An Accidental Tragedy (47 page)

Elizabeth had, in fact, grown weary of the stalemate, brought about, as she saw it, by her intractable cousin, and the court was rife with the gossip that Mary would face some kind of imprisonment in England. Although the commission was still sitting, the Earl of Shrewsbury wrote to his wife in mid December, ‘Things fall out very evil against the Scots Queen . . . Now it is certain the Scots Queen comes to Tutbury to my charge.’

Elizabeth and Cecil had now managed to get all the accusations against Mary into the open, while Mary’s non-appearance was taken as a confession of guilt. Early in the January of 1569, Huntly and Argyll approached the commission and spelt out the formation of the Craigmillar Bond in great detail, thus incriminating themselves along with Bothwell, Lethington, Sir James Balfour and Moray. Mary is cited as an accessory before the fact, and could not in any way deny her foreknowledge of a plot against Darnley, even allowing for her feeble desire that nothing be done ‘to my hurt and displeasure’. If this statement was disputed, then the two noblemen challenged Moray and Lethington to single combat – Lethington was not of noble blood, but they were generously prepared to make an exception to the rules of chivalry and would allow him to fight. Moray’s response to this was very simple: he flatly denied that he had been at Craigmillar on the relevant dates. Therefore, at least that part of the statement was fiction.

Before either of these declarations were made, however, on 7 January, Elizabeth let it be known that

The Queen of Scots must not in any sort understand, that the queen’s majesty meaneth to deal any further in this
matter, considering she doth not answer to the crime of murdering her husband, but that the Earl of Moray shall return to his government, and shall be by her majesty placed in no worse state than that she found him in at his calling from thence. The Queen of Scots would also be removed to Tutbury and no such free access of persons allowed to her as hath been. There should be a general restraint that none should come or send to her but by the queen’s majesty’s knowledge.

After this abrupt command there could be no further doubt but that Mary Stewart was now a prisoner of state. On 10 January Elizabeth wrote to the Scottish commissioners, ‘forasmuch as there had been nothing declared against them [the commissioners], as yet that might impair their honour and allegiances, so, on the other part, there had been nothing sufficient produced nor shown by them against their sovereign, whereby the Queen of England should conceive or take any evil opinion of the Queen her good sister, for anything she had yet seen.’ This was a perfect piece of Tudor prevarication, which in Scots law would be recorded as ‘not proven’. It gave Elizabeth absolute freedom to deal with Mary as she wished, but presented her with the dilemma of deciding exactly what it was that she wished to do with Mary.

As realisation of her plight began to sink in, Mary’s attitude began to change. A renewed approach had been made by Philip II of Spain for the marriage between Mary and Don John of Austria, but she wrote back telling Philip that, given her situation in the hands of Elizabeth, she could make no such commitment. Despite this, when Mary wrote to Elizabeth on 22 January, she made no concessions and proposed no action, but she did, unwisely, berate Elizabeth for her behaviour in the past. Elizabeth had not received her, Mary had not been shown copies of the Casket Letters, and, by allowing him to return with no more than a slap on the wrist, Elizabeth had tacitly appeared to find in Moray’s favour and to condemn Mary. There were other ‘petites rudesses’; Mary had had no news of her relatives in France and she was cut off from news of affairs in Scotland. Her letter no
longer held neither cheerful optimism that a face-to-face meeting could put everything in order, nor Guise imperiousness, demanding the observance of her regal state. Now Mary had the whining tone of an imprisoned supplicant begging for favours.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, had cleared the decks with her accustomed efficiency. Reports that James was to come to England, that Edinburgh, Stirling and Dumbarton were to have English garrisons, and that Moray was to be declared legitimate and would hold Scotland on the death of James should he be ‘without bairns’ were declared to be totally false. Mary had not been tried, but in the court of public opinion she had been found guilty on the basis of unproven evidence and secret rumour. Elizabeth had now removed her to a safer and more comfortable place. And, at least for the moment, Elizabeth could forget about her troublesome Scottish cousin.

