An Accidental Tragedy (52 page)

The year 1572 was also one that saw Mary’s hopes of release fade further and further away. Once again Shrewsbury had to reduce Mary’s entourage, partly for reasons of security as she became a focus for all disaffected Catholics and, more practically, for reasons of cost.

Elizabeth allowed the earl £52 per week, but the system of payment was erratic, to say the least. By February 1570 Shrewsbury had been due £2,808 but had only been paid £2,500 with no prospect of gaining the missing £300. His allowance was based on Mary maintaining a court of thirty people, but when it rose above this, as it frequently did, he had to find the balance himself. The allowance had not provided for Mary’s waiting gentlemen to be served eight dishes at each meal while the ladies-in-waiting were given five. A mark of the height of state maintained by nobles was the lavishness with which they treated their servants and Mary had been trained as a Valois sovereign. Added to this, as escape attempts were discovered, Shrewsbury had to increase the number of guards. Elizabeth was keen that Mary used her dowager’s pension from France, coupled with her revenues from Scotland, to pay for her own keep, but the French allowance was irregular in the extreme and the Scottish Regent had stopped all payments. Shrewsbury also complained, justifiably, that even his immense wealth was being drained by maintaining a household that, apart from anything else, consumed 500 gallons of wine each month. Shrewsbury was a decent man and tried to make Mary’s imprisonment as comfortable as possible, but he was in a cruel financial vice. Although his wife, Bess, was herself independently wealthy, she was also one of the most ambitious builders in England, and he couldn’t rely on her income.

On 26 May 1572, a letter was sent to Elizabeth by ‘the clergy of the higher house’ (the bishops in the House of Lords) demanding that Mary be punished ‘even unto death’, and shortly afterwards Elizabeth wrote to Mary telling her that parliament was forcing her to ask Mary to answer thirteen charges of disloyalty in a Bill of Attainder. A deputation came to Sheffield and Mary answered
these charges by repeating the old justifications for quartering her arms at her ex-father-in-law’s insistence and denying any knowledge of new activities – especially the Ridolfi plot. She had no knowledge of what her friends might be doing but ‘there is no affirmation or publication that she is or ought to be Queen of England by her means procurement or knowledge’. Elizabeth had no wish to see a sister queen tried before parliament and possibly sentenced to death for a treason of which she was technically not guilty, and she used her considerable powers of persuasion to have the Bill of Attainder defeated.

Mary’s status in England suffered a more serious blow in August thanks to affairs in France. Admiral Coligny, the Huguenot leader, had been gaining more and more in power and popularity, with the result that on the evening of 23 August 1572, St Bartholomew’s Eve, Henri de Guise, the son of Mary’s assassinated uncle, marched a squad of soldiers to Coligny’s house in Paris. Coligny was murdered and word spread, erroneously, through Paris that a general slaughter of Protestants had been ordered. Over the next three days an orgy of violence against Protestants took place with up to 3,000 killed, often mutilated and thrown into the Seine. Needless to say, the houses of the dead were looted before being burned. In the countryside there were erratic outbursts until October. In all, about 12,000 Protestants were slaughtered across France.

Given the Northern Rising and the recent events in East Anglia, it was clear that militant Catholicism was still bubbling just under the surface in England, so the news of such a bloodbath and the possibility of it happening in England was Elizabeth and Burghley’s worst nightmare. Both of them had only just managed to survive the reign of Mary Tudor, which had ended a mere fourteen years previously. In some village churches which had moved from the Protestant rite observed under Henry VIII to the Catholic Mass under Mary – sometimes with the same incumbent – altar cloths and vessels had simply been hidden when Elizabeth came to the throne, as people waited to see if orthodoxy would revert to Rome. In the main, English public
opinion did not anticipate a return to the martyrdoms of Mary Tudor with any enthusiasm and linked the continued existence of Mary as a Catholic claimant to the throne with the possibility of an event similar to the Massacre of St Bartholomew occurring in England. The populace had never been overly friendly to Mary before, but it now became violently anti-Catholic. Mary had previously been a royal nuisance, but now she was seen as a malignant sore on the Protestant body politic.

