Elizabeth
Page 5
Elizabeth sent Walsingham to Antwerp in June 1578 as a special envoy to help cobble together a role for the Duke as a ‘Protector’ of the Netherlands. Walsingham did his best, but he never believed it could work. Narcissistic and irresponsible, Anjou was on an ego trip, intent more on winning a principality for himself than on coming up with a compromise that might pave the way to peace. Elizabeth had more than once to stop him from embarking on a military annexation of the Netherlands.25
By 1579, the Dutch revolt had become too extreme for the southern provinces, which made peace with Spain. It was at this perilous moment that Elizabeth began courting Anjou as a potential husband. She blew hot and cold but took her suit up seemingly in earnest a year later, when King Philip claimed the throne of Portugal.26 If Philip could now unify the crowns and resources of the Atlantic empires of Spain and Portugal, it would not be long before he could be expected to reconquer the Netherlands and perhaps, after that, invade England.
When she met Anjou in the flesh for the first time in 1579, Elizabeth found him to be physically repulsive. His diminutive height and badly scarred face, caused by a severe attack of smallpox, were scarcely reprieved in her eyes by his bandy legs and deep, gravelly voice. The twenty-one-year age gap between them was another major embarrassment. But she persisted, concealing her true emotions. Nicknaming him her ‘Frog’ – curiously, he never seemed to mind – she sought to mould him into her ally, wearing a golden flower brooch ‘with a frog thereon’ and holding out to him the offer of an English crown as bait to entice him into doing exactly what she wanted.27
Under the illusion that he would shortly be married, Anjou made a second visit to London in the winter of 1581–2, and Elizabeth played to perfection the part of a woman in love. Walking with him and the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière, in her privy gallery at Whitehall Palace, she suddenly turned to the Duke and kissed him on the mouth. She even drew a ring from her finger and gave it to him ‘as a pledge’.28 Afterwards, she announced her betrothal, saying, ‘It’s now a fact. I have a husband. As to the rest of you, look after yourselves if you will.’ Or so it was gleefully reported in Paris.29
But with her privy councillors split over the proposed match, she quickly abandoned it. Pressure came not least from her most trusted women – those who shared her Bedchamber – for she suffered from insomnia and was frightened of the dark. Every night, she insisted that at least one of these women sleep close by her on a pallet bed (i.e. a straw bed, or mattress). Believing that she was serious about Anjou, they had wept and wailed, ‘and did so terrify and vex her mind that she spent the night in doubts and cares without sleep’. A day or so later, she sent for Anjou and told him the wedding, for the moment, at least, was off.30
When the Portuguese Cortes next assembled, in April 1581, Philip took an oath to observe all the laws and customs of the realm and was recognized as the lawful king of Portugal. And with the budget for the Army of Flanders doubled, thanks to the massively increased revenues of the combined Portuguese and Spanish treasure fleets, Philip’s new supremo in the Netherlands, his nephew Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, rapidly recovered lost ground.31 Within weeks, towns in Flanders and Brabant were convulsed in flames and a fresh wave of Protestant refugees flooded into London. Feeling that she had no other option, Elizabeth bribed Anjou with £30,000 (£30 million in modern values) to accept the titular sovereignty of the Dutch provinces.32 But the fickle, power-hungry Duke lusted for more than an empty title. In January 1583, he attempted to seize Antwerp in a military coup d’état that failed disastrously, forcing him into a humiliating retreat to France. Indignant at his ineptitude, Elizabeth bluntly rounded on him, accusing him of being feckless and squandering her money.33
• • •
With the pan-European crisis fast coming to a head, Mary Queen of Scots on English soil and the Catholic exiles in Paris scheming frantically with the Jesuits and Mary’s agents to enforce the papal decree deposing Elizabeth, the Privy Council sounded the alarm. The threat level soared in October 1583, when a young Warwickshire Catholic, John Somerville – his father-in-law, Edward Arden, was Shakespeare’s kinsman – left his home with the declared intention of killing Elizabeth with a pistol while she was out riding. He made no attempt to conceal his plans and was arrested in Oxfordshire. Tried for high treason at London’s Guildhall, he and three alleged ‘accomplices’ (one of whom was his mother-in-law) were found guilty by a jury of horrified citizens in a packed courtroom. Shortly afterwards, the would-be assassin hanged himself in his cell in Newgate Prison.34
