The House of Tudor (51 page)

72 Elizabeth riding in procession to Tilbury to address her troops in 1588 a contemporary painting on wood.

73 Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, succeeded his step-father, Leicester, for a time as the Queen’s favourite.

74 ‘Elizabeth I with Time and Death’ by an unknown artist.

Mary and Darnley were married in July 1565 and from then on the home life of the Queen of Scotland became different indeed from that of most well-regulated royal households. Darnley soon revealed himself to be a bully and a drunkard -weak, vain, cowardly and vicious - and an easy dupe in the hands of the Jealous, ruthless, power-hungry men pressing round the Scottish throne. Darnley was of the party which burst into that little supper room at Holyrood in March 1566 and forced the Queen - she was six months pregnant - to witness the brutal murder of her Italian secretary. Darnley had been in the plot to seize and imprison the Queen, install himself as a puppet king and bring back the exiled Earl of Moray. Mary survived the ordeal, outwitting her enemies and regaining her freedom of action in a brilliant display of courage and resourcefulness, but she did not forgive her husband.

In spite of everything, her baby was born safely that June and James Melville came south again to bring the news to London and ask the Queen of England to stand godmother to the infant Prince James. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, the arrival of Mary’s son was the best thing to have come out of the whole messy business. For if the child survived (and that was a biggish ‘if, given the current state of affairs in Scotland), who better than this double great-great-grandson of the first Henry Tudor to succeed to the Tudor throne? But that was for the future. In the meantime, what was to be done about the baby’s parents?

It was now an open secret that Mary was urgently looking for a way to get rid of Darnley. ‘It is heartbreaking for her to think he should be her husband, and how to be free of him she sees no outgait’, wrote William Maitland on 24 October. But it was obvious that some ‘outgait’
would
be found and no one was unbearably surprised when the miserable Darnley met his Grand Guignol end at the house of Kirk o’Field in January 1567. His widow’s subsequent career, culminating four months later in marriage to the uncouth and charmless Earl of Bothwell, was, however, followed with horrified astonishment by the outside world.

In London, Darnley’s mother was crying out for vengeance on her murdered son, and Margaret Lennox, who had been in the Tower and Queen Elizabeth’s black books for having allegedly schemed to bring about the Scottish match in the first place, was let out of gaol by her sympathetic sovereign. In Edinburgh, increasingly outspoken placards were appearing on the streets, naming Bothwell as the King’s murderer and accusing the Queen of having been his accomplice. Elizabeth, with her own experience after the death of Amy Robsart still fresh in her mind, wrote vehemently to Mary: I should not do the office of a faithful cousin and friend, if I did not urge you to preserve your honour, rather than look through your fingers at revenge on those who have done you “such pleasure” as most people say.’ And from Mary’s friends abroad came anxious appeals to bring her husband’s murderers to justice and clear her own name.

But Mary, having apparently cast all considerations of prudence and even elementary common-sense to the winds, paid no attention to the repeated warnings and remonstrances of her well-wishers. Instead of taking steps to bring Bothwell to justice, she continued to show every sign of pleasure in his company and by May she had married him, a divorced man, according to the rites of the Protestant church. It has been suggested that she was suffering from a complete mental breakdown and that she may have been a victim of porphyria, the mysterious hereditary ailment which afflicted her descendant George III. Certainly this is the most charitable explanation, but her contemporaries could only suppose that the Queen of Scotland had allowed her illicit passion to run away with her. Whatever the real reasons behind Mary’s self-destructive rampage during the first half of 1567, nemesis was not long in catching up with her. If her second marriage had been a tragic mistake, her third was an unmitigated disaster. By June Bothwell had fled for his life and Mary was a prisoner in the hands of her outraged nobility. By July she had been forced to abdicate in favour of her year-old son.

Elizabeth Tudor may not have felt much personal sympathy for the cousin who was making such a spectacular hash of her life, but she held strong views about subjects who, whatever the provocation, insulted, threatened and imprisoned an anointed Queen. She fired volleys of explosive warnings into Scotland about what would happen if the lords took any further action against Mary, and she sent Nicholas Throckmorton north to make the situation crystal clear to the new Scottish government. William Cecil and Throckmorton himself were strongly opposed to this policy. They, and the majority of the Privy Council, were eager to support the Scots lords and were terrified that Elizabeth’s violent hostility would have the effect of driving Scotland once again into the arms of France. But the Queen was not to be deflected and gave Cecil several anxious moments. He told Throckmorton early in August that she had sent for him in great haste and made him ‘a great offensive speech that nothing was thought of for her to do to revenge the Queen of Scots’ imprisonment and deliver her.’ ‘I answered her as warily as I could’, wrote Cecil, ‘but she increased so in anger against these lords that in good earnest she began to devise revenge by war.’

Although Mary remained in prison and Elizabeth did not fulfil her threats to go to war on her behalf, there can be no doubt that the Queen of England’s intervention had saved the Queen of Scots’ life. Then, less than a year later, the inevitable happened. Mary, resourceful, brave and optimistic as ever, escaped from Lochleven Castle. On 13 May she and her supporters were routed at the battle of Langside and three days later, on 16 May 1568, she landed on the coast of Cumberland, a refugee with nothing but the clothes she stood up in. ‘I fear’, wrote Archbishop Parker prophetically, ‘that our good Queen hath the wolf by the ears.’

According to the French and Spanish ambassadors, Elizabeth’s first, generous impulse was to send for Mary and welcome her as an honoured guest, but the Council quickly over-ruled their mistress’s instinctive desire to show solidarity with her sister Queen. ‘Although these people are glad enough to have her in their hands’, wrote the Spanish ambassador, ‘they have many things to consider. It they keep her as in prison, it will probably scandalize all neighbouring princes, and if she remain free and able to communicate with her friends, great suspicions will be aroused. In any case’, added Guzman de Silva with studied understatement, ‘it is certain that two women will not agree very long.’

The English Council, painfully aware of the many things they had to consider, at once ‘entered into serious deliberation’ as to what should be done with the Queen of Scots. ‘If she were detained in England’, says William Camden, ‘they reasoned lest she (who was as it were the very pith and marrow of sweet eloquence) might draw many daily to her part which favoured her title to the crown of England, who would kindle the coals of her ambition and leave nothing unassayed whereby they might set the crown upon her head.’ If she were allowed to return to France, her powerful kinsmen there would inevitably stir up a hornets’ nest of faction in both Scotland and England. For Elizabeth to attempt to restore the Queen of Scots to her throne by force would be to invite civil war in Scotland, a rupture of the precious and still none too secure ‘amity’ with that country, and an almost certain revival in some form of the old France Scottish alliance which had been the cause of so much trouble and bloodshed in the past. On the other hand, it had to be remembered that Mary was one of Elizabeth’s closest relatives and that she had sought refuge in England trusting in her cousin’s promises of protection and support. To hand her back to men who would not hesitate to kill her, was equally unthinkable.

At first sight the problem looked insoluble - especially as Mary’s attitude made it plain that she was unlikely to agree to any sort of compromise. Elizabeth’s old and trusted friend, Francis Knollys, who had been sent up to take charge of the situation at Carlisle, where the Queen of Scots was now holding court, found her full of an articulate sense of grievance. ‘She showeth a great desire to be avenged of her enemies’, he wrote on 11 June. ‘The thing that most she thirsteth after is victory, and it seemeth to be indifferent to her to have her enemies diminished either by the sword of her friends, or by the liberal promises and rewards of her purse, or by division and quarrels raised among themselves: so that for victory’s sake pain and peril seemeth pleasant to her: and in respect of victory, wealth and all things seemeth to her contemptible and vile. Now what is to be done with such a lady and princess?’ enquired Francis Knollys, with a certain rhetorical flourish, of his friend William Cecil.

What indeed? Mary was told that Elizabeth could not receive her while she remained under suspicion of having been an accessory before the fact of Darnley’s murder. Mary demanded to be allowed to justify herself before Elizabeth in person, and Elizabeth wrote: ‘O Madam, there is no creature living who wishes to hear such a declaration more than I, or will more readily lend her ears to any answer that will acquit your honour.’ The Queen of England offered to mediate in the dispute between the Queen of Scots and her rebellious subjects, but since neither side would budge an inch from their previously entrenched positions the enquiry, held at York and Westminster, got nowhere. In the end, the Earl of Moray went back to Scotland as regent for the infant King James and Mary stayed in England. She was placed in the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury and was to spend the next sixteen years in one or other of that much-tried nobleman’s mansions in the North Midlands. It was, of course, a thoroughly unsatisfactory situation - expensive and embarrassing for the Queen of England, frustrating and humiliating for the Queen of Scots. Elizabeth continued with patient pertinacity to try and find some formula by which Mary could be restored peacefully to her own throne, but negotiations always foundered on the ineradicable distrust between the cousins, on the impossibility of devising adequate safeguards against Mary’s subsequent repudiation of any undertakings given under duress.

For England the consequences of nourishing that ‘bosom serpent’, the
de facto
Catholic heir presumptive, soon became only too apparent, as Mary’s restless I energy found its outlet in endless, dangerous and futile intrigues. ‘Alas, poor fool!’ exclaimed the King of France, ‘she will never cease until they cut off her head.’ By the mid-158os the revelations of the Ridolfi Plot, the Throckmorton Plot (Francis not Nicholas), the Parry Plot and the Babington Plot, together with an ever-darkening international scene and the increasing bitterness of the ideological conflict between Catholic and Protestant had all combined to bring the problem of the Queen of Scots to a festering head. As Francis Walsingham had put it, more than ten years earlier - ‘So long as that devilish woman lives, neither her Majesty must make account to continue in quiet possession of her crown, nor her faithful servants assure themselves of safety of their lives.’

By 1586, Mary’s guilt or innocence of complicity in the various Catholic conspiracies to depose the heretical Queen of England no longer had any real relevance. Guilty or innocent, the Protestant state, feeling itself threatened from within and without, could no longer contain her. It was as simple as that. Elizabeth had fought desperately to postpone the inevitable decision and when at last it had to be made, it caused her real and acute distress. Her extreme, apparently perverse reluctance to authorize the execution of her deadliest enemy - even after she had been presented with enough evidence to convince any reasonable person that Mary was not only prepared to seize her throne but to connive at her own assassination -is, on the face of it, difficult to understand. So difficult, in fact, that it has often been dismissed as mere play-acting. Perhaps there was some play-acting. Elizabeth always was a consummate actress, ‘a princess who can act any part she pleases’, and, of course, she knew she would be presenting the Catholic world with a first-rate propaganda weapon. ‘What will they not now say’, she exclaimed, ‘when it shall be spread that for the safety of her life a maiden Queen could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman!’