The anti-Marian campaign continued with the Bishop of London suggesting to Burghley that she be beheaded, and a long anonymous letter was sent to Leicester declaring that ‘there is no remedy for our Queen, for our realm, for Christendom, but the due execution of the Scottish Queen. The botch of the world must be lanced’. The tone of this letter is similar to the one of 26 May by ‘the higher clergy’.

Mary’s servants were reduced to sixteen and Elizabeth ordered that Mary be ‘kept very straightly from all conference’. No one was allowed to enter Shrewsbury’s properties without an express warrant from Elizabeth. And Shrewsbury wrote, ‘She is meetly quiet, saying that she mislikes she cannot go hunting on the fields upon horseback, which I trust the Queen’s Majesty will not assent to.’ Shrewsbury made sure that the malignancy did not spread by ordering frequent searches of Mary’s apartments and papers, and sending all correspondence immediately to Burghley for deciphering. Burghley, in his turn, asked Shrewsbury to ‘tempt her patience and provoke her to answer’; in other words to act as an agent provocateur and encourage her to make disloyal statements. But Shrewsbury drew the line at that sort of behaviour. Mary was kept close within the walls of Sheffield Castle, but on 10 October Shrewsbury reported, ‘This lady complains of sickness by reason of her restraint of liberty in walking abroad, that I am forced to walk with her near unto my castle, which partly stays her from troubling the Queen’s Majesty with her frivolous letters.’ For all this care and worry, Elizabeth created Shrewsbury Earl Marshal of England. The post had been held in heredity by the Dukes of Norfolk, and the new creation
brought Shrewsbury no further income but did involve him in occasional extra expense. It cost Elizabeth nothing.

Throughout England there was great concern in October 1572 when Elizabeth contracted smallpox. Since the probability was that she would die, Shrewsbury was now acting as gaoler of the next Queen of England; he could expect either news that Elizabeth had recovered, or he might see the approach of a party of, probably Catholic, horsemen come to carry the new queen to Westminster – a queen who might reflect vindictively on the behaviour of her erstwhile gaoler. He wrote anxiously to London and on 22 October was rewarded with a touching letter: ‘My faithful Shrewsbury, let no grief touch your heart for fear of my disease; for I assure you, if my credit were not greater than my show, there is no beholder would believe that ever I had been touched with such a malady, Your faithful loving sovereign, Elizabeth R.’ Shrewsbury vowed to keep the letter – ‘far above the order used to a subject’ – ‘for a perpetual memory’.

Mary too had been ill and had sent a letter to Elizabeth that she had a ‘cold’ in one arm which made it impossible for her to write, but ‘if I did not fear it would importune you too much, I would make a request to you to allow me to go to Buxton well . . . which I think would give ease to it and to my side with which I am very much tormented’. Shrewsbury, who had visited the spa at Buxton for his gout, did not think it would cure her maladies and nothing came of Mary’s request. However, he did become more sympathetic, but wished to delay her going there until 1573, ‘when the house there shall be in readiness, and which, not being finished now, is nothing meet for that purpose’.

The Well of St Anne at Buxton had been a popular curative spring in the Middle Ages and the walls were festooned with the obligatory crutches and sticks, abandoned by the miraculously cured, when it came into the hands of the Talbot family in the fifteenth century. This popularity continued until the reign of Henry VIII – who might have done well himself to take the cure. But on Henry’s behalf Sir William Bassett came to Buxton, suspecting the well to be a centre of Popish superstition, and
sealed the ‘baths and wells of Buxton that none shall enter and wash there until your Lordship’s pleasure be further known’. However, by the 1570s the reputation of Buxton was once again high. Shrewsbury had built a four-storey house, adjacent to the chief spring, with thirty rooms as well as a ‘great chamber’ around the spring, with seats around the baths and chimneys for ‘fire to air your garments in the bath’s side’. Bowling alleys and archery butts vied with a game of Troule in Madame in which balls of various sizes were thrown at holes worth differing scores. Buxton was starting to attract a fashionable clientele and Bess made plans to become even richer with a scale of charges: 12d for a yeoman, through £3 10s for a duke and up to £5 for an archbishop.

