The Watchers (21 page)

So the Queen of Scots, held against her will in England, had to wait and hope. She depended completely upon her friends. From Paris her supporters and agents tried to send her political and diplomatic intelligence in letters that were brought to her with great difficulty from mainland Europe, smuggled under the noses of Mary's keepers. The couriers who carried these packets were zealous young English Catholic gentlemen. Their secret work greatly interested Sir Francis Walsingham and his spies. After all, what else could these letters contain but evidence of Mary's plottings with Queen Elizabeth's enemies? The truth was discovered in the summer of 1586 in probably the most stunning and controversial of all Elizabethan plots, the conspiracy of Anthony Babington, where we have the chance to follow every twist and turn of Walsingham and his quarry.

To invasion and conspiracies to liberate the Queen of Scots we may add the fear of Queen Elizabeth's assassination. Poison was always a danger; Robert Beale had mentioned it specifically in his frank and worrying analysis of the international scene in 1572. In later sixteenth-century Europe there was something of a fashion for killing important men by firearms. In 1563 the second Duke of Guise, the Queen of Scots's uncle, was shot in the back by a young gentleman assassin using a pistol. The first political killing by firearm in the British Isles was that of the Earl of Moray, a Protestant regent of Scotland
(in fact Mary Stuart's half-brother), who was murdered in 1570 by an assassin firing a harquebus, a heavy musket supported on a tripod. The same kind of gun was going to be used to assassinate Lord Burghley in Westminster in 1571 in a plot allegedly commissioned by the Spanish ambassador at Elizabeth's court. The murder plot was revealed to Burghley by one of the would-be assassins, who, instead of finding a reward, went to the gallows. Most shocking of all to Europe's Protestants was the murder, again by pistol, of William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, the leader of Dutch resistance against Spain, in 1584.

Over time, pistols became an assassin's weapon of choice. A pistol, or dag, was much easier to conceal and use than a heavy harquebus, though given the accuracy of firearms in the sixteenth century the killer still had to be very close to his target to be sure of hitting it. In England the law said that a gentleman could keep and carry a pistol if he had the handsome income of at least £100 a year and if the pistol measured ‘stock and gun' at least a yard in length. Elizabeth's government was certainly nervous about the use of firearms. In 1579 a royal proclamation on handguns condemned ‘the multitude of the evil-disposed who … do commonly carry such offensive weapons being in time of peace only meet for thieves, robbers and murderers'. Constables were encouraged to stop anyone carrying a pistol whatever their rank and degree in society. But if thieves carried weapons, then it was sensible for travellers to do the same. It was said that an honest traveller rode out with a case of dags at his saddle-bow – that is, his weapons in plain sight on the arched front part of his horse's saddle.

There were royal assassination scares. The most striking (and in many ways quite the most bizarre) was in October 1583, when a Catholic gentleman of Warwickshire called John Somerville set out from home to kill the queen with his dag. He was quickly arrested for speaking treasonable words against Elizabeth before five witnesses: ‘he was in hope to see the Queen's Majesty and he meant to shoot her through with his dag and hoped to see her head to be set upon a pole for that she was a serpent and a viper'. Here was a textbook treason for which the Treasons Act of 1571 was perfected fitted. The officials who investigated Somerville doubted his sanity, believing that his mind had been turned and twisted by the influence of his wife, a priest
in disguise and an illegal Catholic book – quite possibly (even probably) a work by William Allen of Rheims. One very sinister fact was that Somerville carried with him on his mission an Agnus Dei, a small wax lamb of God blessed by the Pope, an object of Catholic devotion. Master Somerville got nowhere near the queen – he was arrested in a village in Oxfordshire – but the fact that he was interrogated by Sir Francis Walsingham himself shows just how seriously the government believed the threat to Elizabeth's life to be. Somerville was judged sane enough to stand trial for treason. He was found guilty but hanged himself in his cell in Newgate prison before he could be taken to the gallows.

