Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (53 page)

What was to be done with her? Elizabeth had at first considered inviting her to the English court, but was quickly persuaded otherwise. It would afford her too much prominence, and her presence at Whitehall or Greenwich would greatly boost her claim to the throne. Already the northern Catholic lords were paying court to her, and it seemed likely that a Catholic party would congregate around her. The Scottish lords themselves would not look favourably on the support that Elizabeth would give her; it might drive them in the direction of France, with the infant king as the prize. Mary herself must not be allowed to travel to France, where she could provoke infinite troubles.

So the Scottish queen continued in what might be described as honourable captivity. From Carlisle she was transferred to Bolton Castle in North Yorkshire. She had said defiantly that she would have to be carried there but, after many scenes of passion and demonstration, she eventually consented to her removal. Thereupon it was decreed that an inquiry should be established
into the events surrounding the murder of Darnley. Elizabeth herself determined to be the ultimate judge and mediator in the matter. If Mary was proven to be innocent, she should in theory be instantly restored to her throne. If she were found to be guilty, it would be impossible for Elizabeth to receive her. ‘Oh Madam!’ Elizabeth wrote, ‘there is not a creature living who more longs to hear your justification than myself; not one who would lend more willing ear to any answer which will clear your honour.’ She added an important proviso, however. ‘But I cannot sacrifice my own reputation to your account.’ Elizabeth sent her councillors to York, where they were instructed to arrange a settlement between Mary, Elizabeth and King James’s supporters that would precede Mary’s return. Elizabeth could then be seen as the benign healer of Scotland’s ill. It did not quite go to plan.

The queen, meanwhile, went on a progress in the summer of the year. A ‘progress’ was a long peregrination through the more accessible counties of England, in the course of which the queen would graciously consent to accept the hospitality of the greater nobles whose large houses lay along her route. For them, it was an expensive business; for her, it was an opportunity to live more cheaply while at the same time showing herself to selected groups of people. It was a complex and cumbersome undertaking, the queen’s belongings alone requiring 400 wagons. She was also accompanied by approximately 500 courtiers and servants.

Sometimes she travelled in the newly fashionable royal coach, although two years before she had been a little shaken and bruised when it was driven too fast. But more often she was carried in an open litter or rode on horseback, her route lined with her welcoming subjects calling out ‘God save your grace!’ while she replied with ‘God save my people!’ Sometimes she called a halt to the process so that a suitor might present a petition or even speak to her. ‘Stay thy cart,’ Serjeant Bendlowes of Huntingdonshire called out to her coachman, ‘stay thy cart, that I may speak to the queen!’ Elizabeth laughed and listened to what he had to say; then she offered him her hand to kiss.

And so it went on. The Spanish ambassador reported that, on
this summer progress, ‘she was received everywhere with great acclamations and signs of joy’. She pointed out to him the love and affection in which she was held by her subjects while her neighbours (naming no names) ‘are in such trouble’. If she was in danger of assassination she showed no signs of apprehension; she even took up food and drink without waiting for the precaution of a taster in case of poison.

The towns along her route were cleansed and freshly painted, with the vagabonds and other unsightly persons removed from sight. It was customary to present her with a silver cup, preferably filled with coin, that she gladly accepted. Her remarks were recorded for the sake of posterity. ‘Come hither, little recorder,’ she said to the recorder of Warwick, ‘it was told me that you would be afraid to look upon me or to speak boldly; but you were not so afraid of me as I was of you.’ A schoolmaster of Norwich seemed nervous before addressing her in Latin. ‘Be not afraid,’ she said. At the conclusion of his speech she told him that ‘it is the best that ever I heard, you shall have my hand’. As she left Norwich she declared that ‘I shall never forget Norwich’ and, as she rode away, she called out ‘Farewell, Norwich!’

