Mary Queen of Scots (80 page)

But as the royal suite happily escalated through Shrewsbury’s laxity, its increase in numbers inevitably reached the ears of the government in London, who took a much less generous view, especially when outside events seemed to threaten the safety of the queen of Scots. In times of danger there would be an outcry against this burgeoning suite – ‘too much enlarged at the present time’ wrote Elizabeth angrily in September 1569, at the time of her discovery of the first Norfolk marriage negotiations. There would be demands from London that numbers should be cut; this would result in tears and protests from Mary, coupled with guilty denials from Shrewsbury to London that he had ever allowed the number to rise.

More servants, quite apart from the danger of official complaints from London, meant more mouths to feed. Here Shrewsbury was less indulgent. His allowance from the government for the feeding of the queen was the subject of agonizing solicitude on his part throughout all his long years as her guardian, and as late as 1584 he was still complaining about the number of dishes the attendants consumed – eight dishes at every meal for the queen’s gentlemen, and five dishes for the ladies. When Queen Mary was
first committed to Shrewsbury, he was allowed £52 a week to maintain her, but in 1575, without any reason being given, this allowance was cut to £30 a week. Shrewsbury squeaked with protest but all to no avail: it was an economy which the careful Elizabeth was determined to make. Shrewsbury’s seventeenth-century biographer Johnston estimated that he was actually spending £30
a day
, and was thus nearly £10,000 a year out of pocket; yet not only were his complaints disregarded, but he frequently had much difficulty in extracting the allowance which remained from the government.
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Eventually, on the advice of Walsingham, Shrewsbury applied to Queen Elizabeth for a fee farm to try and get back some of the expenses in a manner that would not hurt the royal pocket; even this request took a long time to be granted. In the meantime Walsingham reflected that cutting Shrewsbury’s allowance might turn out to be a false economy if it meant that the queen of Scots was allowed to escape through lack of guards – ‘I pray God the abatement of the charges towards the nobleman that hath custody of the bosom serpent, hath not lessened his care in keeping her’.
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In fact the care which Shrewsbury showed in keeping Queen Mary, like the numbers of her suite which he tolerated, varied very much with the attitude of the central government, and this in turn depended on the state of national security. Shrewsbury was not a cruel man and strictness generally had to be imposed from above. Even when the government resolved that the queen should be kept more ‘straitly’, its wishes were not always implemented very speedily; Derbyshire and Staffordshire were a long way from London, and travelling, especially in winter, from houses like Chatsworth set amidst the mountainous area of Derbyshire, represented considerable difficulties. This worked both ways. In the first place Shrewsbury, like all ambitious Elizabethans, constantly pined for the royal sunshine of the court, and bewailed the duties which kept him so long away from it: he felt he was being excluded from the glorious possibilities of the queen’s favour, as well as an opportunity to make his case about his allowance. In 1582, in the autumn, deprived at the last minute of permission to make a longed-for visit to London, Shrewsbury commented sadly to Walsingham that neither the weather nor the time of the year would have prevented him arriving. Shrewsbury had to content himself with bombarding his friends at court with letters and gifts reminding them of his existence – such as some tasty ‘red deer pies’, made from his own deer, and posted off to London to win the favour of Cecil.
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But just as Shrewsbury was often tortured by the thought of the delights of London and the court, so the government who occupied this delightful city were themselves from time to time agonized at the idea that the Scottish queen in the far-off midlands was enjoying far too much liberty, seeing people, receiving visitors, holding a virtual court, riding about on horseback in conditions tantamount to liberty … such rumours, untrue as they were, spread by those recently arrived in London from the midlands, caused Elizabeth to choke with fury and fire off indignant reproaches to Shrewsbury for neglecting his duty.

