Elizabeth (28 page)

The rebels were so ignorant of the character of Elizabeth and her advisers and so out of touch with the temper of the majority of her people, that they believed the whole country would welcome the substitution of Mary and the re-establishment of the Catholic faith. When Norfolk was arrested, the Northern Earls gathered their followers, proclaimed Mary Queen of England and set out for Tutbury to rescue her. Elizabeth was at Windsor when she heard the news from Cecil; she summoned her Council, and placed her own cousin, Hunsdon, at the head of a force which was to proceed north and engage the rebels. Huntingdon and Sir Ralph Sadleir were sent to Tutbury to remove Mary further south to Warwickshire; the Lord Admiral Clinton was to lead a third army from Lincolnshire, and the Earl of Warwick recruited troops from his own county and proceeded to join Hunsdon and Sussex at York. Elizabeth's calm and courageous attitude in the crisis prevented panic among her Councillors; the measures to meet the rebels were agreed within a few hours; counter-proclamations drawn up and circulated, and any servants or contacts of the traitors were arrested and questioned. It was an agent of Ridolfi's who revealed the extent of the plot and the complicity of Spain. Cecil had taken the precaution of watching the ports for some time; he had noted the activities of the Florentine and set a watch upon his servant, Bailly, who left for the Netherlands and was imprudent enough to return with papers compromising himself, his master, Mary and Norfolk and the King of Spain. Bailly was arrested and taken to the Tower. Cecil interrupted Elizabeth one afternoon when she was sewing with her ladies to show her the results of the interrogation. Bailly had been tortured after refusing to confess; but stretched on the rack he had screamed out the key to the cypher used by Ridolfi and the names of all those concerned in the plot.

While the Queen and her advisers unravelled the details in London, the armies gathered to overthrow her in the North had marched through four counties without gaining a single recruit from the common people, and without rescuing Mary Stuart. The expected uprising never took place. The Earls and their men, weary, dispirited and unnerved by rumours of the strength of the forces Elizabeth had sent up to meet them, rode through silent villages and towns, watched by hostile crowds who listened to their proclamations and then dispersed. The majority of the English people remained loyal to the Queen; they were indifferent to the dynastic claims of Mary Stuart and to the restoration of a religion which had ceased to be preached or practised effectively for nearly twenty years. They knew little of Mary except that she had brought trouble and bloodshed to Scotland and had lost her throne as a result. The benefits of Elizabeth's rule were evident in flourishing trade, employment and peace.

They turned their backs on the rebellion, and at Tadcaster the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland halted their dwindling troops and gave the order to retreat. By January, they had been driven to the Scottish Border, and took refuge there with the supporters of Mary. In the same month her half-brother, Lord James, was assassinated in an act of private revenge and Lennox, Darnley's father, became Regent for his infant grandson, King James. The Earls and the Catholic Scots were immediately engaged in a bitter and internal fight with the new Government. But in England the rebellion was over. The two leaders were in exile; the Scots Queen was closely guarded at Coventry by men who were ordered to kill her if she tried to escape; and Norfolk was imprisoned in the Tower.

Most of the rebels had been hunted down and captured; hundreds of Catholic gentry and thousands of their followers were prisoners, waiting for the Queen to decide on their punishment. When that decision was made Elizabeth proved for the first time that she was indeed her father's daughter.

No one had ever thought of her as cruel; Cecil and Leicester, who imagined they knew her so well, were surprised and secretly appalled at the fury of vindictiveness which she displayed towards her enemies when they were in her power. She sat in her Privy Chamber at Whitehall Palace, facing the members of her Council and in dead silence told them how she proposed to deal with traitors.

“For eleven years,” she said to them, “I have ruled with mercy. Not long ago I held out my hands to some of you and boasted that they were clean of my subjects' blood. Now some of my subjects have shown that they do not appreciate mercy; they preferred my cousin with her stained reputation and record of misgovernment, and they asked the aid of Spanish troops to put her in my place. They failed, thanks to the loyalty of most of my people and all of you, my Lords. Now they shall pay for that failure, as their fathers paid for the Pilgrimage of Grace, when they rose in revolt against my father, King Henry.”