Less than a month after Somerville’s arrest, Walsingham – by now, he had some twenty spies and agents on his payroll – pounced on Francis Throckmorton, nephew of the same Nicholas who had warned Elizabeth to ‘beware of womanish levity’. Like so many Elizabethan families, the Throckmortons were bitterly divided by religion. Nicholas, who died of pneumonia in 1571 – a rumour that he suffered a seizure after eating a poisoned salad is almost certainly false – was a staunch Protestant, tried for treason during Mary Tudor’s reign and acquitted by a London jury. But his nephew, young and headstrong, was so fervidly Catholic he had volunteered his services as a courier to the French and Spanish ambassadors in London. A search of his papers, seized at his house by Paul’s Wharf on the Thames, enabled Walsingham to uncover a menacing conspiracy. Throckmorton was embroiled in a plot first devised in Rome by a Scottish Jesuit, Walter Crichton, and now masterminded from Paris by Henry, Duke of Guise, a first cousin of Mary Queen of Scots. Guise was the leader of the ultra-Catholic faction in the Wars of Religion in France and the richest, most powerful man in the country. He was the one person in Europe, besides King Philip, who had the will, the money, the ships and the men to pull off an invasion of England. After securing large sums from Parisian merchants to help raise troops, Guise had ordered his officers to make themselves ready and told his mother that he hoped ‘there would be ere long, beau jeu in England’.35
Walsingham would become haunted by the knowledge that he had stumbled across the plot purely by accident. Only because he had been warned by a spy that Francis Throckmorton was making regular visits to the French embassy was the young Catholic put under surveillance.36
Throckmorton was tortured on the rack. He bravely kept silent at first, but eventually the pain was unbearable and he babbled almost everything he knew. What he revealed was to cause a decisive rupture in Elizabeth’s relations with Spain. Like Ridolfi, the Duke of Guise had planned to put Mary Stuart on the throne when the heretic bastard Elizabeth was deposed and killed. To help engineer this, Throckmorton had provided Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London since 1578, with maps marked with suitable landing sites on the south coast of England to forward to Guise, along with a list of the names of leading Catholic noblemen and gentlemen who would willingly join the plot.37
For Burghley and Walsingham, this was the stuff of nightmares, and they acted swiftly. On 19 January 1584, Walsingham’s brother-in-law Robert Beale summoned Mendoza to a meeting at which Walsingham addressed the envoy in fluent Italian. He accused him of colluding with traitors and with Mary Queen of Scots, and gave him fifteen days to pack his bags and leave the country.38
Worse was to follow. In early June, a month before Throckmorton was dragged to the gallows, Elizabeth received ominous news from her ambassador in Paris: the Duke of Anjou had died unexpectedly at Château-Thierry, fifty miles north-east of Paris. He was just twenty-nine and was thought to have died of advanced syphilis.39 Elizabeth wept copious tears and went into official mourning for six months. When, early in September, Castelnau, not only the French ambassador in London but also an enemy of the Duke of Guise, was invited to watch her hunt in the park from a newly built terrace high up on the walls at Windsor Castle in Berkshire, she greeted him wearing a black dress and a long, diaphanous veil hanging down as low as the hem of her skirt, as if she were Anjou’s widow.40
Anjou’s death would have terrifying repercussions, which Elizabeth and Castelnau discussed at Windsor. With all three of Henry III’s brothers now dead, France found itself faced by the challenge of a king of ambiguous sexuality with no male children, whose succession was disputed between his second cousin, Henry of Navarre, and Navarre’s uncle, Cardinal Charles of Bourbon, archbishop of Rouen. Most jurists were clear that the shrewd, athletic, plain-speaking, thirty-year-old Henry of Navarre had a much better claim to the throne than the sixty-year-old cardinal. But he was a Huguenot, despised by the Guises. The deadlock presented the Duke of Guise with a golden opportunity to make a bid for dynastic pre-eminence. Castelnau, a moderate, fully agreed with Elizabeth that this was a threat which somehow would have to be neutralized.41
