The Watchers (20 page)

When Mary had landed on the coast of Cumberland in 1568 her monarchy was deeply compromised. She was an escapee from the prison of Lochleven Castle. Deposed by her enemies in Scotland, and strongly suspected by many of having been involved in the murder of her second husband, Henry, Lord Darnley, in 1567, she came to England to beg Elizabeth's family affection in setting her back upon her throne. Under the strong advice of her councillors, Elizabeth refused to meet her cousin. Recognizing the profound difficulty of Mary's case, Elizabeth appointed a tribunal to examine the Casket Letters, the supposed evidence of Mary's complicity in Darnley's death and her adultery with the Earl of Bothwell. The documents were held by Elizabeth's government to be genuine, though this claim has been strongly doubted by historians. Indeed Lord Burghley himself knew they contained some crude forgeries. But if the Casket Letters were shown to be authentic then Mary and her queenship were fatally compromised. The tribunal that met at York and then in Westminster late in 1568 formally recognized the documents' authenticity. This was proof enough for Elizabeth's advisers that the Queen of Scots had been involved in a murder conspiracy against her husband. Though in 1568 not found guilty by a court of justice in England, Mary was sent by Elizabeth to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire to be held indefinitely under close supervision. The deposed Queen of Scots was forbidden to communicate with any outsider without Elizabeth's knowledge and permission.

On balance it was probably less dangerous to Elizabeth's government to hold Mary safely in England than either to return her to Scotland or to send her to France. But safe custody in secure castles and houses in England was merely the best of the three choices. However she was dealt with, Mary was dangerous. The Ridolfi Plot of 1571 revealed to Elizabeth's advisers precisely how pernicious she was, sitting comfortably at the centre of a web of conspiracy whose four principal threads were money from the Pope, a plan for an invasion of England led by a Spanish general, the liberation of Mary herself and the plottings of powerful English Catholic nobility. The most disturbing revelation of all in 1571 was the treason of Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, a cousin of Elizabeth's through the Howard family of Anne Boleyn. Norfolk was found to be a Ridolfi
conspirator. Parliament in 1572 responded robustly, sensitive to the plain if uncomfortable fact that, though ignored by the Act of Succession of 1544, Mary Stuart was Elizabeth's blood successor. What the political establishment of Elizabethan England faced in 1571 and 1572 – as at many moments of political emergency in Elizabeth's long reign – was the appalling prospect of the queen's death with no acceptable royal successor, provoking a foreign invasion and probably also a civil war. After the breaking up of the Ridolfi Plot, parliament pressed for three courses of action. First, cut off the heads of the Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk. Secondly, strip Mary of any pretensions to monarchy. Third, find and establish by parliamentary statute Queen Elizabeth's royal successor: the future could not be left to accident and chance. Significantly, there was very strong support, nourished by the Privy Council, for Mary Stuart's trial and execution. Elizabeth, however, resisted parliament's advice on all but one of the proposed courses of action.

The Duke of Norfolk paid the price of the Ridolfi conspiracy, for in 1572 he went to the executioner's block as a traitor. Terrified of the political consequences at home and abroad of eliminating a blood kinswoman and a fellow monarch, Elizabeth refused to be pressed on Mary by her Lords, Commons and Privy Council. Lawyers in parliament trawled the history of Europe for examples of kings brought to justice by fellow monarchs. The Emperor Henry VII, they found, gave a judgment of death against Robert, King of Naples at Pisa in 1311; Frederick, King of Naples was deposed by King Ferdinand of Aragon in 1501. The lawyers gathered together dozens of legal principles and maxims, many having to do with the fact that the Queen of Scots had been deposed by her own people and was thus no longer a queen. Bishops in the House of Lords quoted texts from the Old Testament to prove Elizabeth's duty to execute Mary. Still Elizabeth was unmoved. Both houses of parliament set to work on a bill to exclude the Queen of Scots from the English succession, seeking to disable Mary's claim to the Tudor crown. The bill, which was turned by Lords and Commons into one ‘wherewith the Queen of Scots may be charged' judicially, was quashed by Elizabeth. It was an effort to deal definitively and robustly with the dynastic danger presented to
Elizabeth by Mary; the queen, who was quite aware of what she was doing, merely adjourned parliament before the law could be passed. The best statute that could be used against the Queen of Scots remained the Treasons Act of 1571 and those of its clauses which prohibited any claim upon or usurpation of Elizabeth's title and crown. So far as Elizabeth's advisers were concerned, this was a very flimsy defence against evil.

