ago. But it soon emerged the women had not come just to pay Margaret their respects. Elizabeth had chosen them as the kindest bearers of terrible news: Margaret’s twenty-one-year-old son Darnley had been assassinated, the fate of so many earlier Kings of Scots.
The murder had been discovered nine days earlier after the people of Edinburgh had been awoken at two in the morning by a violent explosion. Some ran towards the apparent origin of the blast at Kirk o’ Field. There they found the Old Provost Lodging, where Darnley had been sleeping, a heap of rubble. Nearby in the orchard, his strangely unmarked body had been laid out, dressed only in a nightgown, alongside a dead servant. Margaret Douglas immediately assumed that Darnley had been killed on the orders of his wife, as did almost everybody else. Revulsion and grief overwhelmed her, and she ‘could not by any means be kept from such passion of mind as the horribleness of the fact did require’. After a doctor was called, Elizabeth agreed to release her grief-stricken cousin from the Tower. Margaret was now reunited with her younger son Charles and placed in the secure care of a family who backed Katherine Grey’s cause.12
Darnley’s murder had also deeply shocked Elizabeth, but her concern was chiefly for her sister queen. She had always been fascinated to hear about Mary. In 1564 she had demanded to know from the Scottish emissary how Mary compared to her in height, looks and musical talent, just as her father, Henry VIII, had once asked how Francis I measured up to him. Yet although there was a sense of rivalry, and concerns about the danger that Mary posed as her heir, nevertheless while Mary was secure on her throne in Scotland, Elizabeth, as a fellow reigning queen, had felt that little bit more so herself. ‘Madame’, Elizabeth now wrote to Mary, ‘My ears have been so astounded and my heart so frightened to hear of the horrible and abominable murder of your husband and my cousin that I have scarcely spirit to write: yet I cannot conceal that I grieve more for you than him. I should not do the office of a faithful cousin and friend, if I did not urge you to preserve your honour, rather than look through your fingers at revenge on those who have done you “tel plaisir [this pleasure],” as most people say. I counsel you so to take this matter to heart that you may show the world what a noble princess and loyal woman you are.’13 These urgings to find and condemn her husband’s murderers, and so end the rumours of her involvement, went unheeded.
In Scotland Mary was ‘deeply afflicted, and in great fear’ that Darnley’s assassins would now kill her, and make her infant son a puppet king.14 Then the extraordinary news emerged that in May 1567 Mary had married the Protestant Earl of Bothwell, one of the principal suspects in Darnley’s death. She said – and many historians now accept – that she did so only after she had been captured and raped.15 Others believe that she was looking for protection. Whatever her true motives, her marriage provided the pretext for a rebellion led by Bothwell’s erstwhile allies amongst the Protestant lords. Bothwell became a fugitive, and Mary was soon imprisoned in a castle on an island on Loch Leven. Her infant son, James, was crowned King of Scots in her place on 24 July 1567, with the misogynist John Knox giving the sermon.
Elizabeth raged against the rebels; Cecil only managed to dissuade her from sending an army to free Mary by warning such action could trigger Mary’s assassination. The queen had always been more fearful of Katherine Grey’s claim (so much closer to home, and in light of Jane Grey’s earlier usurpation), and now it seemed Katherine’s cause would be unstoppable. Elizabeth had all the keys to her chambers, save one, hidden away, and the imprisonment of Katherine’s husband, Hertford, was made stricter.16 By the time Katherine was moved to the distant Cockfield Hall in Suffolk that w
inter, the twenty-seven-year-old Protestant heir to the throne rightly despaired of ever being freed.
The house that was to serve as Katherine’s fifth prison in seven years belonged to a future Lieutenant of the Tower, a man called Sir Owen Hopton. Cecil had always been careful to find jailors he hoped would be kind to Katherine, and Sir Owen was a relative of hers. Remarkably, he was a grandson of Owen Tudor’s illegitimate son, David, knighted by Henry Tudor when he landed in Wales in 1485.17 Sir Owen was distressed to discover that Katherine was in a state of suicidal depression. He wrote to Cecil warning that Katherine was ill, and worse, that she welcomed her death.18
The doctor sent from the court could do nothing for Katherine. On the night of 26 January 1568, Katherine told those at her bedside that she was dying. They tried their best to raise her spirits, telling her that ‘With God’s help you shall live and do well many years.’ But Katherine replied firmly, ‘No, no. No life in this world.’19 At about six or seven the next morning Katherine gave Sir Owen Hopton her last messages. Elizabeth she begged to ‘be good to my children and . . . to my Lord [Hertford], for I know this my death will be heavy news to him’.20 To her husband she sent the pointed diamond he had given her on their betrothal, her gold wedding band, and a memento mori ring, engraved with the words ‘While I lived, yours’.21 Katherine’s death at nine o’clock that morning, Tuesday 27 January 1568, brought to a close another tragic love story in the Tudor family. Elizabeth put on a show of grief, as expected at the death of a relative, but it was judged an unconvincing performance. ‘She was afraid of her’, the Spanish ambassador noted.22
Of the three Grey sisters only the youngest, Lady Mary Grey, remained alive – and she was also in disgrace. In 1565, aged nineteen, undersized, and judged by the Spanish ambassador to be ‘crook backed and very ugly’ Mary Grey had married a giant of a man called Thomas Keyes who was the sergeant porter, in charge of palace security. It is possible she had a severe form of the scoliosis that afflicted Richard III and Edward VI. Clearly this hadn’t bothered the strapping Mr Keyes, but Cecil described their physical disparity as ‘monstrous’.
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