Mary’s removal to Tutbury should have been simple. Cecil received a projected route from the Earl of Sussex: Bolton to Ripon (sixteen miles) then Ripon to Wetherby (ten miles) Pomfret [Pontefract] to Rotherham (sixteen miles) and so on by easy stages to Tutbury. As Tutbury was not at this time fully furnished it was planned that Mary would lodge first at another of Shrewsbury’s houses at Sheffield. Confusion reigned, however, as Lady Shrewsbury, châtelaine of both houses, had already sent the furnishings from Sheffield to Tutbury. Logistical chaos was taking place as Mary, on the morning of 26 January 1569, was forced to leave Bolton. She had delayed for some days because of bad weather and ill health, but now the household had to move. Sixteen horses had been hired for Mary and her attendants, along with another sixteen for her guard, and thirty-six more for her servants, as well as six cartloads of baggage and eight carriage horses. Their breath steamed in the freezing air as Mary finally appeared, heavily wrapped against the freezing weather, and the cumbersome entourage lumbered out into the snow, to arrive at Ripon late that evening.

At Ripon, Mary had been met by Sir Robert Melville with instructions to discuss the possibilities of her marriage to Norfolk.
Since one of Moray’s fears over Mary’s liberty in Scotland was the possibility of her marrying a foreign prince, the idea of marriage to Norfolk was to be encouraged. Given Mary’s ill humour and exhaustion, these discussions achieved nothing, although she did find time to write to Elizabeth complaining about her forced removal from Bolton and denying her authorship of the Casket Letters. She told Elizabeth she had written a long denial to Cecil, which she would spare her ‘good sister and cousin’ from reading. Doubtless Cecil had already communicated the relevant portions to his queen.

Knollys, ‘much disquieted with this melancholy service in these strange countries, which melancholy humour groweth daily upon me since my wife’s [recent] death’, was still aiming to lodge his party at one of Shrewsbury’s houses at Sheffield, but on 28 January he received the news that it was now uninhabitable and he should make directly for Tutbury. This was becoming more and more difficult as the rigours of such a winter journey began to take their toll. In Rotherham, Lady Livingston became so ill that she had to be left behind. At Chesterfield, Mary, who had been complaining of her recurrent pain in her side, refused to continue without her servant attending her. Lady Livingston was Agnes Fleming, Mary’s cousin, and distantly related to two of the other Maries. Mary’s stay at Chesterfield cannot have been made more cheerful by her receiving a reply from Elizabeth, who could not understand why Mary was upset and advised her, ‘Quiet yourself in all things according to the princely good heart that God hath given you’.

Mary did not heed this patronising advice, given as though to a recalcitrant child, and at the end of January she wrote to Norfolk, ‘Our fault were not shameful. You have promised to be mine and I yours; I believe the Queen of England and country should like of it. If you think the danger great do as you think best . . . I will ever be, for your sake, perpetual prisoner, or put my life in peril for your weal [health] or mine. Your own, faithful unto death, Queen of Scots, my Norfolk.’ Mary, twenty-six years old, was behaving like an over-emotional thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

Finally, on 3 February 1569, Mary arrived at Tutbury, there to be placed in the care of the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury. A week earlier, Elizabeth had sent instructions to Shrewsbury, the highest ranking peer in England after the Duke of Norfolk, ratifying her earlier decision of December. The Earl and Countess were to treat Mary as a queen but not to let her overpower them or gain her freedom without Elizabeth’s express consent, which she intended to give ‘at time and in manner convenient’. Shrewsbury was instructed to limit Mary’s retinue – the cost of maintaining them was prohibitive – and to let no one above the rank of ‘mean servants’ come to her out of Scotland. Since Elizabeth understood Tutbury to be in a poor state, Mary was to be lodged at Shrewsbury’s own house in Sheffield. London obviously had no clear picture of Shrewsbury’s domestic dilemma. Elizabeth, having made her wishes clear, broke off and the instructions then continued in Cecil’s handwriting. If Mary were to make any complaint against Elizabeth, then all the charges made against her would be published. If she became ill or wished to speak to the countess, then contact should be limited and no gentlewoman apart from the countess should be allowed to attend Mary.

