The Boleyns (21 page)

On 16 November 1577 his political career moved up a notch with his appointment to the Privy Council. Whereas Mary had tended to rely on a rather diverse group of advisers, and had allowed the council to become unmanageably large, Elizabeth reverted to the practice of her father’s later years, and treated her council as an elite group of State servants, most of them senior office holders. Hunsdon was not a minister in that sense, and his appointment was rather a reflection of the confidence which Elizabeth reposed in him.
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Nevertheless, he became an assiduous attender at meetings, appearing 125 times in 1578–80, as compared to 177 attendances by Lord Burghley, who was the acknowledged work horse. Only in 1581–2 did his appearances drop to 41, and that was because he was away in Scotland from March to September. In 1588 he put in 91 appearances (as compared to 100 by Burghley), and appeared for the last time on 1 July 1596, just three weeks before his death.
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At the time of his appointment he was fifty-one years old, and was regarded as something of an elder statesman.

Jurisdiction within the verge of the court traditionally belonged to the Lord Steward, at this time Edward Fiennes, Earl of Lincoln. However, for some reason which is not clear, Elizabeth was not satisfied with this arrangement, and on 20 February 1579 constituted a special commission of Oyer and Terminer to hear criminal cases which arose within the verge and gave that commission to Henry Carey.
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It may have been that the council was alarmed at the rising threat of political assassination, in which case it would have made sense to grant a special jurisdiction to the Captain of the Queen’s chief bodyguard. It seems that the Steward’s civil authority over mere misdemeanours was not affected, nor is there any evidence that he resented this intrusion upon his traditional rights. Meanwhile, Sir George Carey’s career was advancing alongside that of his father. In 1572 he sat in parliament again, this time for Colchester, and served on the Commission of the Peace for Essex, which perhaps indicates that he had taken over responsibility for Rochford. On the other hand, in 1584 he sat for Hampshire, and thereafter for Middlesex, both counties in which he held property and for which he acted as a Justice, so it is not safe to assume a connection between his parliamentary seat and his place of residence.
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He was primarily a courtier, and in 1578 was appointed a Marshall of the Household, which was a virtual sinecure, carrying official duties only at the time when the accounts were due to be audited. In 1583 George received also two apparently incompatible promotions, that as Constable of Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland, and that as Governor of the Isle of Wight. The Bamburgh office he discharged by deputy, and there is no evidence that he ever visited it, but the governorship was a different matter altogether. He conducted an extensive correspondence over several years with Burghley and Walsingham about the security of the island, conducted musters and arranged for troops to be stationed there.
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He was on the spot during the critical summer of 1588, and retained the post until he succeeded to his father’s offices in 1596.

In 1583 occurred the Throgmorton plot. Worked out in Paris, and involving agents of the Guises, Mary Queen of Scots and the English Catholics, this aimed at the assassination of the Queen and at a joint Spanish
and
French invasion to install Mary on the English throne. Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, was put in touch with Francis Throgmorton, a young English aristocrat, whose job would be to mobilise the Catholics in support of the invasion, and to provide essential information about English troop deployment. Charles Paget, the exiled brother of Lord Paget, visited England secretly more than once in pursuit of this objective. Unfortunately for them, Walsingham’s spies were already on to Throgmorton, and the council had good warning of what was afoot. Toward the end of 1583 he was arrested as a ‘privy conveyor and receiver of letters to and from the Scottish Queen’ and a series of interrogations was established.
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During one of his visits, Charles Paget had talked with his brother, and, it was suspected, with Philip Howard Earl of Arundel. Arundel was placed under arrest and on 24 December Lord Hunsdon and Sir Walter Mildmay were given the invidious task of questioning him. What questions they may have asked we do not know, but Arundel denied any involvement with Paget and his schemes, and there the matter was allowed to rest.
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Throgmorton himself, against whom the evidence was clear if circumstantial, was tried and executed, and Mendoza was expelled in January 1584. Hunsdon and Mildmay were obviously selected for this duty because both were notoriously hostile to Catholics in general and to the Queen of Scots in particular. In February the former sent to Walsingham a set of notes which he had compiled on the recusant problem, and on the seminarians who were at the heart of it, indicating the names of prominent suspects of whom he was aware. It is unlikely that these told the Secretary anything which he did not know, but it was accepted in the spirit in which it was intended.
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Meanwhile, the affairs of Scotland were unsettled. King James was still underage, and the Earl of Arran was Regent, but Mary had not given up hope of being reinstated as a joint ruler, and a complicated three way negotiation between Arran, Mary and the English Council was underway. At this point James complicated the issue still further by taking as his favourite Esme Stuart, a kinsman of the late Earl of Lennox who had been brought up in France and was a Catholic. Mary naturally took this to be good omen, and began to work to undermine Arran. Hunsdon, as the council’s resident expert on Scottish affairs, was deeply involved in support of the Regent, and he tended to see eye to eye with Lord Burghley on this issue.
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Leicester on the other hand was suspicious because he believed that Hunsdon nursed a secret ambition to marry either his daughter or his niece (Sir Francis Knollys’ daughter) to the young King of Scots. Walsingham was also suspicious because one of Burghley’s nephews, Sir Philip Hoby, was married to another Carey daughter and he thought that kinship was taking precedence over policy. In July 1584 he wrote:

