Tudor Queens of England (33 page)

persona

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non grata
in Rome. Most, but by no means all of her servants were Catholics and it seemed for some time that her conversion was a distinct possibility. Mary’s own policy for coping with her situation was by no means consistent. On the one hand she professed friendship with Elizabeth and denied any intention of harming her but on the other hand she looked increasingly for Spanish support, and became involved in plots that were aimed at her ‘good sister’s’ life. In 1570

and 1571 she inclined with some enthusiasm to the plan to marry her to the Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk, although confused, was not a Catholic and such a marriage would probably have involved her conversion, but as the Protestant Duchess of Norfolk her position in respect of the English succession would (she believed) have been greatly strengthened. In fact Elizabeth was vehemently opposed to the whole idea, and the Ridolfi Plot muddied the waters irredeemably.

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Norfolk was executed for treason and Mary’s status as a security risk was greatly enhanced. At the same time, Mary’s prospects of an eventual return to Scotland were withering away. There had from the time of her fl ight been a residual party in her homeland committed to her restoration. When the Regent, the Earl of Moray, died in 1570, the Earl of Argyll and the Hamiltons briefl y made common cause for that purpose, but their alliance lasted less than a year before Argyll pulled out. The casualty rate among regents was high. The Earl of Lennox was killed in a skirmish in 1571 and his successor, the Earl of Mar, died in 1572. This left James Douglas, Earl of Morton in control, and Morton was strongly pro-English. The unsettled conditions produced by the rapid turn over of governors between 1570 and 1572 brought some of Mary’s supporters out into the open in what was a
de facto
rebellion. They seized Edinburgh Castle but that was the limit of their success and when the regent was able to call upon English artillery to bombard the castle in 1573, they were forced to surrender. In 1579 there was a brief fl utter of returning hope. James was now 13 and his personal preferences were beginning to matter. At that point his preference was for his French kinsman, Esme Stuart, who became Earl of Lennox in 1580 and Duke in 1581. Esme’s rise signalled the downfall of Regent Morton, who was overthrown in 1580 and executed in 1581. The English Council was briefl y exercised about the possibility of a revival of French infl uence in Scotland, and Mary became optimistic. However Henry III had no desire to destabilize his delicate relations with Elizabeth. The Guises began a new round of intrigues with Mary’s agents in France but before they could come to anything a group of Protestant lords seized control of the young King of Scots and arrested a number of Lennox supporters. The Duke himself fl ed to France and the last chance of there being a role for Mary in Scotland disappeared. The Earl of Shrewsbury was vigilant to prevent unauthorized access to Mary but he made no attempt to prevent her from communication with the outside 174

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world and she conducted a series of restless and futile intrigues with her supporters, mainly in France but also to some extent in England. The Earl moved her around his residences for reasons of convenience and hygiene but she never went far from Sheffi eld, except for periodic visits to Buxton to take the waters. This was fashionable as well as therapeutic and she may well have conducted unauthorized discussions there. The Council feared that, but took no effective attempts to stop it. Meanwhile her constant attempts to earn by good conduct the ultimate prize of recognition as Elizabeth’s heir made no progress at all. Since the Ridolfi plot William Cecil (now Lord Burghley), the Queen’s senior adviser, was particularly strong in his opposition. The Anglo-French treaty of Blois (1572) held fi rm through the 1570s, and Mary at last realized that this cut off any chance of substantial aid from France – as distinct from a little surreptitious encouragement – so in 1580 she set out in a radically new direction. Through her agent in Paris, she offered to place herself, her realm and her son, under the protection of the King of

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At the same time she reaffi rmed her Catholicism and repaired her damaged fences in Rome. The cause of the catholic Church, both in England and in Scotland, was the cause of Spain. Philip himself was cautious and non-committal but his agent in England, Bernardino de Mendoza, was enthusiastic and a new round of intrigues began, not this time involving the succession but rather Elizabeth’s removal by a combination of a large-scale Catholic rising and substantial Spanish military support. As neither of these conditions was likely to be satisfi ed, all these plots have an air of unreality about them and how much Mary herself knew of them is uncertain. Whatever she knew, she was playing a double game because on the one hand she was writing to Elizabeth about the possibility of a condominium in Scotland, which, she argued, would secure French and Spanish recognition for James and, on the other hand, she had written to Philip in October 1581 proposing that James be sent to Spain while she returned to Scotland on the back of a Spanish army. By this time, it seems clear that her professions of friendship for Elizabeth were worthless and that her own grasp of political reality was wearing distinctly thin. At about the same time that Mary was writing to the King of Spain, the Duke of Guise was spinning another web of intrigue with the assistance of Mendoza. This time the foreign invasion was to be mounted by the Guise party with Spanish fi nancial backing and was heavily dependent upon the Catholic network in England, which a young man by the name of Francis Throgmorton claimed to be able to mobilize. The object was ostensibly to be Catholic toleration but in reality it was regime change. Mary knew of these intrigues and their real purpose but was not deeply involved. Philip appears to have known nothing about it. The threat was not serious. As Holinshed pointed out, ‘there wanted two things, money and

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the assistance of a convenient party in England to join with the foreign forces.

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Throgmorton’s network was real enough but quite inadequate for his purpose. The main consequences of the plot, apart from the execution of Throgmorton, were the expulsion of Mendoza in 1584 and the convincing demonstration that had been given of the effectiveness of Walsingham’s ‘anti-terrorist’ system. There was insuffi cient evidence to proceed against Mary but suspicion of her intentions had been jacked up another notch. A less direct consequence was something of a panic about the succession, because the more of these plots there were, the more likely it was that one of them would eventually succeed. A Bond of Association was drawn up in 1584 and signed by over a thousand gentlemen, committing themselves never to accept anyone on the throne in whose name the present queen had been made away. Mary was not named but the target was obvious. Then in 1585 Parliament passed an Act ‘for … the surety of the Queen most Royal Person’, which not only gave legal status to the Bond of Association but laid down detailed procedures as to how the guilty parties were to be dealt with. It was under the terms of that statute that Mary was shortly to be tried.