Elizabeth's advisers knew the queen's killing could quickly bring England to its knees. They saw and felt the horror of the Prince of Orange's assassination in 1584. The terrible, insistent question asked by Elizabeth's Privy Council was this: could the same happen to Elizabeth? They knew already the answer to be a plain yes. A second question then followed on from the first: if Elizabeth were taken away from her people – by an assassin's bullet or even by natural causes – what on earth would happen to England? The queen's ministers felt in their bones that invasion and most probably uprisings and rebellion would follow.

Walsingham and his sources were alert to any suspicion of a murder plot. One such conspiracy came to the attention of the government in 1585 in the form of an anonymous report written upon a single sheet of paper; it had neither date nor signature nor really any clue to the identity of the writer. The official who read and endorsed the paper called it simply ‘The speeches of a friar in Dunkirk'. This friar had talked to the English agent about a plot to kill Elizabeth. If, he said, that wicked woman ‘were once dispatched and gone' all Christendom would be in peace and quietness. The friar took the agent into his chamber, where he kept a picture of the Prince of Orange's murder. Orange's killer, said the friar, was a native of Burgundy. ‘Behold and see well this picture,' the friar had said to Walsingham's informant: ‘Look how this Burgundian did kill this prince. In such manner and sort, there will not want such another Burgundian to kill that wicked woman and that before it be long, for the common wealth of all Christendom.'

Elizabeth's advisers were not prepared to sit passively by in the face of threats like this, for in the killing of the queen and in Mary Stuart's claim to the English throne they confronted the nightmare of Protestant England's destruction. They acted in October 1584. At Hampton Court Palace Elizabeth's councillors put their signatures and seals to a document that had been drawn up by Burghley and Walsingham. It was called an Instrument of an Association, a ‘bond of one firm and loyal society' whose signatories swore vengeance on anyone who tried to harm the queen. If any attempt were made upon Elizabeth's life, the object of the Association was to bring to justice any pretender to the throne. The Queen's advisers knew that the greatest danger came from Mary Queen of Scots and her supporters, and so to force home a political point they made Mary herself sign the Association: she, too, swore to protect Elizabeth's throne. Given little choice in the matter, the Queen of Scots put her signature to a French translation of the following words:

we … do voluntarily and most willingly bind ourselves every one of us to the other jointly and severally in the bond of one firm and loyal society, and do hereby vow and promise before the majesty of Almighty God that … [we will] pursue as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge, all manner of persons of what estate soever they shall be, and their abettors, that shall attempt by any act counsel or consent, to anything that shall tend to the harm of Her Majesty's royal person. And we shall never desist from all manner of forcible pursuit against such persons to the uttermost extermination of them, their counsellors, aiders and abettors.

Revenge would be taken against any ‘pretended successor' to Elizabeth's throne ‘by whom or for whom any such detestable act shall be attempted or committed'. The challenger could be hunted down and executed by the signatories of the Association for a conspiracy engineered on his or her behalf. If that challenger happened to be Mary Queen of Scots herself – either in a conspiracy instigated by her directly or merely upon her behalf by someone else – in subscibing to the Association Mary had pretty much signed her own death warrant.

The Association was a remarkable document which Elizabeth resisted,
knowing well enough its implications. But in 1584, unlike in the parliament of 1572, the Privy Council got its way. As extraordinary as the Instrument was the statute parliament passed in 1585 to put the Association into law, the Act for the Queen's Surety, which sought the ‘surety and preservation of the Queen's most excellent Majesty'. As Lord Burghley wrote: ‘for the Queen's Majesty's safety … authority may remain after the Queen's Majesty's death to punish and take revenge upon any wicked person that shall attempt to take her life away'.

The language of the statute was, like any Tudor act of parliament, stodgy. Its implications, however, were stunning. In the event of a rebellion, an invasion, an attempt on Elizabeth's life or anything at all ‘compassed or imagined, tending to the hurt of Her Majesty's royal person by any person or with the privity of any person that shall or may pretend title to the crown of this realm', a commission of at least twenty-four privy councillors and lords of parliament would sit in judgment on the evidence and pronounce a sentence. This sentence would be put into a royal proclamation by which, under the authority of the statute and with the queen's ‘direction in that behalf', all forcible and possible means would be used to hunt down and kill every ‘wicked person by whom or by whose means assent or privity' the invasion, rebellion or act against Elizabeth was provoked, as well as ‘all their aiders, comforters and abetters'.