Touching the by-course between Lord Hunsdon and the Earl of Arran, there is nothing to help it but time and trial. You know Lord Hunsdon’s passion, whose propinquity in blood doth somewhat prevail to enable his credit to more harm than good. And yet he should not herein greatly prevail were he not countenanced by the Lord Treasurer, who dealeth strangely in the action of Scotland.
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Strangely or not, Burghley was dealing cautiously both with Scotland and its queen, far too cautiously for Walsingham’s taste, who wanted a more robust defence of the reformed faith. He suspected the Lord Treasurer of using Hunsdon as a catspaw against Leicester, whom neither of them trusted, ‘although, God wot, he be but a weak one’.
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He was sent to the King of Scots again in June 1584, at Arran’s suggestion, which gives some point to Walsingham’s concern.
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Burghley was trying to conciliate both James and his mother at this point, knowing that the Queen was in two minds, and obviously felt the need to have her closest kinsman in the council on his side. That he was a weak support is merely Walsingham’s opinion, and is not borne out by other evidence. In any case Esme Stuart was ousted in 1583, and the Earl of Arran in 1585, leaving James (more or less) in control. Meanwhile, Mary’s involvement in the Babington plot forced Burghley and Hunsdon into a tactical withdrawal, which neither of them was reluctant to make. Although the Lord Treasurer’s professions of friendship apparently deceived Mary at the time, they had been made in the interests of a cause which was now discredited, and the evidence suggests that both of them were heartily glad to see the back of her.
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Elizabeth herself treated all the parties in this tangled situation to the rough side of her tongue, and Walsingham confessed to Burghley in June 1584 that he had received ‘hard speeches’ over his attitude to Scotland, but that was in the context of informing him that her Majesty was in a foul mood, particularly with Lord Hunsdon, in case he should be thinking of using the latter as a means of access.
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However, his loss of favour, if such it was, does not seem to have affected him adversely. He was reappointed to the captaincy of the Gentlemen Pensioners in 1583, and served as Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire from 1583 to 1585, both positions of trust. Then in July 1585 the Lord Chamberlain, Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham was appointed Lord Admiral in place of the deceased Earl of Lincoln, and Henry Carey was named in his place.
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The summit of his career as a courtier had now been reached. He was fifty-nine, and his kinship with the Queen had paid its full dividend.

Hunsdon, however, was still not an officer of state, and over the next two years he seems to have busied himself with routine council business, authorising a warrant for the building expenses at Portsmouth, and keeping an eye on Scotland, which he was no doubt expected to do. In February 1588, Lord Admiral Howard wrote to Walsingham that he had received ‘advertisement’ from Hunsdon relating to the affairs of the north, and was relieved to hear that the King of Scots was running ‘a true course’. This presumably meant that he was resisting the blandishments of some of his Catholic peers to become involved in Philip of Spain’s plans against England, and must have been sent to the Admiral in his military capacity.
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It may well be that Hunsdon was reluctant to communicate directly with the Secretary because of the tensions which existed between them. He remained a conscientious attender at council meetings, in spite of his commitments elsewhere, but had presumably written to Howard in case he did not see him at a meeting. Howard, like Walsingham, was one of the workhorses of the council, and he wrote because he considered that his tidings needed to be ‘of record’ rather than through any lack of personal contact. Since 1585 Hunsdon had shifted his lord lieutenancy from Hertfordshire to Norfolk, which was a maritime county and therefore more likely to come under attack, and in the summer of 1588 mustered the county in preparation for Philip’s expected invasion. He was still, however, spending a good deal of his time in the north-east, where he also had responsibility for the East and Middle Marches, although intelligence out of Scotland suggested that the threat from that quarter was minimal.
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By July of 1588 he was back in the south and took personal command of the household and other troops designated for the protection of the Queen’s person, in the event of Parma affecting a landing. In that capacity he would have been with the army at Tilbury on 9 August when Elizabeth made her famous speech, although there is no record of his reaction. By that time the crisis was effectively over, and the Armada, defeated at Gravelines, was streaming north in an effort to escape. On 22 August Sir George Carey, monitoring the situation from his position on the Isle of Wight, was able to write to his father that a ‘great fleet’ was reported to be between the Orkneys and Fair Isle, which would have been approximately the location of Medina Sidonia’s ships by that date.
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A few weeks later a number of them were wrecked on the Irish coast. At some point early in 1589 the Queen rewarded her Lord Chamberlain for his service in this crisis, with a licence to export 20,000 broadcloths over the next six years without paying duty. This did not mean that Lord Hunsdon had turned merchant in his declining years, but that he would have been able to sell his licence for a substantial sum to those who were in the business. This was typical of Elizabeth’s cash-cautious style at this time, more famously typified by the grants of monopolies in the manufacture of such commodities as soap and playing cards, which enabled the recipients to sell their rights, and obtain their rewards at the cost of the consumer, to whom the price would have been enhanced.
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