Mary Queen of Scots (88 page)

In June there was further trouble over the arrangements for feeding Mary’s horses and Paulet grumbled that it was all due to the fact that the Cavendishes had all become far too friendly with the queen over the years. Paulet also tried to prevent Mary from making any personal payments to the Tutbury servants, since this would give her an opportunity of secretly bribing them. As a result, his own accounts underwent a financial crisis, augmented by the rocketing food prices in England at the time. ‘This Queen’s servants are always craving, and have no pity at all on English purses,’ wrote Paulet angrily.
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There was indeed apparently no end to the lack of consideration Mary’s servants were prepared to show: when Bastian’s wife Christina gave birth to a child, Paulet had to deal with the problem of a midwife, who might so easily try to slip secret messages in or out. Furthermore, the queen’s waiting-woman, Barbara Mowbray,
‡
who had married Gilbert Curle in October 1585 (Paulet suspected they had been married by a priest disguised as one of Mary’s French ‘readers’) showed every sign of being about to produce a child herself.

Such domestic worries harried Paulet. But he stuck manfully to his duties, and executed them with as much if not more strictness than the government requested. How hopelessly optimistic then was Thomas Morgan’s suggestion from the safety of Paris that Mary should try to bribe Paulet to accord her further liberty, by hinting that on her liberation he would be given virtual autonomy in Jersey where he was hereditary governor; this was not at all the stuff of which Paulet was made. This renewed sojourn at damp and draughty Tutbury thoroughly broke down Queen Mary’s system, and her pleas for a change of air grew pitiful, as she wrote of the wind which whistled through the thin wooden walls into every corner of her chamber. Yet it is clear from Paulet’s letter-books that he felt no sympathy with her ill-health, and seems to have regarded it as just retribution for her sins. In his attitude to her religious beliefs, he showed, to put it at its kindest, the total incomprehension of the bigot, who can see nothing fine or even sincere in the convictions of those with whom they do not agree; and some of his actions or attempted actions on the subject even verged on the sadistic, as when he tried to burn a packet sent to Mary from Chérelles in London because it was full of ‘abominable trash’ – including rosaries, pictures in silk marked with the words
Agnus Dei
and other comparatively harmless by-products of the Catholic religion. All in all, Paulet may be said to have justified Mary’s own description of him as ‘one of the strangest and most
farouche
men she had ever known’.
⁶

However, in the autumn of 1585 it was the protests of the French court to Elizabeth, rather than the compassion of Paulet, which led to the search for a new prison for Mary Stuart. Not only was Mary’s health itself weakened, but the famous middens of Tutbury were stinking to high heaven. Various Staffordshire residences were proposed, including Tixall, the home of Sir Walter Aston. But Sir Walter was a magistrate, and as it was by no means considered an honour to have a house chosen as a royal prison – rather the reverse – Paulet recommended against it, on the grounds that Aston was one of the few loyal men in ‘this infected shire’ and it would be a pity to forfeit his affections.
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Chillington, home of the Gifford family, was well furnished but lacked brew-houses; on the other hand Beaudesert, the Paget home, lacked furniture. Burton was too near a river, and Sir Thomas Gerard’s house (which Mary favoured) too small. In the end the lot fell upon Chartley Hall, an Elizabethan manor-house belonging to the young earl of Essex, with a large moat round it, which made it suitable for security reasons. However, at this point the young Essex protested violently against his mansion being used for this dishonourable purpose. Chartley had certainly been the scene of more chivalresque occasions: Queen Elizabeth herself had visited it during a round of summer visits with Leicester, and coming on from the famous festival of Kenilworth, had been entertained there by Lettice, Lady Essex. Chartley had romantic associations also: for it was there that Philip Sidney had first glimpsed Essex’s sister, the thirteen-year-old Penelope Devereux, the inspiration of his muse, the Stella of his sonnets. Now Essex feared that all the trees on his estates would be cut down to warm the queen of Scots, and he also, more neurotically – if less plausibly – dreaded the damage she might do to the house deliberately, because she had hated his father (since the days when he had commanded the troops which guarded her at Tutbury), and was now said to have transferred this dislike to him.