Shrewsbury wrote to Walsingham in July 1573: ‘Mary seems more healthful now, and all the last year past, than before. What need she have of Buxton Well I know not.’ He asked for direct guidance from London, and in August 1573 Elizabeth granted permission for Mary to visit the spa, but with an increased guard. There was to be no contact with strangers and strict orders that the visit was to be medicinal and not social. Elizabeth was not a cruel woman and she was sympathetic towards a younger woman in poor health, but she had to balance this with the ever-present suspicion that Mary might be in the midst of some new plot – her new chancellor, de Vergé, had just left for France; was he carrying secret messages? – and with Burghley at her elbow feeding her disquiet she had genuine concern. Power has always brought the suspicion that others are plotting to remove it, and such paranoia has existed from Egypt’s pharaohs to contemporary presidents and prime ministers.

The visit to Buxton was a success, not only from the point of view of relieving Mary’s pain in her side, but also providing a much-needed break with the undoubted monotony of Chatsworth or Sheffield. Since Mary’s furniture and wall hangings travelled with her, the interiors of these places were very similar, with the obvious exception of the loathed Tutbury, and her limited exercise gave her little relief. Mary was a very social lady, revelling in new acquaintances and gossip, but when every visitor
was closely watched and regarded as a possible spy, her entertainments were severely curtailed. Buxton was a very different matter. Here was a fashionable town, now with an exiled queen – a queen with a very racy reputation and renowned as one of the age’s great beauties – visiting the baths under intriguing circumstances of secrecy. Everyone would be eager to catch a glimpse of her, and even the strictest security could not wholly prevent Mary from having some contact with the outside world.

In the 1950s Estoril in Portugal became the
refuge du goût
for exiled royalty from Europe and the Middle East and the fashion-conscious flocked to catch a glimpse of an erstwhile monarch on the beach or at the casino. Four hundred years earlier, Buxton necks were craned for a similar glimpse of the dangerous queen. Although Mary was now thirty-one – middle-aged in her times – and becoming stooped and overweight, she still retained her allure, and Buxton profited from it as Brighton would later profit from the visits of the Prince Regent.

Mary found relief at Buxton and believed, ‘If in the coming year, it should please her [Elizabeth], at a better season, to grant me the same permission, and to give me a rather longer time, I believe that will quite cure me.’ Mary now seemed to accept that her imprisonment would continue with periodic transfers to and from Shrewsbury’s various houses, hopefully interspersed with occasional trips to Buxton.

What fragile hope there had been of Mary’s restoration in Scotland died when Regent Mar died on 29 October 1573 and his place was taken by Morton, who was firmly determined to bring the chaos of recurring civil wars to an end. There was now no hope of Mary being restored to her throne in Scotland, and a peace treaty of February 1573 left only Lethington, Kirkcaldy of Grange and a few others embattled in Edinburgh Castle as the rump of the Queen’s Party. Elizabeth sent 1,500 men to Leith, and on 16 June the garrison of 164 men, 34 women and 10 boys surrendered. Most, including Kirkcaldy of Grange, were hanged, while on 9 July, Mary’s last supporter, Maitland of Lethington, the ‘Machiavelli ’ of Scotland, took poison and died, his body
being found some days later as a feasting ground for maggots. Mary Stewart was now Queen of Scots in name only.

Mary also realised about this time that the Cardinal of Lorraine was withholding the bulk of her French pension for his own use. She had high hopes, alas unfounded, that de Vergé might manage to stop this plunder by her own family, but since she was of no further political use to the Guises they felt that they could rob her with impunity. Her brother-in-law Charles IX dismissed her summarily: ‘The poor fool will never cease until she lose her head. In faith, they will put her to death. I see it is her own fault and folly. I see no remedy for it.’

The facts of her isolation and imprisonment were further brought home to her during this time as any news of the enormous changes in her kingdom arrived second-hand and at the discretion of Burghley. It was no longer felt important that she knew anything of Scotland; as a focus for plots, the less information she had, the better.

In December, an informer, W. Hayworth, warned Leicester of a plot by the papists of Lancashire to convey the Scottish queen to France, Spain or Scotland. The warning was vague in the extreme, giving no specific details, and could have actually been true at any moment of Mary’s captivity. The letter reads like a plea from a bigoted and aggrieved citizen against his Catholic neighbours, but Mary was a focus for even petty disputes at the most local level. William Wharton suggested that counterfeit letters be sent to Mary, giving her false news and drawing her and her friends into a conspiracy so that they could all be arrested. The scheme was rejected, but Walsingham noted the idea as worthy of improvement.