Mary Queen of Scots (78 page)

This was a commendably prudent reaction. Beaton was never able to be arraigned for his part in the conspiracy since by the time it was uncovered he was dead, and buried (a sad expatriate Scot but a loyal servant) in the parish church at Edensor, close by Chatsworth. Mary’s words showed that her eyes were sternly fixed on where the power lay, on the help of monarchs, not a handful of local lords, whose number of horsemen varied from 100 to 200 to ‘a few’, and at times apparently intended to ship her beyond the seas and at other times imagined ‘they might keep her in some secret place undiscovered, if she could not have ready passage’. She showed no more interest when there was an attempt to revive the plot the next year. Mary was by now a woman of nearly thirty, on the verge of middle-age by the standards of the time; the old impetuosity of her youth was gone. She was chronically sick, alone in a country she did not know; it was
a different matter to elude the bars of her own palace of Holyrood and ride to Dunbar through her own kingdom of Scotland, than to travel in disguise through unknown England, a foreign queen among foreigners. Under the circumstances Mary preferred to pin her hopes to more substantial targets.

In August 1570 Norfolk was released from the Tower. His release proved the signal for a further and much wider conspiracy, in which he was once more involved, under the inspiration of an Italian banker based in London, named Roberto Ridolfi. The Ridolfi plot, as opposed to the earlier plan, which merely proposed marrying Norfolk to Mary, had distinctly dangerous objectives if its wildest aspects were taken seriously. Ridolfi himself was a man with an Italian love of intrigue but unfortunately with little of the Italian Renaissance skill at diplomacy; he understood little of the workings of the English mind, or indeed the workings of England itself. His aim was apparently to secure an invasion of England from the Netherlands, by Philip
II
’
S
general there, the duke of Alva, which invasion was to be supplemented by a rising of native Catholics within England. This combination of invaders and internal rebels would free Mary and, having seized Elizabeth, place Mary on the throne of England, side by side with her consort Norfolk. These were rash and treasonable schemes indeed. There were many difficulties in the way of their being carried out – the principle one being, as Philip
II
was quick to notice, that there was no proof that there would be another Catholic rising within England. Yet Philip stipulated that there should be no Spanish invasion until the English themselves had risen. In the meantime Alva formed the lowest opinion of Ridolfi, whom he termed a
gran parlaquina
or chatterbox, and a lightweight; as late as September 1571 he wrote to Philip from the Netherlands with a sarcastic lack of respect for Ridolfi’s ability to carry out any sort of practical scheme, that even if Philip and Elizabeth jointly agreed to the invasions it still would not be sure that Ridolfi would be able to carry it through! Alva also analysed with terrible correctness the danger, to both Norfolk and the queen of Scots, if such a scheme was discovered or miscarried: either or both might lose their lives.
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Mary’s attitude to, and personal involvement in Ridolfi’s schemes is open to question. She had not lost interest in Elizabeth’s projects for her restoration to Scotland, which still dragged on. In October 1570, Cecil and Mildmay paid Mary a personal visit at Sheffield Castle, possibly spurred on by the king of France’s representations to Elizabeth on the subject of Mary. They put before Mary a long list of articles proposing an alliance between
herself and Elizabeth. Many of these articles reiterated the familiar English position since the abortive Treaty of Edinburgh: Mary was to give up her unlawful claims to the English throne. In addition Mary was to give up bargaining over her remarriage without Elizabeth’s consent, and the question of James coming to England as a hostage if Mary was restored to Scotland was officially incorporated. In the course of their discussion, Cecil showed himself not immune to the famous charm of the queen of Scots: in a memoir of 1569 he had already referred to ‘her cunning and sugared entertainment of all men’ whereby she won many to her cause; now a personal experience of this sweetness led him to agree with Maitland: ‘The Queen of Scots was of a clement and gentle nature, and was disposed to be governed by counsel of them in whom she reposed her trust.’ Leslie, who reported this favourable verdict, even thought that Cecil had promised to bring Mary at last into Elizabeth’s presence. Yet nothing concrete ever actually happened as a result of these articles, and by the spring of 1571 Mary was writing wearily to Sussex that she seemed to have been looking for a happy resolution to her affairs for so long ‘which has been so many times delayed for every light matter that did occur, that we are for our own part in doubt if finally there shall be any good succeed unto us therein’.
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It is possible that under these circumstances of three years’ onerous English captivity, Mary did allow herself to be persuaded to write the incriminating instructions and letters to Ridolfi quoted against her at Norfolk’s trial. The original of the credentials said to be given to Ridolfi by Mary and Norfolk have mysteriously disappeared.
^e
In these instructions Mary wrote wildly concerning the miserable state of England, the cruelty of her own position, the persecutions of the Catholics, the fact that Huntingdon and Hertford (Catherine Gray’s son) were threatening her rights to the English throne, the need for the Pope to press ahead with her nullity suit, and how she intended to send James to Spain to marry him to a Spanish princess. Norfolk was described as being the head of the enterprise, and a keen guardian of the rights of the Catholics. All practical details were to be left to him; furthermore Mary castigated the French who had, she said, done absolutely nothing to help her.
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However, the evidence of Mary’s other letters, written at the same time to Mothe de la Fénelon, the French ambassador, show that she was, to say the least of it, trying to keep all the options open. She had, for example, far from given up all hopes of French assistance and in October twice approached the ambassador begging him to continue to help her and to interest the king and queen of France in her cause ‘because she had no means to help herself’.
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Nor had Mary in any way despaired of Elizabeth’s assistance: for at the same moment as her approaches to Mothe de la Fénelon, Mary was writing to the English queen, stating the full confidence she felt in Elizabeth, and her desire to have her (Mary’s) succession rights discussed in the English Parliament.
³³
Subsequently Mary did admit to having given some sort of financial commission to Ridolfi, but she always denied that it had been anything so specific and dangerous to England as Cecil suggested.

