The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (33 page)

With Throckmorton’s ‘confession’ and the examination of the other nobles, Walsingham and the Privy Council believed that they had uncovered a major invasion plot, masterminded by the Duke of Guise and involving both the French and Spanish ambassadors, Michel de Castelnau, and Don Bernardino de Mendoza, together with senior noblemen in England and English Catholic émigrés. Although the Duke of Guise had been the ‘director’ of the plot, the unravelling of the conspiracy led to a significant rupture in Anglo-Spanish relations. Throckmorton had specifically identified Mendoza as the source for the duke’s invasion plans. Long despised by the Elizabethan government, Mendoza was dismissed.
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He was not replaced and thereafter would become a key ally of the Duke of Guise.
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Weeks later, as Mendoza prepared to depart England, he reported that ‘a soldier returned from Terceira [a Portuguese-owned island in the Azores] had come to the court to give a letter to the Earl of Bedford and to see the Queen’. Mendoza described how the soldier ‘proceeded with such boldness’ that he entered the palace and found his way to ‘the place where the Queen was with two other ladies’. Elizabeth ‘cried out angrily for him to be seized’, and he was taken to Dudley’s chamber where he was asked whether Mendoza had sent him to ‘kill the Queen’. Later the soldier said his entrance was to irritate the people against the Spanish ambassador and make them think that it was by his intervention that the mariner wanted to kill the Queen.
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Dudley believed that any Catholic had become a danger to the Queen’s own safety. ‘There is no right papist in England that wisheth Queen Elizabeth to live long,’ he wrote, ‘and to suffer any such in her court cannot be but dangerous.’
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In Defence of the Queen’s Body

On 10 July 1584, William of Orange, the Protestant leader in the Netherlands, was shot dead by a fanatical Spanish Catholic – a murder many believed was sponsored by Philip II of Spain. At once Elizabeth’s own demise seemed to draw far closer. As Edward Stafford, son of Lady Dorothy, reported, similar atrocities were being planned, including an attack on the Queen: ‘There is no doubt that she is a chief mark they shoot at and seeing there were many who would kill William of Orange anything could be done.’
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The assassination threat was now at its highest since the start of Elizabeth’s reign. Throughout the year evidence of foiled plots and conspiracies filled diplomatic bags and personal correspondence. One intelligence report detailed how ‘the life of our glorious sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth hath been most traitorously and devilishly sought’, and might even have been taken ‘if almighty God, her perpetual defender, of his mercy had not revealed and withstood the same’.
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In March, Giordano Bruno, in a letter addressed from Paris and sent personally to Elizabeth, described how he had been visited by a Spaniard called Zubiaur, an agent for Mendoza, who had confessed ‘the most ignoble things’. Zubiaur claimed that he had been charged by the Spanish ambassador, to procure Elizabeth’s death, ‘very shortly by arms, by poisons, bouquets, underclothes, smells, waters or by any other means; that it will be the greatest St Bartholomew’s Day there has ever been; and that neither God nor Devil will stand in the way of their doing it’.
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Later in the year, an undated and unsigned sheet of paper was given to Walsingham entitled, ‘The Speeches of a Friar in Dunkirk’, and outlined another conspiracy against Elizabeth. If, said the friar, that wicked woman were ‘dispatched and gone’, all Christendom would be in ‘peace and quietness’. The friar had shown Walsingham’s informant a picture depicting the murder of William of Orange. ‘Behold and see well this picture,’ the friar told him. ‘Look how this Burgundian did kill this prince. In such manner and sort, there will not want such another Burgundian to kill that wicked woman and that before it be long, for the common wealth of all Christendom.’
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The Privy Council believed Elizabeth and Protestant England to be in real and imminent danger. Dramatic and unprecedented measures were now taken as Cecil and Walsingham drew up, ‘The Instrument of an Association for the Preservation of Her Majesty’s Royal Person’ (or ‘the Bond of Association’), which bound signatories to defend the Queen’s life and avenge any assassination attempt against her. It obligated all signatories ‘to the uttermost of their power, at all times, to withstand, pursue and suppress all manner of persons that shall by any means intend and attempt any thing dangerous or harmful to the honours, estates or persons of their sovereign’. All those who signed the bond pledged ‘never to accept, avow, or favour any such pretended successor, by whom or for whom any such detestable act shall be committed or attempted’. Members of the association were ‘to prosecute such person or persons to the death … and to take the uttermost revenge on them … by any possible means … for their utter overthrow and extirpation’.
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The intention was clear. Should an attempt be made on Elizabeth’s life, Mary Queen of Scots would be killed, whether she was a direct party to the plot or not. A sacred oath sealed the bond.
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From October to November 1584, while elections were held for a new Parliament, copies of the bond were circulated throughout the realm, acquiring thousands of signatures and seals.
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Whilst the government claimed that this demonstrated a spontaneous outpouring of loyalty for Elizabeth, it took significant steps to ensure certain individuals swore the oath and signed the bond. In a letter drafted by Cecil for circulation to the lord lieutenants in the counties, Walsingham added the words:

Your lordship shall not need to take knowledge that you received the copy from me, but rather from some other friend of yours in these parts; for that her Majesty would have the matter carried in such sort as this course held for her [safety] may seem to [come more] from the particular cause of her well affected subjects than to grow from any public direction.
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The Privy Council’s correspondence over the next few months included reports from all parts of England on the progress of the Bond of Association, with local officials devising signing ceremonies fit for the solemnity and significance of the undertaking.
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When the new Parliament met on 23 November, Elizabeth expressed her gratitude for the displays of popular loyalty:

I am not unmindful of your Oath made in the Association manifesting your great goodwills and affections … done (I protest to God) before I heard of it or ever thought that such a matter, until a great number of hands were showed me at Hampton Court, signed and subscribed with the names and seals of the greatest of this land. Which I do acknowledge as a perfect argument of your true hearts and great zeal for my safety, so shall my bond be stronger tied to greater care for your good.
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In a long and impassioned opening speech, Sir Walter Mildmay identified the Pope as their ‘most mortal and capital enemy’, who had sponsored sedition in the realm.
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He described the ‘malicious and secret practices’ which were dependent on the Pope and emphasised that Edmund Campion and other Jesuits had met their deaths not simply for the ‘superstitious ceremonies of Rome, but for most high and capital offences and conspiracies’, including ‘the deposing of our most gracious Queen, advancing of another in her place,’ and the ‘alteration and subversion of this whole state and government’. He called on members to consider if these ‘priests, rebels, fugitives and papists’ were set at ‘the helm of the Church and Commonwealth’, and painted a terrifying picture of the ‘ruin, subversion and conquest of this noble realm’. Strong laws were needed to provide for the queen’s safety ‘against all such malicious enemies’ and, as Mildmay deliberately added, ‘straight laws also against troublers of this state under pretence of titles, either present or future, thereby to cut off their expectation if they or any of them dare to lift up their hands or hearts to endanger the person or state of our gracious Queen’.
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After a day of strong words and rallying rhetoric, Mildmay set out their task: to provide the highest penalty to avert three types of danger: invasion, rebellion and violence to the Queen. The stage was now set for what would become the principal measure of the Parliament, the ‘Act for the Queen’s Safety’.

This sweeping new law ‘for Provision to be Made for the Surety of the Queen’s Majesty’s most Royal Person and the Continuance of the Realm in Peace’ was justified as a direct response to the ‘sundry wicked plots of late devised and laid, as well in foreign parts beyond the seas as also within the realm’.
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Inspired by the Bond of Association, it gave the Queen’s subjects the right to pursue to death anyone involved in an invasion, rebellion, attempt on Elizabeth’s life or anything at all that ‘compassed or imagined, tending to the hurt of her Majesty’s royal person’. With Mary Queen of Scots again clearly in mind, the act decreed that any pretender to the English throne could also be pursued to death for any conspiracy organised in their name.

