The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (49 page)

Her great magnifico, the Earl of Leicester, was sent to the Netherlands as the Queen’s Lieutenant-General. He arrived in December 1585 attended by the flower of English chivalry, many of them fired with enthusiasm for the Protestant cause. Leicester sought ‘as much authority as the Prince of Orange’ had, but he shared rather the arrogance and ineptitude of Anjou than Orange’s personal authority. Nevertheless, for a while his arrival strengthened the faltering resolve of the Dutch. He was awaited as ‘the Messiah’, so Philip Sidney told him. In the midst of the euphoria, Leicester was offered the governor-generalship of the United Provinces. Unknown to the Queen, and against her express command, he accepted it, thereby giving the impression that the Queen herself had assumed sovereignty, with Leicester acting as her viceroy. In January 1586 he was installed as ‘absolute governor’. Elizabeth’s fury once she discovered this, her ‘storms’ and ‘great oaths’, made her counsellors run for cover. Leicester saw himself as a Renaissance prince, but to the Queen he was her ‘creature’. Her fear, as a queen and as a woman, had always been that her greatest male subjects would conspire to overrule her. Now they had.

Leicester had not acted alone. There had been a conspiracy in the Privy Council. Surely this had been the ‘plot for the establishing of some well-settled government’ in the Netherlands about which Walsingham’s agents had conferred with some of the ‘best-affected patriots’. Leicester’s ‘friends’ protested loyalty to him, while distancing themselves from him. His brother advised exile to the ‘furthest part of Christendom’. Not until the end of March did the Queen call Leicester her ‘sweet Robin’ again, wrote Ralegh, whom Leicester suspected of traducing him. Elizabeth’s anger was partly stirred by rumours of an alternative court in the Low Countries, with the Countess of Leicester queening it there, but more by the knowledge that she had been deceived by her councillors; that she had been the last to know of an act which made her ‘infamous’. The forward Protestants had been moved to desperate measures to protect a cause which Elizabeth had never truly supported.

As he had left for the Low Countries, Leicester suspected that Burghley would exploit his absence to further the peace. Rumours spread that
the Queen was preparing to deal with Parma, to renege upon the cause even as her troops risked their lives for it. 1586 saw a series of dismal military failures. Parma’s constancy and strategy brought gain after gain for Spain, while Leicester’s complaining and inaction led to reverses for the allies. Not that everything was Leicester’s fault. His arrival had precipitated a constitutional and political crisis in the infant Dutch republic. His function uncertain, his instructions contradictory, his bedraggled army without provisions (except from his own resources), his queen dealing behind his back, Leicester could hardly have succeeded.

Haunted by ‘danger, want and disgrace’, Philip Sidney wrote to Walsingham at the end of March that ‘if her Majesty were the fountain, I would fear… that we should wax dry’. But she was not. For Sidney, the conflict in the Netherlands was part of a cosmic struggle: ‘I see the great work indeed in hand against the abusers of the world.’ In that struggle, the ‘wise and constant man’ must play his part truly, trusting to ‘man’s power’ and never despairing of ‘God’s work’. Outside Axel in August Sidney urged on his troops to holy war and, amidst a series of English reverses, his ‘camisado’ (night attack) there was a rare success. Yet without pay, mutiny and defeat threatened. At a raid outside Zutphen on 22 September Sidney received the wound that would kill him. His contemporaries knew what they had lost. Ralegh, who had been jealous of him in life, wrote:

A riderless horse was led in the Accession Day tilts that year, caparisoned in mourning black. Even as Sidney had left for the Netherlands, he had already doubted that victory against Spain could be won there, for Parma’s advance seemed inexorable. He had dreamt of greater action on a wider stage, wanting England ‘to carry war into the bowels of Spain’, either on the Spanish mainland, or into the heart of her empire.

The Queen’s motto was ‘
Semper eadem
[Always the same]’, and she had tried to live by it. Elizabethan politics had seemed to be frozen. No answer was found to the perennial questions: what was to be done about
the succession? and about the haunting menace of the Queen of Scots? Elizabeth’s other motto was ‘
Video et taceo
[I see and keep silent]’. She had known her own mind, even as she watched and waited, and had been shrewd in her caution. Yet her councillors increasingly doubted her powers of judgement. Walsingham wrote to Leicester in May 1586 of the Queen ‘whom I do find daily more and more unapt to embrace any matter of weight’. They despaired of her failure to listen to them, her refusal to allow open debate in Council, and her willingness to take advice ‘underhand’.

War must transform the nature of politics. Elizabeth’s personal emblem of the rusty sword for a peaceful reign was no longer appropriate; nor was her way of governing. Politic inaction, delay and prevarication might serve for peace; but not for war, where deep strategy, quick reactions and instant decisions were necessary. Her councillors might risk her fury again by taking decisions for her, as they had done when Leicester accepted the sovereignty of the Netherlands. And a wider band of her subjects too might seize the initiative. In 1584 thousands had, in the Bond of Association, sworn to prosecute to the death anyone who attempted anything against the Queen. The Act for the Queen’s Safety (1584–5) had moderated that arbitrary, vigilante justice and instituted legal process, but the ‘fellowship and society’ of the Bond remained bound by oath to act if the Queen’s life were threatened. In 1586 another conspiracy was discovered.