The main architect of this unrealistic conspiracy, on Mary’s side, other than the serpentine Ridolfi and the irresolute Norfolk, was Mary’s envoy Leslie. Mary Stuart like most human beings was inclined to trust increasingly those whom she had trusted for a long time. Since the bishop of Ross first came to France in the spring of 1561 – when he incidentally propounded the foolish scheme for a northern Scottish invasion which Mary wisely rejected – Leslie had been an assiduous if not especially tactful servant of the queen; although he had managed to have good relations with both Darnley and Bothwell. As Mary’s ambassador in England after her imprisonment, he was certainly in a position of enormous difficulty: the point has been well made that he was expected to act as the ‘representative of a foreign ruler powerless to protect her servants but strong enough to attract discontented elements’,
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but Leslie was endowed with an unfortunate combination of energy and application – unfortunate in the sense that he lacked the essential
finesse
which would have enabled him to judge not only the right action to take on Mary’s behalf but also the right time to do it. His anonymous publication in London in 1569 of the
Defence of the Honour of Queen Mary
, which asserted her old rights to the succession, was scarcely diplomatic when the favour of Elizabeth, so famously touchy on this particular subject, was all-important to Mary.

For all his erudition, which enabled him to write his long history of Scotland during this vital period of his stay in England, as Mary’s ambassador, Leslie never quite appreciated the point which Alva quickly perceived: a plot in favour of Mary which miscarried could be far more dangerous than no plot at all. He was also, like his mistress in certain moods, a man of impulse with a quick rash temper. Yet Mary had perforce to put enormous faith in the bishop and his summing-up of situations, as well as in his capacity to amplify her own written communications by personal interviews. Many of Mary’s letters at this period end by promising that the bishop of Ross will further enlighten the recipient. It was unfortunate under the circumstances that by March 1571 Leslie, Mary and
Norfolk were all cut off from each other, with the dubious Ridolfi acting as a go-between. Mary deeply regretted the loss of Leslie’s news bulletins, which she regarded as her window on the outside world: by the summer, the lack of ‘the daily intelligence she was wont to receive from the bishop’ was mentioned as being the thing which troubled her most.
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If the incriminating documents are genuine, it is possible that Mary gained such a falsely rosy picture of the situation that she allowed herself to be committed on paper to an extremely hazardous venture. Such a false picture would not necessarily have been painted on purpose by Leslie to confuse Mary: it is more than likely that Leslie himself was also bewildered and muddled in his intrigues. He was not after all able to confront Mary face to face to discuss the situation verbally; dependence had to be made on letters, and letters could all too easily be intercepted. Although Maitland’s son later made harsh comments on Leslie’s character, and accused him of aiming at his own glory, and the enrichment of his bastard offspring, the situation was wide open for Cecil if he wished to lure the intriguers to their downfall by misrepresenting what each had said to the other; with Mary in prison, cut off from her servant, Leslie showed himself at first to be impetuous and later cowardly; but these qualities did not necessarily make him a villain.