In fierce debates, MPs questioned how, if the Queen was killed and all royal authority lapsed, effective action could be taken against the culprits of her murder. Fears were raised of a kind of vigilante justice and an orgy of ‘mutual slaughter’ between rival claimants. To counter this danger the call was made for statutory provision during an interregnum. Royal authority would reside with a ‘Great Council’ formed of the ‘great officers of the realm’, and the privy councillors would execute royal justice, take action against those responsible for the Queen’s death and choose a successor who appeared ‘to have best right … in blood by the royal laws of the Realm’, at which point the interregnum would end.
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During this period, the union of the natural body of the monarch with the body politic of the realm would be broken until it was reunited in the appointed heir on their accession.
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Ultimately this proposal was rejected and never presented to the Queen as her councillors knew she would oppose it.

On 18 December, Sir Christopher Hatton informed members that the Queen thankfully accepted their care for her, which, ‘her Majesty said (but he might not say), was more than her merit’. She expressed approval for the bill but added that her confidence ‘was in God only for her safety’. She also said she ‘would not consent that anyone should be punished for the fault of another’. In other words if Mary Stuart was implicated in a treasonous conspiracy, she did not wish the penalties to extend ‘to the issue of the offender’, James VI, except if ‘the issue was also found faulty’. The bill was then put aside for the Christmas recess.

The second bill of the session also addressed the issue of the Queen’s safety by seeking ‘to bar the coming in of Jesuits and seminary priests, the only disturbers of the peace of the realm and the very instruments to work her Majesty’s destruction’.
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All Jesuits and priests that remained within the kingdom forty days after the passing of the law were to be regarded as traitors to the realm.
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It also became treason for any person to ‘willingly and wittingly receive, relieve, comfort or maintain’ any Jesuits or other priests. This was the harshest legislation of the period and was testament to the growing numbers of missionary priests now in England and their perceived threat as agents of sedition.

The bill was brought to the Commons for a first reading on 12 December and then three days later was given its second reading along with the bill for the Queen’s safety. It seemed that all in the house was in agreement. After one final reading, they would be ready to pass to the Lords and then receive royal assent.

With Parliament apparently united behind the bills for the Queen’s safety and against the Jesuits and seminary priests, an entirely unexpected voice of opposition was raised. Dr William Parry, a member who was sitting in his first Parliament as MP for the tiny borough of Queenborough in Kent, rose to his feet and affirmed that he ‘favoured not the Jesuits or seminaries but was to speak for English subjects’. He ‘spoke directly against the whole bill’, he said, which sought to banish the Jesuit and seminary priests. He denounced it as savouring treasons, ‘full of blood, danger, despair and terror to the English subjects of this realm’; full also ‘of confiscations – but into whom?’ Parry asked. ‘Not, said he to her Majesty (which he wished they were),’ but to others. Whilst he was sure that bill would be carried by both houses, ‘he hoped when it should come into her Highness’s most merciful hands, that it would stay and rest there, until which time,’ he said, ‘he would reserve his reasons of his negative voice against the bill, then to be discovered by him only unto her Majesty’.

The MPs listened in stunned silence, clearly grieved by Parry’s questioning of the house’s motives and his suggestion that they were acting ‘not so much for the Queen’s safety … as for the satisfying of their own greedy desires’. They were also angered that he would not give an explanation for his words, ‘a thing contrary to the orders of the house’. Parry was immediately removed from the Commons into the Sergeant’s custody, brought before the Privy Council and the Speaker of the Commons before returning to the house the following day to apologise for his hasty actions. He said he meant no offence to the Queen or the house, but repeated that he would reserve his reasons for the Queen herself.
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The question in many minds was: what had caused a member of the Commons to behave so rashly?

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Agent Provocateur?

Seven years earlier, Dr Parry had left England for the continent with mounting debts and disaffected with a lack of favour and patronage from Elizabeth. In 1582 he was received into the Catholic Church in Paris and became involved in the politics of Catholic exiles in France. In May the following year he wrote to Cecil, from whom he continued to seek patronage, ‘If I were well warranted and allowed, I would either prevent and discover all Roman and Spanish practices against our state, or lose my life in testimony of my loyalty to the Queen’s majesty,’ while at the same time pledging to others ‘to employ all my strength and industry in the service of the Catholic Church’.
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It is difficult to determine whether he was a traitor or, as he later claimed, a freelance English spy.