Most of the men listening to her remembered that religious rebellion, the last attempt to rescue the Catholic religion from the violent persecutions directed by Henry VIII. And they remembered that he had drenched the North in blood as a reprisal.

The Queen's voice continued. It was harsh with anger, and there was a savage expression in her black eyes.

“No one possessing land or wealth is to be executed. They will ransom their lives with their last penny. As for their followers, one man out of every ten is to be hanged.”

No one answered for a moment, and then Hunsdon moved forward.

“I beg to advise your Majesty,” he said, “that my Lord Sussex suggested the opposite course. He proposed punishing those who by birth and education should know better than to rebel against you, and to show mercy to their tenants and men at arms. These are ignorant peasants, Madam, only following their landlords. How can it be just to hang them—so many of them,” he added, “while the nobles and gentry escape?”

“We are not living in the Middle Ages,” Elizabeth retorted. “These ignorant peasants as you describe them must learn that their first duty is to me. It will be just to hang them because there is nothing to be gained by giving them their lives. If they are not loyal from love, my Lord, they will be loyal to me from fear. Sussex may be a good general but he's a poor lawyer. If we execute the landowners, the Crown has no claim on their property. I want their property. They raised the rebellion and by God I'll see they pay the cost of it. Tell Sussex to proceed with my orders at once.”

“Does this decision include the Queen of Scots, Madam?” Cecil spoke at last. It was inconceivable that hundreds of Englishmen were to die, while the real culprit was not even mentioned.

Elizabeth's mouth tightened angrily.

“She is not my subject; she is not bound to me by any law but a sense of her own honour. If you propose to badger me about punishing the Queen of Scots, then I can answer you once and for all. She will be more strictly imprisoned, but nothing more can be done against her.”

“And Norfolk, Madam?”

She turned to answer Leicester. He had always hated the Duke. This was his moment to revenge himself upon the man who had insulted and ignored him for years and repeatedly accused him of betraying the initial intrigue to the Queen.

“I sent the Duke to the Tower for trying to make a marriage without my consent; I spared his life because he promised never to write or communicate with the Queen of Scotland again. The evidence taken from Master Ridolfi's papers proves that he broke his word and was party not only to this rising, but to a Spanish invasion and my assassination. You all know that, my Lords. Once more, I showed mercy and I was rewarded by betrayal. Norfolk shall be tried for treason; if you find him guilty—and I think you will—then he shall be executed. By rights he should hang like a dog with the others. Does that satisfy you, my Lord Leicester?”

He smiled blandly at her.

“If it satisfies your Majesty,” he said.

Eight hundred Englishmen of low degree were hanged by her personal instructions. The North of England was polluted by the corpses hanging from gallows in every town and hamlet; villages were razed; the estates of the rich were sequestered and their owners rotted in dungeons long after their ransoms had been paid. Elizabeth punished her people with the jealous fury of a woman revenging herself upon an unfaithful lover. She had prided herself upon her people's love; she travelled up and down the country, to towns and universities, showing herself to them and inviting their loyalty. She had ruled them wisely and made them richer and more prosperous then ever before, and she could not forgive or forget that a section of them, though they had not been visited and courted, had turned on her in favour of someone else. She took her revenge and her conscience never stirred. It was all the more extraordinary to her Council that when she had signed away the lives of hundreds without pausing, she could not order Norfolk's execution.

They had tried him and found him guilty, and expected her to sign the death warrant. She accepted the verdict with pleasure, spent the evening dancing with Sir Thomas Heneage and playing cards with Leicester who lost a large sum of money to her. She was in such a good temper that she offered to waive the payment till the next day. Everything about her was brilliant and untroubled, from her choice of a new dress shining with cloth of silver and pearls, to the familiarities she showed both her favourites, laughing and teasing them in turn. When she awoke the next morning and Cecil came with the warrant for Norfolk's execution she refused to sign it.

