Elizabeth's Spymaster (26 page)

Walsingham was now almost beside himself with frustration at Elizabeth’s vacillation – so much so that he had fallen ill. He told Burghley that the grief of his mind ‘has thrown me into a dangerous disease, as by [speaking to] Dr Baily [Walsingham’s physician], your lordship may understand’.

A flavour of those angry conversations taking place in the privacy of Elizabeth’s chambers may possibly be supplied from overseas. The Spanish perceived dissension amongst Elizabeth’s chief ministers and advisers over Mary’s death, but chose the wrong actors in the drama. Mendoza in Paris reported to Philip II in late January that Burghley

says that although he had constantly shown himself openly against the Queen of Scotland, the earl of Leicester and secretary Walsingham, his enemies, had tried to set [Elizabeth] against him by saying that he was more devoted to [Mary] than anyone.

But she had seen certain papers in his coffers which had told greatly against Leicester and the queen had told the latter and Walsingham that they were a pair of knaves and she saw plainly now that, owing to her not having taken the advice of certain good and loyal subjects of hers, she was in peril of losing her throne and her life by having burdened herself with a war which she was unable to sustain or carry on.

She said if she had done her duty as a queen, she should have had them both hanged.
¹⁴

In addition to Burghley and Walsingham, others were maintaining the pressure on the queen to authorise the execution. A document entitled
Reasons Touching the Execution of the Scottish Queen,
probably drawn up by Hatton during this period and clearly intended only for Elizabeth’s eyes, lists ten cogent arguments why Mary should die:

1. Her majesty, in not executing justice upon the S[cottish] queen, shall foster and nourish the only hope which the Catholics have to re-establish their religion within this realm.

2. The S[cottish] queen’s life cannot stand [continue] with her majesty’s safety and the quiet estate of this realm being (as she is) the only ground [source] of all practices and attempts [conspiracies] both at home and abroad.

3. Mercy and pity (where impunity does not assuage but increase malice) is nothing else but
misericordia crudelis
[cruel compassion] but [with] the S[cottish] queen, experience teaches [us] that the more favour she receives, the more mischief she attempts.

4. When public health and necessity enforces a speedy execution (as in this case it does) there ought [to be] no respect of kindred, affection, honour … whatsoever, to enforce the contrary; as being all of no account in regard of a matter so important as public necessity.

5. What dishonour or rather impiety were it, sparing the life of so grievous an offender, to hazard the lives of so many thousands of true subjects, being left to the spoil and revenge of so malicious a woman.

6. By taking away the S[cottish] queen’s life, her majesty shall quench the malice of foreign princes who, notwithstanding they will not be quiet during her life, will never trouble themselves to revenge her death.

7. Her majesty, being a public person, is to have especial regard of a matter that imports [impacts] so greatly [on] both her own safety and the public state of her whole country.

8. The saying which politic men have so much respected without regard to justice,
mortui non mordent
[‘the dead don’t bite’] may well be used by her majesty in a case of so great and apparent justice.

9. Albeit there were some hope[s] of good success by sparing her life, yet wise men in doubtful cases have always allowed of this rule –
prudentius est timere quam sperare
[‘it is more prudent to fear than to hope’].

10. If her majesty shall omit this occasion to take away so dangerous a person, when law and justice condemn her, there may hereafter
more dangerous practices [conspiracies] be attempted, when law and justice cannot take hold of her.
¹⁵

But mere philosophical argument was not enough to galvanise Elizabeth’s mind. To convince the queen of the need for execution, a sensational new plot to murder her was conveniently discovered that January.

It was a baffling affair that bears all the hallmarks of Walsingham’s genius for both disinformation and timing. Despite his petulance at his less than gracious treatment by Elizabeth, despite his continued ill-health, his determination to destroy his old arch enemy was as strong as ever.

On 8 January, the French ambassador Châteauneuf was suddenly placed under house arrest in London, suspected of involvement in a new conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth. William Stafford, the ‘lewd, mis-contented’ younger brother of Sir Edward, the English ambassador in Paris, had allegedly contacted Châteauneuf’s secretary Leonard Des Trappes, offering to carry out a plan to kill the queen. It involved the recusant debtor Michael Moody (then a prisoner in Newgate, by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury), notoriously a ‘discontented man and one that would do anything for money’. Elizabeth’s death would be caused ‘either by gunpowder or by poisoning her stirrup or her shoe or some other Italian device’.
¹⁶
Des Trappes allegedly dismissed these methods as mere ‘fancies’ and wished ‘that there was such a man to be found in England as he that did the execution upon the Prince of Orange’.
¹⁷

Both Stafford and Des Trappes
¹⁸
were thrown into the Tower and questioned. On 10 January, Elizabeth sent urgently for Thomas Phelippes ‘to attend without fail’ and to bring with him Châteauneuf’s intercepted letters. The next day Stafford confessed to Walsingham, and Moody was questioned by Vice-Chamberlain Sir Christopher Hatton and Elizabeth’s senior law officers, Attorney General Popham and Solicitor-General Egerton.

Moody was well briefed, with a script that must have been specially written to goad the queen into action over Mary. He told his interrogators that all hope was not yet past.

His meaning by these words was that the Scottish queen was still
living and there was still hope of her life … William Stafford had declared to him that she should not die and that, he understood from the French ambassador here.

Stafford would deal with the princes of the Scots’ queen’s blood [guises] in France to procure money and other necessary provision … for some attempt against the queen’s majesty.

On New Year’s Eve, Stafford told him that the French ambassador said it was necessary that there should be more in the action for destroying her majesty and not to lay it upon two or three only.