And that was how in 1572 – the year of Elizabethan crisis, a turning point of decision and direction – those who moved in political circles at the royal court and in the Council saw it. The great massacre of Protestants in Paris in August of that same year, at the feast of Saint Bartholomew, offered further grim evidence of European Catholic conspiracy. The Devil was seen to be at work against the people of God. The events of Bartholomewtide caused Elizabeth's government to re-evaluate the international situation it found itself facing. So it was that Robert Beale, later one of Edmund Campion's interrogators and a man close to both Sir Francis Walsingham and Lord Burghley, was prompted by ‘the great murder in Paris and other places in France' to write a discourse, or political paper, for Burghley.

Beale's analysis in 1572 was stark, even terrifying. The killings in France, he believed, reflected the efforts of Catholic princes to destroy Protestantism throughout Europe in a campaign either waged openly in war or by treason and malice in secret. There was a ‘detestable conspiracy' to divide the world into a new triumvirate of Spanish, French and papal power. Together Spain and France planned to conquer England. The foundations set down for the coming invasion were the defence of Mary Queen of Scots's title to Elizabeth's throne and Pope Pius V's bull of 1570 denouncing Elizabeth as a schismatic and usurper. The ambitious house of Guise, Mary Stuart's family, manipulated the monarchy of France and sought to confront and destroy Elizabeth probably by poison. Without a sure royal succession after Elizabeth's death, England stood alone and defenceless against evil. Beale remembered the destruction of two leaders of the European Protestant cause, Louis of Bourbon, Prince of Condé, who was killed in battle in 1569, and Admiral Coligny, murdered in Paris in 1572. All European Protestants were in danger. The King of France himself had
ordered the killings in Paris. In the Low Countries the forces of the Prince of Orange, leading the Dutch against the Duke of Alba's Spanish army, were weak. Beale wrote:

It is therefore time and more than time that Her Majesty were thoroughly resolved to take some right course [for] both her own safety and wealth of this realm … The French King is become a man or rather an incarnate devil. The Prince of Condé and Admiral be slain. The Spaniard is placed in the Low Countries. The Prince of Orange's forces be like after this to be so weakened as he shall never be able to lift up his head again. We are left destitute of friends on every side, amazed [stunned, overwhelmed] and divided at home: and consider not that where there is any such irresoluteness and security, that estate [state or kingdom] cannot in policy upon any foreign invasion (as is intended against this), continue long.

It was a brutal and cheerless analysis of the international scene.

Beale doubted very much whether English Catholics could ever be trusted by the queen. He wrote in private what Elizabethan officials, sensitive to the charge of orchestrating a religious persecution in England, were always relucant to say in public. Catholics, Beale said, could never be loyal subjects of Elizabeth. He reasoned thus: it was impossible for those whose religion, founded upon the Pope's authority, believed both the queen's birth and her title to the English throne to be unlawful. What confidence, he asked, ‘can be reposed in him, who thinketh in conscience under the damnation of his soul, to owe a more obedience to a higher power'? For an Elizabethan Protestant Beale's logic was unassailable.

Beale had no illusions about the pernicious influence of Mary Queen of Scots. She was the principal cause of the ruin of the kingdoms of Scotland and France and she had ‘prettily played the like part' in England. ‘All wise men generally throughout Europe cannot sufficiently marvel at Her Majesty's over mild dealing with her, in nourishing in her own bosom so pestiferous a viper.' He suggested a tough course of action to be taken against Mary. To disable the Queen of Scots from the English succession – the policy pushed by Lords and Commons and the Privy Council in parliament but subverted by Elizabeth in 1572 – was merely ‘a toy', a trifle and a fantasy. To eliminate
Mary once and for all was the only sure way. Beale's political logic was that the malice of Spain and France, being profound already, could not be ‘augmented' by Mary's death. It would be better to be rid of her and take the consequences of her elimination sooner rather than later.