An orator at Cambridge was enumerating her virtues, at which she modestly shook her head, bit her lip, and expressed a brief disclaimer. Then he began to praise virginity. ‘God’s blessing of thine heart,’ she called out, ‘there continue.’ During her reign of forty-four years she organized more than twenty such ritual journeys and when, at the age of sixty-seven, she embarked on yet another some of the more elderly courtiers were heard to grumble, at which she commanded ‘the old stay behind and the young and able to go with me’. Yet she never ventured too far, confining her perambulations largely to what became known in the nineteenth century as the home counties; she never travelled to the north or to the south-west.

The inquiry into Mary’s behaviour opened at York in the beginning of October 1568. Elizabeth had sent Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk, to be the principal English commissioner; since he was suspected of having Catholic sympathies, it was believed
that he had been dispatched in order to assist Mary’s cause. Yet she had found more than an ally in the duke of Norfolk; she had found a possible husband. Norfolk, three times a widower at the early age of thirty-two, was now available for marriage once more; as the foremost nobleman in England he was a most suitable match. If the queen of Scots were to marry him her succession to the English throne would become easy and almost inevitable. It seems likely that Norfolk himself, together with a number of his allies, had contemplated this arrangement even before his journey to York; it can safely be said, however, that Elizabeth herself was quite unaware of any such plan.

The regent of Scotland and Mary’s half-brother, the earl of Moray, threw the proceedings into disorder by bringing with him eight letters and twelve ‘adulterous’ sonnets allegedly written by Mary to Bothwell; they had been discovered in the possession of one of Bothwell’s servants after the decisive battle of Carberry Hill. They became known as the ‘casket letters’ and did more to damage Mary’s reputation than even the killing of Darnley. ‘I do here a work that I hate much,’ she had written to Bothwell, ‘but I had begun it this morning . . . You make me dissemble so much that I am afraid thereof with horror, and you make me almost to play the part of a traitor . . . Think also if you will not find some invention more secret by physick, for he is to take physick at Craigmillar and the baths also.’ The inference must be that she was meditating with her lover the means of killing her husband.

The authenticity of the letters has been a cause of controversy ever since. The originals have long since disappeared, perhaps destroyed, and the material can only be read in translation or transcription; some of the transcripts have Cecil’s annotations in the margin, testifying to the care with which he pored over them. The general assumption must be that genuine passages have been interpolated with fabricated words and phrases, no doubt planted by Moray to incriminate his half-sister, but no certainty in the matter is possible. It can only be said that they achieved their purpose at the time.

The duke of Norfolk confessed himself horrified by their content. He wrote to Elizabeth that the letters contained ‘foul matter and abominable, to be either thought of or to be written by
a prince’. Yet his disgust did not alter his intention of marrying the lady. The complication of the case was such that the tribunal was moved from York to Westminster, where, towards the end of the year, the commissioners entered what one observer called ‘the bowels of the odious accusation’. The letters were produced in court and read in the privy council. Mary was herself defiant, stating that ‘the charges against her were false because she, on the word of a princess, did say that they were false’.

There followed days and weeks of meetings and conferences between the various interested parties, rendered even more uncertain by the hesitancy and vacillation of Elizabeth. She had promised to support Mary in her distress but had in fact started proceedings that placed the Scottish queen in an undesirable light. Mary still protested her innocence but there was no one at court who believed her; Mary herself refused to discuss the letters, except in an audience with the English queen. Yet Elizabeth could not receive Mary while she was under suspicion of murder. It was a tangled web.

Elizabeth did not wish to condone the behaviour of the earl of Moray in overthrowing his lawful sovereign, but it was he who could bring peace and stability to Scotland. So she informed the regent that he could depart with his delegation ‘in the same estate in which they were before their coming into the realm’. Nothing had been resolved. These affairs of state were in any case too sensitive to bear much further examination. Elizabeth demanded absolute secrecy in the matters discussed. The whole imbroglio had ended inconsequentially, yet had still managed severely to damage the reputation of the queen of Scots. Mary herself was soon removed to Tutbury Castle, in Staffordshire, where she endured conditions of genteel confinement; her imprisonment lasted for another eighteen years.