She was sallow and her eyes were deeply circled. She looked suddenly so ill and strained that Cecil was alarmed. When he placed Norfolk's warrant in front of her, her hand took up the quill, inked it, and then paused. Death did not trouble her, torture did not disgust her. They had wrenched every limb out of the wretched Bailly's body to make him reveal Ridolfi's cypher and Elizabeth had listened to the account of the questioning and even seen the tremulous cross made by the victim on his confession because his hand was too crippled to sign.

But during the night the thought of beheading paralysed her imagination. It gave her a feeling of hysteria, almost of suffocation; she had lain awake, trembling and sick. The image of her mother and her first lover, the Lord Admiral, was blurred by time; the former was submerged in her subconscious but it rose like a witch at the words of incantation. They expected her to cut off Norfolk's head. She could have had him hanged, or tortured or burnt; the most brutal methods left her indifferent, neither stimulated by pain like some women she knew—in France they fought to see an execution—nor moved to compassion by suffering. An enemy was an enemy, and her heart was a stone concerning their removal. It was the method which horrified her, and it was the last privilege left to a gentleman that he should die by the axe instead of the rope.

Suddenly she screwed up the warrant and threw it aside.

“I have changed my mind,” she said. “Find another way to kill him, or else he must be pardoned. I can't sign this.”

“Madam …” Cecil stared at her, amazed. Pardon Norfolk; he could hardly believe that he'd heard what she said. No one had been more vehement in their demand for the Duke's execution than Elizabeth, who now refused to authorize it.

“You can't pardon him,” he protested. “He's a proved traitor!”

“Then hang him!” She spat the words at him, and her right hand swept the warrant, the pens and ink and papers off the table. “Poison him, do what you like, damn you! But don't worry me with this, don't stand over me like some old grey-bearded ghoul.… I had no sleep. I'm tired,” she said desperately, holding her head. “I'm ill, Cecil, can't you see? So leave me alone.”

He watched her pass into her bedroom, leaning on Lady Dacre, saying again and again, “I'm ill, my head aches, I'm ill.”

He told the Council that she refused to sign, and those who had not seen her supposed that she was moved by mercy. Cecil did not repeat her suggestion that he should find another means. He knew that whatever her reason it was not the result of pity, but he was lacking in the sensitivity to see that for once Elizabeth was looking back instead of forward.

For the next two months he presented the warrant in vain, but his failure was Leicester's success. When she was ill or disturbed he was the only one who could comfort her, the only one she would permit to see her looking tired and unpainted. And in his arms, with her head against his shoulder, Elizabeth spoke of the past and the nervous terrors she had undergone since the day she had refused to sign the warrant.

She could talk to him about the Lord Admiral; listening to her, soothing and stroking her hands, Leicester saw the glimpse of Elizabeth which no one had seen but her childhood attendants; emotional, with nerves strung like fine wires, pursued by phantoms in the mind, and affected by them in her rational conduct.

“I hate him, and I want him dead,” she said. “I meant what I said to Cecil. Find another means—anything. But why should the method affect me, Robert? Why should a beheading paralyse my will, make me physically ill so that I can neither eat nor sleep?”

“Because it brings back memories,” he suggested gently. “But they are only memories. You did not kill the Admiral; you must kill Norfolk. You must pick up that pen and say to yourself that you are going to sign and it will be done before you know it.”

She sat upright and he wiped her face with his own handkerchief. Without her stiff dresses and her jewels, with her hair hanging loosely round her shoulders, Elizabeth looked strangely young, much younger than her thirty-seven years. Her pale skin was unlined, the fine bones and the proud nose would keep the illusion of youth longer than for most conventional beauties. It was peaceful and strangely touching to see her sitting up in the enormous bed, and to hold her without passion, almost as if they were both old and had lived together for many years. Lettice was right when she said he loved Elizabeth. He had found tenderness and loyalty late in life; they were virtues that she had forced upon him. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

“I am going to send for that paper, and you are going to sign it while I'm with you. And then you are going to get up and dress; the sun is shining and your horses are dying for lack of exercise.”