In the secret world of Catholic exiles, spies, seminary priests and young idealists won to the Catholic cause at the universities and the Inns of Court, the dream remained of freeing the captive Queen of Scots and placing her on the English throne. At Whitsun 1586 John Ballard, alias Captain Fortescue, a ‘silken priest in soldier’s habit’, revealed a conspiracy to Anthony Babington, a young gentleman of Lincoln’s Inn. A massive invasion of England was planned for that summer, supported by the great Catholic powers. There would never be a better time, since English chivalry was away fighting in Flanders. To Babington’s objection that English Catholics would not rise while the Queen lived, Ballard replied that she would not live long; plans were laid for her assassination. But some of Mary Stewart’s agents were Walsingham’s agents also. Among the Catholic idealists, prepared for martyrdom, Walsingham had insinuated the most cynical of
agents provocateurs
, men who would act for the highest bidder. For Walsingham, ‘knowledge is never too dear’. He was accused later of laying a
trap for Mary. In reality – if that is a term properly applied to the deluded Queen – she had needed no luring.

Early in July Babington wrote to the Queen of Scots telling her of the proposed conspiracy and of the ‘six noble gentlemen’ ready for the ‘tragical execution’. This was a request for her assent, and she gave it. Every letter from Mary to her friends, and from her friends to her, was hidden in a beer barrel delivered weekly to Mary’s prison at Chartley, the Earl of Essex’s house in Staffordshire, and every letter was intercepted, copied and passed to Walsingham. By 17 July he had in his hands Mary’s own reply to Babington: the proof of her complicity, the evidence of her treason. Babington and his accomplices were hunted down, arraigned and condemned. Elizabeth was known for clemency, but these conspirators could not be spared. In the Tower, one of the conspirators, Chidiock Tichborne, wrote an elegy:

The full penalty for treason was exacted upon the conspirators: to be hanged, cut down from the gallows while they still lived, and dismembered before their own eyes. Babington watched the agonies of his fellows, until his turn came.

On the copy of the letter which told of Mary’s treason, Walsingham’s agent had sketched three lines –
– death to anyone who intercepted the letter, and, surely, for the Queen of Scots. Mary was tried before a commission of councillors and peers at Fotheringhay Castle in mid October, and the verdict of guilt was given. Could she be allowed to live? As before, in 1572, an extraordinary Parliament was summoned: not to make laws nor to grant subsidies but to advise upon the fate of Mary Stewart. Lords and Commons demonstrated their unanimity in speech after speech, and on 12 November the two Houses presented a joint petition calling for her death. Speaker Puckering insisted that mercy towards Mary was cruelty to her subjects: ‘to spare her, is to spill us’. His speech contained a not-so-veiled threat. Had not thousands of Elizabeth’s subjects sworn before God ‘to pursue to death… such as she is by just sentence now found to be’? Either they must now act

against Mary, against the law, or allow her to live, against their oaths and to the peril of their souls. On 24 November Elizabeth replied, but her answer gave no answer; she asked them to ‘take in good part my answer answerless’.

Would Elizabeth succumb to the cruelty of pity? Sentence had been proclaimed against Mary on 4 December, the warrant for her execution drawn up and signed, but not dispatched, and still not dispatched. Elizabeth would not be seen to kill her sister Queen. ‘We princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of the world duly observed.’ Emissaries came from Scotland and France to intercede for Mary’s life. Elizabeth saw Mary’s death in her dreams, so she told her Secretary of State, William Davison, but she could not bear the guilt of it. Would no one ease her of her burden? Would not Paulet, Mary’s gaoler, fulfil the oath he had taken when he joined the Bond of Association and ‘shorten the life of that queen’, she asked? No, he would not. Since Elizabeth declined to act, her councillors must act for her. On 6 February Beale, clerk to the Privy Council, delivered Elizabeth’s warrant to Fotheringhay, and on 8 February the axe fell. Mary met her death with a resolution that Elizabeth had lacked in allowing it, ‘glad that the end of all her sorrows were so near’. Refusing the Protestant prayers offered, Mary prayed God to forgive her enemies as she forgave them, asked for His blessing upon Elizabeth, and besought all the saints to pray her Saviour to receive her. She died a Catholic.

Elizabeth received the news of Mary’s death in a frenzy of guilt and grief. Estranging herself from the Council which had deceived her, she denied access to Burghley and sent Davison to the Tower. That Lent a court preacher dared to rebuke the Queen for her false pity and unthankfulness; for being a failing Deborah for Israel. Spenser, subtlest of poets, revealed in
The Faerie Queene
the agonized ambiguity of a queen torn between mercy and justice as, in transparent allegory, Mercilla appears, but only appears, to spare Duessa. Mary’s death removed the menace of a queen-in-waiting within England, but brought new danger. With the succession still unsettled, the old questions of religion and allegiance were laid bare. English Protestants could now support the succession of James VI of Scotland, the Protestant king of a Protestant country, but to English Catholics he was a heretic and intolerable as king. Philip of Spain had been planning an invasion to place Mary upon the throne: hers was the right and she was a Catholic who would restore
England to Rome. Now that Mary was dead, would Philip, who had once been king-consort of England and was heir to its throne by descent in the Lancastrian line from Edward III, claim the throne again not only by conquest but by right?