Out of this dense language of the law came two startling propositions. The first was that in the event of a national emergency the execution of royal justice would be entrusted to the signatories of the Instrument of Association. Any pretender to Elizabeth's throne – and the likely pretender was Mary Queen of Scots – could be pursued to death for any conspiracy organized in her name. This was licensed revenge, pure and simple. The second proposition was that royal government would continue even after Elizabeth's murder. It was a proposal for interregnum, for a temporary English republic in the name of the continuity of royal government.

To bring her to justice under the act, the commission would have to prove that Mary Queen of Scots had at least ‘privity' of any conspiracy: that is, private knowledge of or complicity in it. Elizabeth's government would have to possess material proof that Mary
was actively involved in any plot against her cousin or her cousin's kingdoms of England and Ireland. Elizabeth's advisers believed, of course, that Mary was already guilty, however clever she was at hiding her tracks. But what they needed according to the law passed by parliament was the evidence to prove her involvement and complicity in plots against England. That is what drove Sir Francis Walsingham and his men in their investigations in the years after 1585. At last, in the Babington Plot of 1586, they found it: not exactly in Mary's handwriting but, as the following chapters will show, in documents conclusive enough to allow the government to eliminate the Queen of Scots for ever.

The conspiracy of the priests of William Allen's mission; the efforts of Allen and the Duke of Guise to press for an invasion of Scotland and England; the power of the cause of Mary Queen of Scots to inspire Catholics at home and abroad; the fear of Queen Elizabeth's murder; the drastic emergency contingencies of the Instrument of Association and the Act for the Queen's Surety: all of these themes and forces singly and collectively made the years of the 1580s profoundly challenging for Elizabeth and her government. There was a powerful feeling of anxiety and isolation, of imminent catastrophe. Elizabeth's advisers knew that the queen's life, upon which the security and peace of kingdom and religion rested, was a delicate thing. Ministers like Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham believed that only a passionate and ruthless vigilance could save Protestant England. These were suspicious and dangerous times for the spies and intelligencers of England and Europe.

In June 1580 William Parry, Lord Burghley's gentleman intelligencer, was in Paris, spying on the city's English Catholics. Knowing he could be useful, he sought Burghley's patronage and favour. In his leisured way Parry gathered information without any great finesse, something that troubled Elizabeth's ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Cobham, who wrote rather uncertainly to Burghley that an Englishman called Master Parry pretended to depend upon his lordship's good favour.

Parry took it upon himself to work as an intermediary between Elizabeth's government and some of the exiles. He spied on the English Catholic nobility and gentry visiting Paris and sought to befriend them. He sent reports to London interceding on their behalf. Sometimes he came close to making deals with them, negotiating favourable terms for their loyalty. There was a purpose to this that Parry, dazzled by his own self-importance, did not recognize. Elizabeth's government was pragmatic about the exiles. They could be won over or they could be divided against themselves, reputations compromised in the eyes of other Catholics by their negotiations with the government. Here Parry – clever, indiscreet and self-absorbed – was the perfect instrument. He was quite serious when he wrote to Burghley on behalf of Sir Thomas Copley, a prominent English Catholic gentleman. Parry praised Copley's family and descent, and noted Copley's satisfaction at Burghley's continued ‘goodness and friendly mind towards him'. Copley, Parry wrote, took it ‘very grievously that Her Majesty (to whose person and state he always protested so true and so loyal a heart) should by sinister information conceive such mislike of him'. Parry was confident that he had divined Copley's true loyalty: ‘In truth, my lord, it seemeth to me that he meaneth good faith and very
sincerely and unfainedly to give Her Majesty all the contention he can, and faithfully to serve the same to the uttermost of his ability.'