Her new host, who would have charge of her for fifteen years, was George Talbot, 4th Earl of Shrewsbury. Elizabeth, no doubt with Cecil nodding in approval, had chosen Shrewsbury as Mary’s gaoler with considerable care. He was about forty years old, immensely rich and, more importantly, he owned seven great houses, not counting two of the greatest houses in England which were owned by his wife, and all of them were within easy reach of each other in the Midlands. He was a non-belligerent man, fussy to extremes and, like many rich people, very careful over unnecessary expenditure. His correspondence abounds with desperate appeals to Cecil over the high cost of accommodating Mary and her court. Needless to say, these appeals fell on deaf ears.

Equally important to Mary was her hostess, Elizabeth, the Countess of Shrewsbury. More often known as Bess of Hardwick,
she was the earl’s second wife, but he was her fourth husband. Robert Barlow, her first, died leaving her a property-rich widow, and she promptly married Sir William Cavendish, putting her determined foot on the first rung of the aristocratic ladder. Ten years later he died and she then married Sir William St Loe who, on his death, excluded his own family from his will in favour of Bess. She now owned Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House and had become second only to the queen in wealth. Joseph Hunter, the antiquary, said of her that ‘she had a mind admirably fitted for business, very ambitious, and withal overbearing, selfish, proud, treacherous and unfeeling’. This was the Bess of Hardwick who completely dominated George Talbot when he wasn’t being dominated by Elizabeth Tudor. Into his household he now had to welcome Mary Stewart.

Tutbury was probably the most unsuitable of all Shrewsbury’s houses: it was a medieval castle which he occasionally used as a hunting lodge and it was furnished for only one or two nights’ stay at a time. The roof was missing in some places and the walls were only partially hung with tapestries. Some rooms had beds while others had only pallets on the stone floors. Gradually, some silverware arrived from the Tower of London and the main rooms were hung with tapestries; beds were erected and Mary’s cloth of state arrived. To Shrewsbury’s great relief Mary answered ‘with temperate words and all passed without sign of offence’, and she even accepted a reduction in her household from sixty to thirty people without demur. Many years later, however, Mary let her true opinion of Tutbury be known:

I am in a walled enclosure, on the top of a hill, exposed to all the winds and inclemencies of heaven. Within the said enclosure, resembling the wood of Vincennes, there is a very old hunting lodge, built of timber and plaster, cracked in all parts, the plaster adhering nowhere to the woodwork, and broken in numerous places; the said lodge distant three fathoms of thereabouts from the wall, and situated so low, that the rampart of earth which is behind the wall is on a
level with the highest part of the building, so that the sun can never shine upon it on that side, nor any fresh air come to it; for which reason it is so damp, that you cannot put any piece of furniture in that part without its being in four days covered in mould. I leave you to think how this must act on the human body; and, in short, the greater part of it is rather a dungeon for base and abject criminals than a habitation for any person of quality . . . the only apartments that I have for my own person consist – and for the truth of this I can appeal to all those who have been here – of two little miserable rooms, so excessively cold, especially at night, that but for the ramparts and entrenchments of curtains and tapestry that I have made, it would not be possible for me to stay in them in the day time; and out of those who have sat up with me at night during my illnesses, scarcely one has escaped without fluxion, cold or some disorder. [The grounds are] place to look at fitter to keep pigs in than to bear the name of a garden . . . This house having no privies, is subject to a continual stench; and every Saturday they are obliged to empty them, and the one beneath my windows from which I receive a perfume not the most agreeable.

Tutbury did, however, suit Elizabeth’s purposes extremely well. It was far enough away from Scotland to make any escape attempt unlikely, while communication with London was easier than it had been at Bolton. Elizabeth could say with honesty that her cousin and sister queen, having not been found guilty by the investigation, was not, therefore, lodged in a prison. Yet Mary was under the strict control of a trusted courtier – a courtier who, moreover, owned several other houses nearby, an asset which was essential while considering Mary’s long-term confinement in England. These great houses had little in the way of sanitation; their stone or wooden floors were laid with either rushes or, in the case of the more luxurious, a few rugs; and at least once a year they had to be ‘sweetened’. The floors and walls were swept and
washed down; vermin were expelled from the roof spaces and ceilings; the stables and privies were dug out and the excrement carted away; kitchen fires were extinguished and chimneys swept – so that for a period each year the houses were uninhabitable. Therefore, while Mary and her court would have to be moved, they did not need to move far and Shrewsbury could easily continue as host, or gaoler.