Heretic Queen (21 page)

Nine days after the Darnley murder, the Spanish ambassador to London, Guzman de Silva, wrote to Mary on the order of Philip II that he “had been told of the bad offices of her husband [Darnley] in writing against her to His Majesty, the Pope and other Princes in the matter of religion.”
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The Venetian ambassador reported to the doge that Darnley's murder had been the work of heretics. Still the open question remained: Did Mary know about the plan to murder her husband?

Naturally, Darnley's outraged father, Lennox, begged Cecil for Elizabeth's assistance in punishing the murderers, especially Mary. Meanwhile, intelligence had arrived from Scotland that Mary had not only “looked through her fingers” but was also obstructing justice to bring Bothwell to trial. Elizabeth demanded to know the truth and sent the experienced Henry Killigrew northward as her ambassador. When Killigrew arrived in Scotland days later, he found a “very doleful” Mary. She seemed, so he reported back to Elizabeth, more interested in who was publishing the defamatory placards against her and Bothwell than in finding her husband's murderers. By the end of the month, Killigrew and those loyal to the Earl of Moray had persuaded Mary that she must allow Lennox to pursue a private prosecution in Parliament against Bothwell as the murderer of his son.

Incomprehensibly, Mary flatly refused to be a coplaintiff with her father-in-law. In fact, she upheld the decree that Lennox could only come into Edinburgh with six armed men, while it was widely known that Bothwell had over four thousand adherents swarming in the town. Lennox shrank from entering Edinburgh without men to protect him. Bothwell, deprived of facing his accuser, was acquitted.

Disgusted with his sister, Moray headed for London. He told the English court that Bothwell “had always been his enemy” and was now in a position of absolute power. He also said that he would not return to Scotland unless and until Mary punished those responsible for her husband's murder. By mid-May, Mary was positively courting disaster. She married the Earl of Bothwell on May 15, only days after he divorced his wife.

Elizabeth immediately offered asylum to the young Prince James as pandemonium broke out in Scotland. Cecil himself wrote, “Scotland is a quagmire … The most honest desire to go away, the worst tremble with the shaking of their conscience.”
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Maitland remained loyal to Mary and was in constant correspondence with Cecil detailing the events as they unfolded. Arms were taken up by the Protestant Lords against Mary and her third husband, who were summarily defeated at Carberry Hill only one month after their wedding day. Bothwell escaped overseas, while Mary was taken through the streets of Edinburgh to the cries of “burn the whore” and “burn the murderess of her husband.” Mary spat back at them that she would crucify the lot of them.
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Two days later, she was bundled off to her island prison at Lochleven Castle. The Earl of Moray returned home to join Maitland and the other Lords of the Congregation in restoring order.

Before leaving England, Moray had asked Elizabeth for help, and she flatly refused. Though she recognized the dire state of Scotland's affairs, Elizabeth explained, she could never set herself up against an anointed queen in favor of those who had seized her throne. Nonetheless, she sent Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to Scotland to see if he could smooth the way for Mary's restitution and bring Prince James to England for safety. Throckmorton was too late to be of any real value aside from warning Elizabeth and Cecil of their “great peril” in abandoning the Protestant Lords to their cause. By the end of the summer, the Scottish Parliament had decided to establish a regency of nine nobles, naming Moray as regent, and procured Mary's abdication and her consent to the coronation of her son. Mary would remain indefinitely imprisoned at Lochleven Castle.

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Elsewhere, another regent
sat uncomfortably next to her son, the king. Catherine de' Medici, for her part, was deeply concerned about the “iconoclastic fury” on her border with the Netherlands. Worse still, her son, Charles IX, had grown desperately fond of the Huguenot leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who had also become the king's mentor. With the Huguenots in ascendance in France, and the Netherlander Calvinists standing their ground against the might of Spain, the situation for France's Catholic established order seemed grim. Nonetheless, Catherine could be happy that Mary's Guise uncles had withdrawn from court and were temporarily cut off from their niece.