Although Shrewsbury never failed to write in return protesting his extreme loyalty to Elizabeth and his eternal vigilance as a jailer, there was no doubt that the question of access to the Scottish queen was a delicate one, and whatever he swore to Elizabeth Shrewsbury did not always interpret the rules in the harshest possible light. In April 1574 he wrote down to London, in answer to some accusation that he was showing too much kindness to his captive: ‘I know her to be a stranger, a Papist, my Enemy. What hopes can I have of good of her, either for me, or for my country?’
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But of course there was a simple answer to Shrewsbury’s question, as to what he – leaving out his country – could hope for from the queen of Scots, and Cecil and his fellows were well able to supply it for themselves: if Elizabeth died suddenly, who knew but that Mary’s fortunes might not be dramatically reversed? If the captive were to be transformed overnight into the queen, and Mary were to ascend the throne of England, as would have been a possibility at least, had Elizabeth died while James was still a child, then Shrewsbury could expect much from his former charge if he had shown himself a sympathetic host to her in her times of distress. This consideration of Mary’s potential as queen of England which died away in the 1580s after James grew to manhood, was very much present in the minds of the English statesmen in the 1570s; not only Shrewsbury but also Cecil and Leicester kept the possibility at the back of their minds in their dealings with the queen of Scots.

From Mary’s own point of view she was of course anxious to be allowed to receive as many local people, and enjoy as much local life as possible. Such visits helped to while away the tedium of her imprisonment: the great families of Staffordshire and Derbyshire, the Manners and the Pagets, far from being Philistines, had the particular enjoyment of music and musical festivities which Mary shared.
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These visits also provided an excellent cover for messengers and messages to slip by secretly. By the summer of 1569 irritating reports were reaching London that the Shrewsburys were allowing Mary some sort of social life at Wingfield. Lord Shrewsbury countered such complaints by detailing his extravagant precautions for Mary’s safety – how, for example, when a child was born to his son and daughter-in-law, Gilbert and Mary Talbot, in March 1575 he deliberately christened the baby himself, to prevent unnecessary strangers entering the house. Nevertheless Shrewsbury was on some occasions accused of actually showing off his distinguished captive to his visitors – a charge of which one feels he was probably not completely innocent, since the presence of the famous queen of Scots in the midlands of England must have caused a sensation among the local gentry on her first arrival. Cecil told Shrewsbury that Elizabeth had heard in London of ‘a gentleman of Lord B’ who, on visiting Shrewsbury at his home, had been asked by him whether he had ever seen the queen of Scots. Cecil’s indictment continued: ‘Then, quoth your lordship, you shall see her anon.’
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Such tales made Elizabeth’s blood boil and Shrewsbury’s run cold.

Mary’s access to the baths at Buxton was the subject of a long drawn-out three-cornered skirmish between Elizabeth, Shrewsbury and Mary. Buxton, which lay comparatively close to Chatsworth, although cut off from it by rough countryside, was endowed with a well, the healing properties of whose waters had been known even to the Romans. In early Tudor times it had been known as the well of St Anne, and had become a centre of religious pilgrimage, where the people came to be cured as much by their faith as by the waters themselves; as at a modern centre of pilgrimage, Lourdes, the crutches and sticks of the cured were hung up in the little chapel over the springs where Mass used to be said on behalf of the afflicted. During the iron dominion of Thomas Cromwell these innocent pursuits were rudely interrupted; the crutches and sticks, and the offerings to the chapel were angrily swept away as manifestations of ‘papist idolatry’ by Cromwell’s emissary; the baths themselves were locked up and sealed. However, by the time Queen Mary reached Derbyshire, the baths were once more unsealed, and were enjoying a considerable vogue even with the courtiers in far-away London, for their remedial powers which were thought to be particularly helpful in the case of gout. In 1572 a Dr Jones wrote a thesis on the benefits to be derived from the ‘Ancient Baths at Buckstones’ which described the commodious arrangements made there for the reception of the sufferers. Bess had apparently already turned her agile mind to the possible profit to be derived from these baths and their
tepid, clear mineral waters: Dr Jones’s narrative implies that she planned some sort of Buxton Bath Charity, in which it was intended to have a clear scale of charges according to the wealth of the patient – £3 10
s.
for a duke and 12
d.
for a yeoman.
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To visit these baths became the dearest object of Mary Queen of Scots; again and again she pleaded the near-breakdown of her health in an effort to secure the desired permission. Shrewsbury himself built a special house next to the famous baths, in which it would be possible to house the Scottish queen as she took her cure, without danger of escape. But every time Elizabeth appeared to be on the point of agreeing, she seemed to hear of some fresh plot to rescue the prisoner. These heart-searchings eventually culminated in permission being granted, albeit reluctantly. Mary paid her first visit to Buxton at the end of August 1573 and spent five weeks there. Thereafter it became the outing to which she most keenly looked forward, not only one may suppose for the remedial effects of the waters – considered efficacious also for female irregularities as well as gout – but for the unique opportunity which it gave her to mix with people. The presence of occasional court folk at Buxton was indeed a source of equal joy to both Mary and Shrewsbury. Thus Mary was able to meet Cecil, in 1575, and later Leicester, her former suitor, in 1578 and 1584. Cecil in his cautious way actually turned down a projected match of his daughter with Shrewsbury’s son, on the grounds that it might confirm ugly reports that he had become too friendly with Mary while at Buxton. But Leicester went on after his cure at Buxton to be entertained by Shrewsbury at Chatsworth, where Mary was at that moment confined. Mary’s keenest hope was of course that Elizabeth herself would succumb to the temptation to visit the baths, so that the longed-for meeting would be brought about. But although Elizabeth visited the town of Stafford and the nearby Essex house of Chartley in the course of a progress in August 1575 – the moment in their lives at which the two queens were geographically nearest to each other – she did not journey on to Buxton.