Essex’s protests managed to delay Mary’s departure for Chartley throughout the autumn; but Paulet himself greatly approved of the change, especially as the amount of water round the house meant that the over-spirited laundresses would have less excuse for passing in and out of the gates as they went about their work. On Christmas Eve the journey was finally made. On arrival Mary found herself so reduced in health that she fell severely ill, and even Paulet found himself ‘for charity’s sake’ bound to pass on her complaints about her bed which she said was ‘stained and ill-flavoured’; he recommended the down bed which she herself requested.
⁸
On this occasion Mary was obliged to keep to her bed for more than four weeks, and it was towards the end of March, eight or nine weeks later, before she felt any real improvement, from the ‘painful defluxions’ which plagued her. It was scarcely to be wondered at that her own servants were gravely worried for her, and feared that the move from Tutbury might have come too late to save her.

While considerations of the queen’s health appeared to engross the Chartley household, deep and very different currents were swirling beneath the surface of its domestic pattern. Walsingham took the opportunity of the move from Tutbury to Chartley to mount a new stage in his campaign to incriminate the queen of Scots. His aim was of course to provide England – and Elizabeth – with sufficient evidence to prove once and for all that it was too dangerous to keep Mary alive. Already the bond of Association passed through Parliament the previous year meant that a plot had only to be made in favour of the queen of Scots – rather than by her – and she would by English law merit the death penalty. Now Walsingham, through his many and devious agents, set about enmeshing Mary in two separate conspiracies against Elizabeth, which together made up the complicated and in part bogus machinations which are known as the Babington plot.

These machinations had two separate strands. In the first place there was the plot – whether genuine or not – to assassinate the English queen. Secondly there was the plot to rescue the Scottish queen from captivity. In both cases, or in any combination of these two plans, foreign aid in the shape of a foreign invasion of England was absolutely essential for success: although Queen Elizabeth might fall a victim of the assassin’s dagger, unless these assassins had sufficient resources to rescue Queen Mary immediately, they might find that by the time they reached her place of imprisonment, their candidate for the English throne had either been killed by her captors or else spirited away. In any case the English Catholics could not carry through such a revolution alone. This was a point which was thoroughly appreciated not only by all the level-headed conspirators, but also pre-eminently by Mary Queen of Scots herself, who never stopped stressing the danger to her personally of an amateur plan (as she had done many years before when Gerard and the Stanleys had thought of rescuing her). It was one of Walsingham’s most subtle moves to make his agents at all points exaggerate the possibility of this foreign aid, generally supposed to be Spanish. In this way the English conspirators were led to believe that a Spanish invasion was certain, and so travelled even further along the road towards fruition of their plans. The Catholic parties abroad were on the other hand given the impression that the plans and numbers of possible English Catholic insurgents were far more stabilized and numerous than in fact they were. Although Mary, from her prison, emphasized in every letter that a Spanish invasion was a
sine qua non
of a successful rescue, these constant pleas in her letters were quite ineffective compared to the havoc wrought among the Catholic conspirators by the fact that so many of their
number were actually renegades, secretly in the pay of the English government.