On 6 July, the stakes were doubled again. A courier arrived in London with the appalling news that, five days earlier, a young cabinet-maker’s apprentice, Balthasar Gérard, had assassinated William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch Calvinists, in the hallway of his house at Delft. Tempted by the huge bounty of 25,000 écus (worth around £8 million today) which King Philip had placed on William’s head, Gérard had packed a heavy pistol with three bullets and a large quantity of gunpowder. One bullet lodged in the fifty-one-year-old William’s abdomen as he turned to climb the stairs to his private chambers; the others tore diagonally through his lungs, afterwards smashing into the staircase wall and spattering blood and plaster everywhere. William died within minutes.42
His assassination left the Dutch rebels leaderless. And with the Duke of Parma preparing to lay siege to Brussels and Antwerp before marching north, it seemed it was only a matter of time before the last rebel towns of the Netherlands would fall to him like ninepins. The Duke of Guise was quick to see the possibilities. Before the year was out, he temporarily shelved his plan to invade England in favour of a secret treaty with Philip, who undertook to pay him the astronomical sum of 50,000 French crowns a month (£16 million in modern values) to form a Catholic League to exterminate the Huguenots and make France uniformly Catholic again. Were he to succeed, Elizabeth’s position would be dire: Protestant England would be vulnerable to a Catholic invasion jointly led by the pope, France and Spain.
• • •
So it was that when, just twelve weeks after William of Orange’s murder, Sheriff Spencer strolled at a leisurely pace along Aldgate High Street on the eastern perimeter of the City of London with his constables, he knew he had to be vigilant. At a moment when a single assassin’s bullet could have had catastrophic consequences, the Privy Council had ordered close searches for spies and Jesuits, coupled with random raids on the houses of known Catholics and ‘Mass-mongers’ (a term of abuse applied to undercover Catholic priests by Protestants). The city watches were put on maximum alert. More than a hundred known Catholics, both priests and laymen, were rounded up, and those who were considered the most dangerous were interned at Wisbech Castle in the depths of the Cambridgeshire Fens. Others were forcibly deported, loaded on to ships at Tower Wharf, their wrists bound together with ropes, and ‘banished [from] this realm for ever by virtue of a commission from Her Majesty’.43
As Spencer turned a corner, he encountered a huddle of dubious-looking foreigners glowering as a gang of civic labourers, sent out earlier with bricks and shovels by the mayor, sealed up an illegal alleyway leading to an immigrant enclave just inside the city walls. In the midst of this group he singled out two men who turned out to be brothers, ‘a little black man’ in leather boots and ‘a tall black man’. Dark-haired and swarthy rather than actually black-skinned, they were second-generation converso Jews from Venice, born to parents who had hurriedly sought Christian baptism to escape the Catholic Inquisition.44
Hearing the loiterers muttering suspiciously to one another in a foreign tongue, Spencer was instantly on his guard. He had been taught to believe that Portuguese or Italian Jews could be shady characters who led a double life. Like Walsingham, he thought many of them were spies or agents of the hated Jesuits. Could they even be assassins?
Spencer questioned the two men testily and ordered them to go about their lawful business. The Venetians refused, saying, ‘This is the Queen’s ground and we will stand here.’ When cautioned by the constables that, if he refused to move on, he would be sent to ward (i.e. taken into custody), the man in boots sneeringly said, ‘Send us to ward? Thou wert as good kiss our arse.’45
A proud, truculent pillar of the establishment who would one day fall foul of the law for beating his daughter, Spencer was not to be trifled with.46 He knew that he had more than sufficient reason to arrest these insolent foreigners. And he was further provoked by what he took to be an empty threat from the taller of the two brothers. ‘Sheriff Spencer,’ said this man tauntingly, ‘we have as good friends in the Court as thou hast and better too.’
Spencer, who was nicknamed ‘the Hardhead’, ordered his constables to seize the men, arresting their younger brother, too, for good measure. They resisted violently, striking the constables with their fists and lashing out at Spencer. At this point, the lawyer William Fleetwood, the city’s chief law officer, known as ‘the Recorder’, arrived to take charge, ordering the Venetians to Newgate Prison. Squaring up to him, the man in boots demanded scornfully, ‘Who are you?’ When told that he was Master Recorder, the man retorted, ‘You were as good eat the sole of my boot as send us to Newgate.’
As they were frogmarched to the nearest prison, at the Poultry Counter beside the Stocks Market, where fish and meat were sold, the Venetians persisted in their defiance. When the warder entered their names into the ledger at the gatehouse before leading them to their cells, they smudged the wet ink with their fingers, saying, ‘Master Recorder sent us to Newgate, and not to the Counter, and to Newgate we will go.’47
A week later, Spencer would have the shock of his life. A royal messenger knocked at the door of his fine mansion, Crosby Place in Bishopsgate, bringing a letter from Walsingham. Now Elizabeth’s principal secretary in succession to Burghley, who as the queen’s chief minister was learning to delegate a little in order to focus more intensively on crisis management, Walsingham severely rebuked Spencer for apprehending the Venetians. For it turned out that Spencer had arrested Arthur, Edward and Jeronimo Bassani, the stars of the queen’s sackbut and wind consort, and she wanted them back.48
Elizabeth was visiting Oatlands, a pleasure palace near Weybridge in Surrey built by her father for his third wife, Jane Seymour, when she discovered that her favourite musicians were missing.49 This was not long after Castelnau’s visit to Windsor, and she was in the later stages of her summer progress. In a fit of pique, she ordered Walsingham to investigate. Her impatience when thwarted on even petty matters was well known: one night in April 1572, when she was unable to sleep, she had ordered one of the grooms of the Privy Chamber to ride ‘with all speed’ through the night from Greenwich to Whitehall, seven miles in each direction, simply to fetch a white satin bolster he had forgotten.50
In a grovelling reply, Spencer sought to justify himself, explaining that he had not known the Venetians’ true identity until after they were imprisoned. Galvanized into action by the angry queen, the Privy Council freed and pardoned the musicians and summoned Spencer and Recorder Fleetwood to appear at Whitehall on 8 October with their underlings to account for the arrests.51
Just as the Bassani brothers had predicted, the tables were turned. The Privy Council sent the luckless constables to the Marshalsea, a prison in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames. Spencer would plead in vain with Walsingham that ‘as I would in no respect nor in any wise by any means willingly do anything that might displease Her Majesty or Your Honour, so likewise in the service of Her Majesty and to the good acceptation of Your Honour I will gladly and willingly spend both my life and my goods.’52 Forced by the Privy Council to make an abject apology, Spencer and Fleetwood were then made to pay the not insubstantial bills for food and wine which the Bassani brot
hers had run up in prison, and afterwards the civic authorities were sued, apparently successfully, by the landlord of the Aldgate site, Lord Thomas Howard, for the losses that their workmen had caused him through bricking up the contested alleyway.53 This, too, was no coincidence. Just a few weeks before, Elizabeth had stood as godmother to Howard’s son and had sent the child’s nurse a purse of silver.54
Given the rupture with Spain and the intense fear and surveillance in the metropolis by 1584, it was hardly surprising that Spencer should have arrested the swarthy Bassani brothers for their suspicious behaviour. He had done so believing that he was following orders from above. Spencer may have had a noxious temper, but so, at times, it seemed, did the queen. What the luckless sheriff found truly shocking was Elizabeth’s subversive disregard for her own security, and most of all her lack of consideration for his dignity as an elected city official. It was a side of her he had never imagined could exist. Hauled before the Privy Council to account for his actions, he discovered in a visceral way that England was ruled by a queen whose mind and purposes even those closest to her would find difficult to read.
2. Crisis and Betrayal
William of Orange’s assassination presented Elizabeth with the starkest, most dangerous choice of her life, one which was to provoke a clash between her feelings as a woman and her instincts as a queen. The question was clear: should she intervene on the side of the Dutch Calvinists in their struggle with their Spanish overlord, King Philip, thereby provoking war, or should she leave the rebels to their fate? If she failed to intervene, the Duke of Parma’s army would triumphantly reconquer the whole of the Netherlands. Then Philip would have the best-equipped forces in Europe standing idle within easy striking range of the British Isles and safe harbours for his fleets should he wish to take control of the English Channel.