Of course, the French Huguenots pressed home their advantage with the young king in the absence of the Guises. Coligny tried to persuade Charles that if they successfully ejected Philip from the Low Countries, it could only serve France's national interest. Catherine wisely resisted. The very last thing she cared to do was to alienate Philip and bring down the wrath of Spain on France. Nevertheless, Philip tested her mettle, requesting that Alba be able to march his crack troops the length of France to the Low Countries, as it was the most convenient route for his invasion forces. Catherine, naturally, failed Philip's test, unequivocally refusing an outlandish suggestion that would “set fire to the kingdom.”
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The route was changed, but not without Catherine fearing reprisals from Philip's soldiers in the future. After all, with most of the Low Countries in revolt in the south, the Spaniards would be billeted on France's border. Catherine ordered a reinforcement of the northern defenses and hired six thousand Swiss mercenaries as a deterrent against potential Spanish aggression. Garrisons along the Netherlands borders in Piedmont, Champagne, Toul, Metz, and Verdun were reinforced.

In 1567, these tensions coincided with the burning issue from England's viewpoint. Would the French return Calais in accordance with the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis? Catherine's response came soon enough. Since Elizabeth had broken the peace between France and England by taking Newhaven in 1562–63, France was quite content to maintain its current and natural borders. Calais would never be returned.

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While Catherine was
battling to save the fragile peace of France, Cecil's spies and ambassadors in Ireland discovered that Shane O'Neill, that bellicose Ulster chieftain who had kept his territories in a state of perpetual war, had appealed for five thousand troops from France to fight the English. He was politely refused. Simultaneously, O'Neill donned a diplomatic mantle and traveled from southern Ireland to Edinburgh and on to Rome, seeking aid for his cause while claiming to be saving Ireland for Roman Catholicism.
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Naturally, Mary was in no position to offer succor to O'Neill at a time when her very throne was crumbling beneath her. Nonetheless, Pius V in Rome was prepared to lend a ready ear.

Sometime in the spring of 1567, the disreputable papal appointee, Armagh's Archbishop Magrath, wrote to Pius V for the establishment of the Holy Inquisition in Ireland. He urged the pope to grant this most serious request since Ireland's heretics “under form of sound doctrine yet by merry tales and pretty conceits disseminate many and diverse empty and profitless matters repugnant to the Catholic faith … [and] utter derisive and unseemly words even against God's holy church.” Naturally, the pope agreed that such a Holy Inquisition should be established under the “sway and jurisdiction of the Most Illustrious and Catholic Prince O'Neill.”
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This seemingly earnest plea was an outright lie. The number of “heretics” in Ireland was small, even ten years after Elizabeth's Act of Settlement. Shane's Catholicism was more a political tool to elicit support from Scotland, Spain, or the papacy than a matter of faith. The Anglo-Irish settlers professed the religion more or less as decreed by Elizabeth as the head of the Church of England. Not surprisingly, no pope had appointed any Catholic archbishop or bishop to any Pale diocese in Elizabeth's lifetime.
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The Pale dioceses of Dublin, Kildare, Meath, and Armagh were fully Anglo-Irish in worship. Other Pale dioceses in Limerick, Cork, Ferns, Tuam, and Clonfert acknowledged Elizabeth's Royal Supremacy but continued to worship as traditional Catholics, with Elizabeth's full knowledge. Yet Ireland was rapidly becoming a battleground for religious and political tensions.
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Though a thief, bully, murderer, and cheat, Shane O'Neill maintained an iron grip on Ulster. Leicester, taking charge of the degenerating situation there, persuaded Elizabeth without too much argument that his brother-in-law, Sir Henry Sidney, would make an ideal Lord Lieutenant to replace Sussex. A tall, elegant, and likable man, Sidney had always been popular with Elizabeth's nobility. That he was also Leicester's favorite made his initial popularity with the Palesmen, Anglo-Irish, and Celtic chieftains (who called him “Big Henry of the Beer”), even more remarkable. Having only taken up his post in 1566, Sidney found that his support to stop O'Neill was nearly universal. Perhaps this groundswell of support for the English Lord Lieutenant is not so strange when considering that O'Neill had been terrorizing the Irish for over fifteen years—burning fields and villages, pillaging livestock and valuables, kidnapping whosoever stood in his way, and murdering at will.

Still, deciding to eliminate Shane O'Neill was one thing; succeeding was quite another. As the weeks became months, Sidney's obsession with routing O'Neill grew. Stuck between the divergent demands of the Celtic chieftains, the faction-ridden Anglo-Irish, the power-hungry Palesmen, and the English merchant adventurers, Ireland seemed more akin to a “Wild West” of native warring tribes and con men than a civilized nation. Sidney found his position as governor rapidly eroded, and by the spring of 1567, he had had enough. “For God's sake,” Sidney begged Cecil by letter, “take me out of this world.”
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Sidney hadn't been able to provide the Irish with a quick-fix solution to O'Neill. At the end of the day, it was the O'Donnells, who dominated Tyreannell in northwest Ulster, who handled matters. Though Elizabeth had voted Sidney a staggering £35,000 to mount a devastating force against O'Neill, few in Ireland had confidence that this time Sidney would prevail. As Sidney made his way northward from Dublin, the O'Donnells set aside their internal differences and joined forces with one another to repel O'Neill. Attacking Shane's encampment at Farsetmore, the O'Donnells literally forced O'Neill's men back into the swollen River Swilly. Hundreds of men drowned, while others willingly abandoned the once omnipotent O'Neill. Nonetheless, Shane had somehow escaped.

O'Neill desperately needed new allies. Unable to count on his own clan, who were already vying to take over from him on his death, O'Neill knew he would have to surrender to Sidney or make peace with the other Scotsmen in Ireland, the MacDonalds. Shane opted for the MacDonald solution, as he had already kidnapped their chief, Sorley Boy. On May 31, negotiations were opened in a large field in County Antrim, far away from their armies. Shane offered Sorley Boy's release in exchange for Scottish mercenary reinforcements. The MacDonalds pondered and said they'd consider the matter. Two days later, the MacDonalds gave Shane O'Neill their reply. They cut his throat and hacked him to pieces.

When Edmund Campion, the Oxford student who had so impressed Elizabeth, compiled his
History of Ireland
in 1569–70, he wrote, “Thus the wretched man ended, who might have lived like a Prince, had he not quenched the sparks of grace that appeared in him with arrogancy and contempt against his prince.”
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Shane's body was buried at Glenarm initially. Yet Sidney remained dissatisfied that O'Neill was indeed dead. To placate Sidney, the chieftain's body was exhumed and his head sent “pickled in a pipkin” to the Lord Lieutenant, who promptly had it mounted on a pole over Dublin Castle as a lesson to all the “wild” Irish.

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By the end of the summer
of 1567, Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned at Lochleven Castle; Shane O'Neill was dead; Philip's crack commander, the Duke of Alba, had marched into Brussels; France teetered on a fresh outbreak of religious violence; and England knew that to recover Calais it would need to go to war. It is little wonder Elizabeth felt the international situation was grave.

At home, the universities remained hotbeds of discontent, whether from Catholic or Protestant factions. Though Cambridge was emerging as the more “churchy” of the two universities, Oxford was seemingly overrun with the more conservative or Catholic society. While Cambridge overwhelmed Oxford in the sheer numbers of godly preachers, Oxford more than made up for the town's Catholic leanings with its own extreme ministers among its graduates in men like John Field and Thomas Wilcox. Both men, after just a few months in London, had already found themselves exiled.
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Cecil from his base at Cambridge and Leicester at Oxford instituted their own miniature secret services to provide intelligence to the queen for potentially serious threats. The most useful “agents” of both men within the universities invariably changed with the passing years, but more often than not, it was the students themselves that proved the most fruitful path for discovering dissident attitudes. After all, Elizabeth and her privy councillors knew that the Catholic students and their professors found refuge in the classrooms and universities at Louvain and Mechlin. Though these university spy networks had their roots in the controversies of the 1560s, they would continue until the end of Elizabeth's reign, with consequences far beyond the sphere of religious upheaval.

In the autumn of 1567, there were over twenty-seven Catholic exiles at Louvain from New College Oxford alone.
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Their writings and books sent back illicitly to England had done “incalculable good in spreading the growth of the Faith,” the Spanish ambassador wrote to Philip. The Spanish king's reply was a resounding endorsement for the “Apologetic School of Louvain,” urging the ambassador to explore any opportunity to encourage the work of the Catholic English exiles.
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