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The Queen of Scots seemed to be quite incapable of learning from her own mistakes. She had got away with a marginal involvement in the Throgmorton plot, partly for lack of fi rm evidence but rather more because there was no obvious law under which she might be tried and no certainty that any court in England had jurisdiction over her. The statute of 1585 supplied both those defects but in spite of knowing that perfectly well and professing a desire to retire altogether from the political arena it was not long before she was up to her eyes in another plot. In January 1585 the Earl of Shrewsbury was relieved of his charge, and Mary was moved from Sheffi eld back to Tutbury, this time in the custody of Sir Amyas Paulet. Paulet was a puritan, and soon proved to be an exceptionally zealous guardian. In December of the same year he moved his charge to the nearby manor of Chartley and deliberately deceived her into believing that she had discovered a way to correspond that evaded his vigilanc

e.39

Nothing could have been further from the truth, and the next time a plot was being hatched, Paulet and Walsingham made certain that she walked right into the trap. The scenario was familiar. Mendoza, the Guises and Mary’s French agents were plotting in Paris what was virtually a re-run of the Throgmorton conspiracy, only this time the English agent was a young man named Anthony Babington. Babington was a former servant of Mary’s, and appears to have been quite bowled over by her charms. He was also far more zealous than discreet and on 6 July 1586 wrote her a highly explicit letter, seeking her approval for another assassination attempt against Elizabeth. This letter fell into Walsingham’s hands and he read it before she did. Altogether this was a very leaky conspiracy because 176

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another of the plotters, a priest named Ballard, was already in custody and had made damaging allegations, so Babington was a marked man. Then on 17 July the unsuspecting Mary replied to Babington, explicitly approving his scheme and giving him various advice as to how to set about the task. Walsingham, of course, read the letter. He now had the evidence which he needed, but still faced the daunting task of persuading the Queen to act. However, circumstances had changed since 1584. England was now at war and Mary had exposed herself to the charge of being a Spanish agent; even Elizabeth could not ignore so blatant a threat. Had not William of Orange fallen to just such an assassin’s bullet two years earlier?

This combination of pressures forced the Queen to act. In October 1586 she set up a commission to try her cousin and notifi ed her of the intention: Whereas we are given to understand that you, to our great and inestimable grief, as one void of all remorse of conscience, pretend with great protestations not to be in any sort privy or assenting to any attempt either against our state or person, forasmuch as we fi nd by most clear and evident proof that the contrary will be verifi ed and maintained against you …

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She had authorized the commissioners to proceed to trial. Mary did not attempt to challenge the jurisdiction of the court but instead adopted the futile expedient of protesting her innocence. However, even her own secretaries testifi ed against her. Elizabeth knew perfectly well that compassing the death of a heretic would incur no censure from the Catholic Church, but she still insisted on conferring with the commissioners before they delivered their verdict. On 4 December her guilt was proclaimed in accordance with the terms of the 1585 Act, and James was reassured that his mother’s exclusion from the English throne did not affect his ow

n claim.41
As a result very largely of her own folly, all Mary’s schemes for the English Crown or succession, which had occupied her for quarter of a century, had now come to nothing and her life was on the line. Elizabeth, for reasons that are entirely creditable in humane terms, was most reluctant to see the woman who had professed to be her ‘most dear sister’ suffer on the scaffold. On the other hand, she was now convinced of Mary’s treachery and her councillors, aware of her reluctance, stirred rumours of new plots. At length she was convinced. ‘Aut fer, aut feri; ne feriare feri’ (suffer or strike; strike in order not to be stricken), she is alleged to have said, and signed the death warrant on 1 February 1587. Mary was executed on the morning of 8 February, making her exit with far more theatrical fl air and dignity than she had lived. Despite her dubious relations with the Church, she presented herself as a Catholic martyr and as such was accepted by subsequent Catholic historiography. She died at Fotheringhay, where she had

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been tried, and was buried in nearby Peterborough Cathedral. James professed great sorrow and indignation but he did not allow either to disrupt his developing relationship with Elizabeth. After all, he had not seen his mother since he was a baby. What he did do years later in 1612, was to have her remains moved from Peterborough to Westminster Abbey – as though she had been Queen indeed. Mary was unique. She was Queen of Scotland effectively only from 1561 to 1567 and, after a good start, made a catastrophic mess of her responsibilities. Before 1561, although she bore the title, she was little more than a fi gurehead and after 1568 she was an exile and a prisoner. For the six years of her reign when she was in Scotland she was a serious political rival to Elizabeth but, after her marriage to Darnley, her position disintegrated. In fact she fell into the trap that Elizabeth narrowly avoided, of allowing her physical and emotional needs to take precedence over the political demands of her position. This worked both positively, in her marriage to Darnley, and negatively in her involvement in his murder. Despite her intelligence and shrewdness she behaved as a woman rather than as a queen. After 1568, if she had converted to Protestantism and had come to terms with the English Council, she might have been recognized as heir. On the other hand if she had been a different kind of woman she might have ended her days as Queen of Scotland and England would not have been troubled with her. Eventually she drifted into the position of being the Catholic pretender and

– given the way in which English opinion was moving – particularly after 1570

– that was a formula for failure. In the context of this study, she is an admirable foil for Elizabeth. Scotland’s misfortune was England’s gain.

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7. Anne Boleyn by Unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery, London)