One false agent in a chain of correspondence can cast a completely different slant on a whole subject: the preliminaries of the Babington plot involved not only Charles Paget and Thomas Morgan, but also a new Walsingham double-agent – Gilbert Gifford – at their very heart. The assassination plot against Elizabeth, which is at first sight a dastardly conspiracy to kill the English queen, changes character as it becomes clear that much of the plot consisted of mere provocation by which Walsingham hoped to entangle Mary. The first stages of the intrigue which ended in Mary’s downfall did not in fact involve Babington and his associates at all, but merely the protagonists of this earlier and dubious assassination plot. These were Gilbert Gifford, his cousin George Gifford, a failed priest of simple nature who was much under Gilbert’s influence named John Savage, and a more lively ordained priest, Ballard, who was in close touch with Thomas Morgan, and who had come to believe in his own political mission to overthrow Elizabeth. The key figure in these early plottings was Gilbert Gifford. He came from an ancient, still Catholic family whose main seat was at Chillington in Staffordshire; his cousin George came from a Hampshire branch of the same family, but in neither case was the possession of an honourable name any guarantee of integrity. Gilbert Gifford indeed seems to have had that peculiar subtle turn of mind which actually enjoys spying for spying’s sake; he had gone abroad as a Catholic in 1577, had joined the English college at Rome to train as a priest, been expelled, and then roamed Europe before being innocently received back into the fold by Dr William Allen, head of the English College at Rheims. With his talents – not only was he highly intelligent but also an excellent linguist – he knew how to make a strong impression on his friends so that he easily drew over the weaker characters to his way of thinking, however tortuous. By the time he landed in England in December 1585, he had become thoroughly involved in the detailed matters of Mary’s correspondence abroad, and let into the secret of all the new conspiracies to free her. On landing, however, he was apprehended and taken before Walsingham: and it was at this point that the details of their secret compact were arranged. It is not necessary to suppose that Walsingham had planned the meeting in advance; as one historian has put it, the probabilities seem to be that the opportunity suggested the expedient.
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The first time it was known by Mary’s supporters that some change in her isolated and news-deprived condition might be expected was when this same Gifford presented himself at the French embassy. The new
ambassador who had replaced Castelnau de Mauvissière was Guillaume de l’Aubespine, baron de Châteauneuf; but Gifford was actually seen by Cordaillot, a secretary at the embassy. The secret letters from Morgan which could no longer be smuggled into the Scottish queen had been piling up at the embassy for the whole year. Now Gifford offered to get packets to Mary, saying that no one in Staffordshire was likely to recognize him, not even his father or his sister, since he had been abroad for so long; as he still looked strangely young, his real identity would remain unsuspected. This story hardly matched with his earlier offer to make a perfectly legitimate visit to Staffordshire on the excuse of seeing his father: and according to Châteauneuf’s later statement,
¹⁰
the French embassy themselves never totally trusted Gifford, especially when he turned out to be lodging in London with Thomas Phelippes, one of Walsingham’s chief agents, and an expert decipherer. Nevertheless, whatever Châteauneuf’s inner suspicions, the die was cast. Thomas Morgan’s letters were entrusted to Gifford. On 16 January 1586, to her unimaginable joy, Mary Stuart received the first secret communication she had had for over a year. Not only that, but she was informed that the same strange pipeline by which the packet had come – the local brewer – could be used to smuggle out her own notes.

The secret battle for the incrimination of the Scottish queen was now engaged. Mary was aware that Phelippes, Walsingham’s arch agent had already paid a visit to Chartley to see Paulet, for she had passed some disparaging remarks on his character and his personal appearance; unfortunately she did not realize that the object of Phelippes’ visit had been to set up the exact workings of the snare in which she was to be trapped. Mary was intoxicated by the pleasure of renewed communications. As she wrote her first outward messages, to be handed to the agreeable brewer as she had been directed, she little realized that the treacherous Gifford still lurked in near-by Burton. The method by which Mary believed she contacted the outside world, but in fact merely signalled her private thoughts and schemes directly to her jailer Paulet at Chartley and her enemy Walsingham in London, was as follows:
¹¹
Mary’s secretary Nau first took down her letters, according to the queen’s directions and with the help of his own notes made along the way, and then put them into code. Next he would wrap the letters securely in a leather packet and hand them privately to the Chartley brewer. The packet was then slipped through a corked tube in the bung of the cask. The merry brewer – ‘the honest fellow’ as Paulet sarcastically termed him – then drove away, back to Burton. Here he handed the packet to Gifford, and the same evening Gifford would
bring the packet secretly back to Chartley and Paulet. If Phelippes was still at Chartley then the message was opened and deciphered on the spot, and the decipher sent forward to Walsingham in London; otherwise the original packet was sent by express riders to London and the deciphering done by Phelippes there. The code set up by the conspirators was not an especially subtle one, involving the use of a mixture of Greek letters, numbers and other symbols for the letters of the alphabet and common words. But even if it had been of a more complicated nature, the deciphering would still not have been a very arduous task: at the opening of her new communications, this particular code had been specially set up for the future between Mary and her correspondents, and passed on to them through the post; Walsingham had thus merely to note it down, and any of its variations, as and when they were established.