Such visits gave Shrewsbury an opportunity of lavishing actual presents as well as showing kindness to prominent courtiers, or their wives and relations. Venison, fruit, fowl, meat, wine and ale flowed in a rich stream from the Shrewsbury domains to make the stay of these fashionable figures in distant Derbyshire more palatable. In August 1576 Sir Walter Mildmay, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, thanked Shrewsbury profusely for his kindness to his wife during the period of her cure, without which ‘her being at Buxtons, in so could and raw a country, would be very odious to her’.
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Happy Shrewsbury! The arrival at Buxton of Sir Thomas Cecil, Cecil’s
elder son, and his lady, my lady Essex, and the earl of Bedford’s two daughters all with the clouds of court glory still freshly trailing about them, gave him a magnificent opportunity to load them with five hogsheads of beer and ale, further wine, sheep, rabbits, and further emoluments to supplement their diet, including ‘a fat cow’.
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Yet so long as these visits of Mary to Buxton continued, they remained a source of apprehension on the part of Elizabeth. Dreadful rumours that Mary might be endearing herself to the common people there by small acts of charity began to reach London. In 1580 Shrewsbury was once more defending himself against the accusation that Mary was being allowed too much access to the world: he admitted that there had been one poor cripple who had spoken to the Scottish queen at the well, ‘unknown to all my people that guarded the place’, but he promised it would not happen again. In 1581 Cecil complained to Shrewsbury that Mary was known to have visited Buxton twice that summer, although she only had official leave for one visit. In 1584 Elizabeth apprehensively forbade an assembly of freeholders in the forest of the Peak, three miles from Buxton, on the grounds that the inhabitants were ‘backward and for most part ill affected in religion’, despite Shrewsbury’s protests that these were good men who had been summoned in respect of Elizabeth’s rights of vert and venison there, which had fallen into disuse for the lack of such courts.
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Mary herself spoke the truest word on the subject of such terrors on the part of the Elizabethan government, that her charity might win her hearts. To Paulet, a subsequent jailer, who criticized her for giving a smock to a poor near-naked woman out of pity for her condition, she replied: ‘You fear lest by giving alms I should win the favour of the people, but you ought rather to fear lest the restraining of my alms may animate the people against you.’
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Apart from these desirable visits to Buxton and the demands of safety in time of crisis, Mary’s little household found the locality of their prison changing from time to time in any case, owing to the sanitary arrangements of the time: the contemporary method of cleansing large houses such as those inhabited by Shrewsbury was to empty them totally of their inhabitants, who would be transferred to another house, and then clean the dwelling thoroughly from top to bottom. Not all Mary’s prisons were as uncomfortable and hateful to her as Tutbury – whose evil drainage system and notorious ‘middens’ stinking beneath her own windows became one of her chief sources of complaint during her later years there. Wingfield was a great Derbyshire manor house of considerable style and grandeur, and even Mary approvingly called it a palace. Sheffield Castle and Sheffield Manor lay close together, the castle in the valley and the
newly built manor on the hill: one of the reasons why Shrewsbury was anxious to transfer Mary to Sheffield in the first place was that the propinquity of the two houses would make cleaning problems easier, since Mary could be shifted conveniently from one to the other. At Chatsworth Mary could enjoy the beauty of the wild country in which it was set – those moors from which Gerard hoped she could be plucked – or the park itself where Queen Mary’s bower still commemorates today the little closed garden where she is said to have taken her exercise.