News of what was afoot began to trickle through to the English government in the late spring. Elizabeth received a private warning from the grand duke of Tuscany, who had learnt only too easily of Ridolfi’s hazardous plans. Finally and most disastrously, a certain Charles Bailly was arrested at Dover with a whole packet of books and letters sent from Ridolfi to Leslie. The connection of Leslie and Ridolfi was a fatal one for Mary, because Leslie in turn led directly to the Scottish queen, whose official envoy he was. The next step was to uncover Norfolk’s association with the whole plot, which proved easy enough when Norfolk was found to be sending money to Queen Mary’s supporters in Scotland. On 7 September Norfolk was arrested once more and placed in the Tower. More harmful still was the arrest of Leslie himself: for he produced a series of most damaging confessions, under threat of torture, which mentioned not only the foreign troops which were going to be imported into England, but also the use of papal money in the affair, some of which had been sent to the Marians in Scotland.

On 3 November Leslie attributed the rising in the north to continuous communication between Mary and Norfolk, and between Norfolk and the northern earls – an injurious if inaccurate diagnosis. On 8 November his interrogator, Dr Wilson, the Master of Requests, described to Cecil
how Leslie had said that Mary was not fit for any husband, for she had first poisoned Francis, then consented to the murder of Darnley, and thirdly matched with the murderer Bothwell, and after that she had brought Bothwell to Carberry Hill in the hopes that he would be killed in his turn; now she was pretending marriage with the duke of Norfolk, whom Leslie believed would not have survived long in the embraces of this female Bluebeard. Such confessions, however much promoted by physical fear, hardly pointed to Leslie as a stable and loyal servant. Even Wilson, shocked at this manifestation of what he took to be Scottish ingratitude, exclaimed: ‘Lord what a people are these, what a Queen, what an Ambassador.’
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But Leslie through all his tribulations did not lack self-confidence. On 8 November, the very day on which Leslie had outlined Queen Mary’s marital career in such amazing terms, he wrote to her himself and said that he had been forced to confess everything since her letters had been produced in front of the Privy Council; nevertheless he could not help discerning the hand of providence in the discovery of the ‘design’, since Mary and her friends would be taught a sharp lesson against seeking relief by such means in the future!
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This egregious commentary on the outcome of the Ridolfi plot did not prevent Leslie from urging Mary to use all means in her power to get him released, and at the very least to help him financially.

In January 1572 the duke of Norfolk was tried for high treason. Shrewsbury was specially imported from the midlands to take part in the trial as one of the judges, leaving Sir Ralph Sadler temporarily in charge of Queen Mary. Norfolk was condemned, and finally executed in the following June. When Queen Mary heard of the execution of ‘her Norfolk’, she cried bitterly and kept to her room. Bess, finding her prisoner ‘all bewept and mourning’, asked her rather tactlessly what ailed her. Mary replied with some dignity that she was sure Bess knew what the cause of her grief was, and would sympathize with her in it; as for herself, she feared lest anything she herself had written to Norfolk might have brought him to such a pass. To these modest apprehensions, Bess replied ungraciously that nothing Mary had written could have done either good or harm, since Norfolk had been tried by a fair committee of his peers – including, of course, Shrewsbury.

Despite the snub administered by Bess, Mary had by her mere existence led Norfolk to conspiracy and death; in the same way Norfolk’s trial and execution, and the revelations of the Ridolfi plot, were of acute relevance to Mary’s position in England. It was not so much that she had lost a suitor – for there were many suitors in Europe of varying eligibility – as that her
character in the eyes of the English nobility and the English Parliament now underwent a change. Popular opinion has a loud voice but a short memory. The circumstances of her arrival, now four years away, were quite forgotten in the tide of popular hatred which spread against her – this ‘monstrous dragon’ as one Member of Parliament termed her. Mary was now seen as a foreign-born Catholic spider, sitting in the centre of England spinning her webs in order to depose the English Protestant queen. The fact that she was an isolated prisoner with very little money was ignored in the light of the dangerous possibilities which the Ridolfi plot seemed to expose. It was at this point that Elizabeth herself seized her pen and wrote the famous lines on the subject of Mary, the ‘daughter of debate’, which ended: