Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (51 page)

Only two months earlier Elizabeth had fallen sick of a strange disease and had grown so thin that ‘her bones may be counted’. It was whispered that she might be consumptive. ‘Her Majesty’, Cecil wrote to the English envoy in France, ‘suddenly sick in the stomach and suddenly relieved by a vomit. You must think such a matter would drive men to the end of their wits, but God is the stay of all that put their trust in Him.’ Despite the confident and indeed imperious demeanour of the queen, her first years of rule were undermined by a constant note of insecurity and danger.

Yet she recovered and in the late summer of 1566 went on a progress to Oxford, stopping off at Woodstock, where she had been held prisoner during the reign of her sister. The dons came to meet her before she came into the town, calling out ‘
Vivat regina!
’ She gave them thanks in Latin. Then she listened to a loyal address in Greek before replying to that oration in the same ancient tongue. She was as learned as any Oxford scholar.

Her arrival at the university was the occasion for further orations and sermons, public lectures and public disputations, plays and debates. While she watched one drama,
Palamon and Arcite
, the stage collapsed; three people were killed and five were injured. She sent her own barber-surgeon to care for the afflicted, but then laughed heartily when the performance was resumed. She also expressed her instinctive dislike for the more doctrinaire reformers. On meeting one noted sectarian, of Puritan persuasion, she remarked ‘Mr Doctor, that loose gown becomes you mighty well. I marvel that you are so strait-laced in this point [of religion] but I come not now to chide.’ He had made the mistake of praying, in public, that the queen would allow further change within the Church. This was a subject on which her mind was closed. At the end of her visit she made another speech in Latin, on the dignity and worth of learning, and her litter was accompanied for 2 miles by a body of scholars and local worthies.

The birth of James Stuart had alarmed Elizabeth, since the prospect of an heir materially increased Mary’s following in England. The Scottish ambassador in England told his mistress that many shires were ready to rebel and that the nobility had named the captains of the enterprise. Elizabeth’s envoy wrote to Cecil from the French court that ‘both the pope’s and the king of Spain’s hands be in that dish further and deeper than I think you know . . . I have cause to say to you
vigilate
!’ The ambassador was acute. Six months later Philip II wrote to the Vatican that the time would soon come ‘to throw off the mask and bestir ourselves’. He and the pope must consider the way in which they could assist Mary Stuart and promote the cause of God; the queen of Scots was the ‘gate by which religion must enter the realm of England’.

It is probable, then, that Cecil helped to orchestrate the pressure placed upon Elizabeth by the parliament of 1566. He left a paper, or memorial to himself, in which he wrote that ‘to require both marriage and the stabilizing of the succession is the uttermost that can be desired’. Parliament assembled in the autumn of that year, unaltered since the last meeting of 1563; it had then been prorogued rather than dissolved. The clamour for the queen’s
marriage had become more intense during the interval, and it was rumoured that the Commons would refuse to vote her ‘supplies’, or finances, unless she revealed her commitment to matrimony or at least named her successor. The debate went on for two mornings, in the course of which several members traded blows. The Lords then agreed to join the Commons in a petition to her.

Elizabeth was furious with her councillors, who were suspected of collusion. She vented her anger first on the duke of Norfolk and, when another councillor tried to defend him, she said that he spoke like a swaggering soldier. Then she turned upon Leicester, her favourite. She accused him of abandoning her. He swore that he was ready to die at her feet. What, she asked him, has that to do with the matter? Before venting some further insults on those present, she left the room. Of the Commons she was disdainful. She told the Spanish ambassador that she did not know what those ‘devils’ wanted.

She summoned a delegation of fifty-seven members of the Lords and Commons to Whitehall, and forbade the presence of the Speaker. It was only the queen who would talk. They presented her with a petition in which they expressed their wish that she marry ‘where it should please her, with whom it should please her, and as soon as it should please her’. She opened her harangue by accusing ‘unbridled persons in the Commons’ of contriving a ‘traitorous trick’. Then she accused the Lords of supporting them. ‘Whom have I oppressed?’ she asked them. ‘Whom have I enriched to other’s harm?’ But then she turned to the subject. ‘I have sent word that I will marry, and I will never break the word of a prince said in a public place, for my honour’s sake.’ A prince’s honour is of course a flexible commodity. There then followed what might be called an Elizabethan moment. ‘I am your anointed queen,’ she told them. ‘I will never be constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoats I were able to live in any place in Christendom.’

Cecil read an edited version of her speech to the Commons in their chamber, and he was greeted with silence. The members were not impressed, and almost at once further calls for a petition on the marriage were being heard. The queen demanded to see
the Speaker and commanded him to instruct parliament that ‘there should be no further talk of the matter’. When they remonstrated with her on the infringement of their ‘lawful liberties’ she wisely yielded. But it was in no sense a triumph. At the end of the session, in January 1567, Elizabeth rose from the throne and made her concluding speech. It was already dusk. ‘I have in this assembly’, she said, ‘found such dissimulation where I always professed plainness that I marvel thereat; yea, two faces under one hood, and the body rotten.’ She finished her peroration with ‘beware how you prove your prince’s patience as you have now done mine . . . My Lord Keeper you will do as I bid you.’

The lord keeper rose in the fading light. ‘The Queen’s Majesty doth dissolve this parliament. Let every man depart at his pleasure.’ The queen proceeded to the royal barge and returned to the palace. Parliament would not meet again for another four years. Cecil noted ‘the succession not answered, the marriage not followed, dangers ensuing, general disorientations’.

It may be noted, in parenthesis, that in this period the coach was introduced to England. John Taylor, the popular ‘water poet’, believed that it had been brought to England by the queen’s coachman, a Dutchman named William Booner. ‘A coach’, he wrote, ‘was a strange monster in those days, and the sight of it put both horse and foot in amazement. Some said it was a great crab-shell brought out of China; and some thought it one of the pagan temples in which the cannibals adored the devil. Soon an outcry was raised about the scarcity of leather, from the quantity used in coach building.’ So in the 1560s the monstrous carriage, as well as the queen’s marriage, was the talk of London.

Having alienated both his wife and the Scottish nobility, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, had every reason to leave Scotland; he spoke of escaping into England, although he would hardly have been welcomed at the court of Elizabeth. She would not even recognize him as king of Scotland, and he was deluded enough to believe that he had some claim upon the English throne. After the safe birth of her son Mary turned her face against him, believing him to be responsible for the murder of her Italian secretary. Mary neither ate nor slept with him and on one occasion, according to the English ambassador in Scotland, ‘used words that cannot for modesty nor with the honour of a queen be reported’.

At the beginning of 1567 Mary was reliably informed that Darnley was proposing to kidnap their son and rule as regent in his name; the queen herself was to be confined in a secure castle. It was important that all his movements and meetings should be watched. When he fell ill, perhaps from a recurrent bout of syphilis, she visited his sickroom and remained with him for the next two or three days. At the end of January she brought him to Edinburgh in a horse litter.

James, the fourth earl of Bothwell, now enters the plot. At the age of twenty-one he had become Lieutenant of the Border, and had served Mary’s mother during her regency of Scotland. He had
been one of the lords who had accompanied the newly widowed Mary on her journey from Paris; soon enough he had caught the young queen’s attention. He had already become one of her principal counsellors, and one of those whose antipathy to Darnley was as great as that of the queen.

He was part of a small group who now planned permanently to remove Darnley, and a bond or deed was drawn up between its members. It was later reproduced in Robert Pitcairn’s
Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland
(1833). The conspirators stated that ‘such a young fool and proud tyrant [as the king] should not bear rule of them – for diverse causes therefore they had all concluded that he should be put forth [dispatched] by one way or the other’; they pledged to be true to one another, and all would take on the guilt of murder. It is uncertain what the Scottish queen knew of this, even though her own half-brother was aware of the plot. At a later date she asserted that she had told them to do nothing ‘to touch her honour and conscience’. Yet even if she had refused her consent to these proposals, by her own confession she had listened to them without reacting violently to the putative murderers of her husband. She could have accused them of treason, but she remained silent.

As Mary and Darnley moved towards Edinburgh, Bothwell met them on the road. Their intended destination had been Craigmillar Castle, but now the earl directed them to new lodgings at the house of the provost of St Mary’s known as the ‘Kirk of Field’ or ‘Kirk o’ Field’. Darnley’s chambers had been properly furnished for a king in the west wing of the house, and it was here that Mary watched over her husband’s convalescence; she did not sleep in the house but in the evening retired to the more palatial surroundings of Holyrood. An apartment was in fact made ready for her after a few days, directly beneath that of her husband, and she took particular care to have the bed situated. ‘Move it yonder,’ she said to her attendant, ‘to the other side.’ She spent the nights of Wednesday 5 and Friday 7 February there. It was later rumoured that this was part of her design, so that people might suspect the target of the conspirators was herself.

At approximately ten o’clock on Sunday night two or three men brought some sacks of gunpowder into Mary’s chamber at
Kirk o’ Field. Mary herself was with her husband in the chamber above, and at this juncture remembered that she was supposed to attend a masque and dance at Holyrood. As she left the room she said, as if as an afterthought, ‘It was just this time last year that Rizzio was slain.’ Darnley turned to an attendant and asked, ‘Why did she speak of Davie’s slaughter?’

At two o’clock on the Monday morning a ‘crack’ was heard throughout Edinburgh. The old provost’s house of Kirk o’ Field was in ruins. Darnley had not perished in the explosion. His corpse and that of his page were found 40 yards away beneath a tree, on the other side of the town wall, with ‘no sign of fire on them’. Close by them was a chair, a rope and Darnley’s furred cloak. A dagger was also found, but neither victim had been stabbed.

The mystery of their last moments persists. They may have been smothered in their sleep; they may have been pursued and taken in the garden. Or they may have lowered themselves from the first-floor window, after discovering that the doors to their chamber were locked, only to be dispatched near the scene of the crime. Within hours of the explosion placards had been fixed to the Tolbooth in Edinburgh accusing Bothwell and his associates of the crime. Bothwell’s antipathy to Darnley was notorious. Two days later Mary issued a proclamation in which she offered £2,000 for information against her husband’s murderers. But she knew well enough that the name of Bothwell was on everyone’s lips. His portraits were posted on the gates and walls of the city with the legend ‘Here is the murderer of the king’.

On hearing the news of Darnley’s death, and of Bothwell’s involvement in it, Elizabeth sent an urgent letter to Mary. ‘Madame,’ she began, ‘my ears have been so deafened and my understanding so grieved and my heart so affrighted to hear the dreadful news of the abominable murder of your mad husband and my killed cousin that I scarcely have the wits to write about it . . .’ She professed to be more grieved for Mary than for her husband but she added that ‘I will not dissemble what most people are talking about; which is that you will look through your fingers at [dispense with] the revenging of this deed’. Mary, in other words, was already rumoured to be complicit or at least acquiescent in the
deed. The queen of England exhorted her to lay these reports to rest by taking action; she urged her ‘to touch even him whom you have nearest to you if the thing touches him’. Mary was so angered by this message that she refused to reply to it.