Thereupon, Stafford said that his servant, Godson, was a tall fellow and a gentleman and was fit to be used in the matter.
¹⁹

In light of the ‘plot’, the number of bodyguards around the queen was doubled as an extra security measure, an act no doubt intended to emphasise the grave peril she faced every day that Mary remained alive.

Châteauneuf angrily denied any involvement or, as Stafford claimed, giving his approval to the plan. There seems little doubt that Stafford was one of Walsingham’s agents provocateurs
²⁰
and it is perhaps significant that two years earlier he had acknowledged some kind of deep obligation to the spy master. In June 1585 he told Walsingham

I am as ever at your command and there is no man living to whom I am so beholden. If I should live to see my blood shed in your cause I should think it but some recompense for the great good I have received at your hands.
²¹

Moody was also known to Walsingham – the spy master had paid him to carry letters between London and Paris in 1580–4.
²²

Whatever the origins of the plot, Châteauneuf could not conceal the fact that he had not immediately exposed the conspiracy to Elizabeth’s government, as any ambassador of a friendly country would do. In reality, he knew it was a trap, albeit a risky one diplomatically for Walsingham. However, not only was the plot a useful psychological weapon for putting pressure on Elizabeth, it also effectively neutralised the French ambassador for a month during a critical period for her government. It is noteworthy
that Des Trappes was later quietly released from the Tower, and after two months, when the danger was past, Elizabeth’s government acknowledged that it had all been a terrible misunderstanding and sought to smooth the ruffled French feathers. The whole episode was, the spy master later told the ambassador, merely an attempt by Stafford to extort money.
²³

In case the Stafford ‘conspiracy’ was not enough, both Walsingham and Burghley cunningly spread a host of rumours designed to stiffen Elizabeth’s resolve to finally rid herself and England of the threat posed by Mary Queen of Scots.
²⁴
The Secretary’s agents were tasked with spreading a web of misinformation to both inflame public opinion and cause general consternation amongst the loyal subjects of the realm. Philip II of Spain, it was rumoured, was building up stocks of artillery and military equipment at Lisbon, ready to use against England. The Duke of Parma was to mount an operation from the Low Countries to rescue the Scottish Queen from Fotheringay, or, in another more lurid version, to abduct Elizabeth herself. Worse still, the Duke of Guise had actually landed strong forces in Sussex and was marching on London, to coincide with an invasion from Scotland. There were other rumours that Mary herself had escaped.

But the campaign of misinformation rebounded on the government and came back to haunt them. Amid the fevered, plot-laden atmosphere in the dark corridors of Elizabeth’s court, it must have frustrated and angered Walsingham and Burghley to continually receive messages reporting back the disturbing output of their own rumour machine, although some of the communications may have been symptomatic of the general anxiety and tension felt throughout the country at this time.

The Earl of Pembroke wrote on 31 January that talk of a Spanish force landing at Milford Haven was happily unfounded.
²⁵
The jittery Mayor and Aldermen of Exeter, Devon, anxiously sent to Burghley on 3 February, enquiring urgently for instructions in the hue and cry to retake the Scottish Queen. The following day, ‘at the hour of one in the night’, they dispatched a messenger to the Privy Council, seeking the truth of reports that she had really escaped and that London had been set ablaze by England’s enemies.
²⁶
As late as 6 February, Sir Owen Hopton, Lieutenant
of the Tower of London, reported his interrogation of one William Bellinger who had heard Alexander Payne, ‘a goldsmith’s boy’, recount how Mary had escaped and been recaptured, but had broken her arm in the attempt. He also discussed the ‘general opinion that the Scottish queen should not be put to death’.
²⁷

Unaware of the true nature of the government-inspired rumours, Paulet himself had heard the stories and wrote to the newly appointed Junior Secretary of State William Davison
²⁸
on 30 January:

You may perceive by these letters enclosed … that the report of the Scottish queen’s escape or of her taking away, as it is now termed, carries such credit in these parts …

These seditious rumours are not to be neglected, in my simple opinion, and indeed there is not a more ready way to levy forces to the achieving of that which these lewd reporters pretend to fear.

I cannot let them flatter themselves with vain hope, but by the grace of God I will not lose this lady, my charge, without the loss of my own life, neither shall it be possible for any force to take her out of my hands alive.
²⁹

The rumours had also spread overseas. On 1 February, Walsingham received information from one of his ‘intelligencers’ in France, reporting that

Many Romanists laugh at the report of the Scottish queen’s escape but the French ambassador never thought her dead till now, supposing the rumour to be spread by policy. If she yet lives, she lives too long and threatens loss.

If she be dead, the thing must be handled with severity with a show of grievous offence towards those who had charge of her and a search [instituted] throughout the realm as never a milk maid, especially in Northamptonshire, must be left unexamined, lest otherwise the subtle enemy discovers the [truth].
³⁰

As if to substantiate the climate of treachery, another of Walsingham’s agents reported rumours that Paulet himself had murdered Mary: ‘God
grant this is true for she has lived too long: good Protestants blame the queen for waiting so long for God commanded that rulers should govern with great severity.’
³¹

He was closer to reality than he could have imagined.

Elizabeth, now desperate to avoid having Mary’s royal blood on her hands, considered ordering her assassination to escape having to sign the death warrant herself. The still, small voice of conscience was never a factor in her thinking. To her, employing the law of the land to kill another queen struck at the very concept of the divine right of kings. She knew full well that such an action potentially had awesome political ramifications for her and her successors on the throne of England.
³²
She sought solitude to wrestle with her uncertainty and was reportedly heard to mutter to herself:
‘Aut fer, aut feri: ne feriare, feri’ –
‘Either suffer to strike, not to be struck, strike’.