Robert Beale's analysis appealed politically and instinctively to Lord Burghley, Sir Francis Walsingham and other privy councillors. But Elizabeth would not be moved, fearing above all the shattering consequences of stripping away the divine sanction of monarchy by killing the Queen of Scots; and so Mary lived. What followed after 1572 were fifteen years of uneasy and unstable peace between England and the princes and powers of Europe and some very busy plotting on behalf of Mary's cause. It was just as Beale had predicted. For the rest of her life the Queen of Scots and her household were moved between places of safety and seclusion deep in the English midlands, away from London, the coasts and the sensitive borderland with Scotland, under the supervision of custodians and keepers appointed by Elizabeth. Elizabeth's government knew that it had to isolate Mary as best as it could in order to cut off her contacts in England and abroad.

Mary was not cowed by her imprisonment. In fact she seemed to speak and to act with more confidence than her royal cousin of England, forcefully stating her rights even at the most difficult times. In June 1572, when members of the House of Lords and House of Commons were busily looking at the precedents for trying and executing monarchs, Mary wanted to go before parliament to state her own case. While Elizabeth resisted the efforts of her Privy Council and parliament to deal with Mary robustly, the Queen of Scots was just as confidently sure of her blood, parentage and right of next succession to the English crown. Significantly, knowing full well what the implications were, Mary resisted the views of lawyers in the House of Lords by refusing to submit to the legal jurisdiction of her cousin. The Queen of Scots – the unqueened queen, deposed in Scotland, a prisoner in England – always stood proudly upon the dignity of monarchy.

But Mary was above all a realist. She knew that Elizabeth's government wanted to suffocate her influence. She appealed to King Philip of Spain; he was sympathetic to her situation but too busy on the many
fronts of Spanish imperial power to devote either time or energy to her cause. With her cousin, Henry, Duke of Guise, she had more success. In fact the young duke became one of her most enthusiastic and active supporters in Europe. In 1578 he talked to King Philip's ambassador, as well as to William Allen, about Mary and her young son, King James VI of Scotland. Mary's situation was always tangled up with greater projects: to free the Queen of Scots without a vision for the rescue of England from Elizabethan tyranny – or indeed to have restored a Catholic England without a royal successor to Elizabeth – never made much sense. The liberation of the Queen of the Scots and the end of Elizabeth's heretical rule belonged together in the minds of Europe's Catholic leaders and English Catholic exiles. And so it was that in the early 1580s the Duke of Guise, with the help of Jesuit priests, began to look to the practical details of a plan to free Mary as well as to save England and Scotland from pernicious heresy.

In 1581 Robert Persons, Edmund Campion's companion and superior in their mission to England, began to think seriously about Catholic prospects of success in Scotland. A Catholic Scotland could offer a safe haven for persecuted English Catholics. Its young king, James VI, had been raised by his mother's enemies and given a thorough classical education and an uncompromisingly Protestant upbringing. In the early years of his rule Scotland was governed through Protestant regents who fought the kingdom's Catholic nobility. But James, by now fifteen years old, was growing in ability and confidence. Might he, English and Scottish Catholics wondered, be persuaded to become a Catholic? James's favourite at court was his cousin Esmé Stuart, first Duke of Lennox, who was perceived to exercise great influence over the king. Here the Duke of Guise, Robert Persons and William Allen saw their best chance of success. Indeed Lennox himself proposed a scheme to restore the Catholic religion in England, Ireland and Scotland, as well as to free the Queen of Scots and to secure the return of Catholic exiles and émigrés to their homelands. Lennox envisaged an invading force of 15,000 foreign troops. He and James would lead Scottish and Spanish troops in Scotland. The Duke of Guise would bring an army across the English Channel from France to land on the south coast of England. The rebel Earl of Westmorland and other English exiles would return to England to
raise and arm their tenants. Together, by invasion and rebellion, they would push Elizabeth off the throne and liberate the Queen of Scots.

It was a bold plan to which many – the Duke of Guise especially – gave time, money and resources. But in the end it was hamstrung by changing political circumstances, principally the fall from influence at James's court of the Duke of Lennox and also by the cooling of King Philip of Spain's support for Guise's plan. Nevertheless, the duke's unwavering commitment touched off in England in late 1583 and early 1584 one of the most energetic of the many Elizabethan hunts for conspiracy and conspirators in England. It is known as the Throckmorton Plot, and it is one of the secret threads of the following chapters, involving a young Catholic gentleman called Francis Throckmorton, the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Paget and one of the most elusive of Elizabethans, Lord Henry Howard.