Cecil was reduced to despair by Elizabeth’s hesitation and indecision. He wrote in a private memorandum that ‘her majesty shall never be able to raise her decayed credit, nor pluck up the hearts of her good subjects, nor prevent and escape the perils that are intended towards her, unless she do utterly give over the government of her most weighty affairs unto the most faithful councillors . . .’ It was the central dilemma of her reign, with the
strength and solitariness of one woman pitched against a phalanx of men.

The movements of the larger world went largely unremarked and unreported in the accounts of the struggles and rivalries at court. In the reign of Elizabeth the commerce of England was greatly increased with spices and perfumes from India, ermine and steel from Russia. England sent woollen cloths and calf-skins to Turkey, and in return purchased silks, camblets, rhubarb, oil, cotton, carpets, galls and spices. From the New World came gold and silver. They were part of the great exfoliation of life that slowly covered the globe, as the power of European finance and trade pushed its way forward. This was the age of the great commercial companies of merchants that planned their ventures from Muscovy and Persia to Cathay. By the end of the queen’s reign English traders had reached the Gulf of Guinea and the Indian Ocean. One of the first travellers upon that ocean, Thomas Stevens, remarked that ‘there waited on our ship fishes as long as a man, which they call Tuberones. They come to eat such things as from the ship fall into the sea, not refusing men themselves if they light upon them.’ In February 1583 Elizabeth wrote letters to the kings of Cambaia (now Gujarat) and of China, asking leave for her representatives to trade. As a result of all these activities London was fast overtaking Antwerp as the European capital of trade and finance. When the shah of Persia asked a merchant, Arthur Edwards, the name of the place from which he had come the answer puzzled him. ‘England,’ the man said. No one had ever heard of that land. Edwards then ventured on ‘Inghlittera’. ‘Ah,’ one courtier said, ‘Londro.’ So London was better known than the nation.

The Turkey merchants brought their wares from the Levant while the mariners of England sailed down the western coast of Africa and the eastern coastline of the New World. In the 1560s Sir John Hawkins made three successful voyages to the African continent, where he opened the unhappy trade in slaves, and crossed the Atlantic to Hispaniola and the Spanish colonies in America. At the beginning of the next decade Sir Francis Drake
made three journeys to the West Indies. On his last expedition, from a summit of a mountain on the Isthmus of Darien, he caught sight of the great Pacific. So the map of the world was slowly being unrolled.

A Company of the Mines Royal was created in 1568 in order to promote the mining and distribution of copper, and in the same decade the industries for window and crystal glass were successfully established. England was growing more luxurious, at least for those with full purses. Some lamented ‘the over quantity of unnecessary wares brought into the port of London’ and Cecil himself complained about ‘the excess of silks’ as well as ‘the excess of wine and spices’.

In this context we may view the miracles of Tudor architecture, many of which survive still. It is marked by wreathed chimneys and oak-panelled rooms, by mullioned bay-windows and vertiginous gable roofs. The ornamental plaster ceiling also became characteristic. The size and complexity of the windows prompted a comment upon one great Elizabethan house, ‘Hardwick House, more glass than wall’. Eltham Palace and Hampton Court furnish evidence for the Tudor halls with open timbered roofs at a great height. The private chambers of the richer sort were furnished with tapestries, hangings and curtains; high stools, covered chairs, cabinets, chests and cupboards were everywhere apparent. Cushions could be found in most rooms.

The appetite for luxuries materially increased over the course of Elizabeth’s reign; sugar and pearls came from the New World, while lemons and pomegranates and scented soap came from the Old. In previous times no flesh had ever been eaten on fish days; now the people of London scorned fish as a relic of papistry. William Camden noted that ‘our apish nation’ had grown so rich that its citizens engaged in a ‘riot of banqueting’ and ‘bravery in building’. Even the ploughman, according to Thomas Lodge, ‘must nowadays have his doublet of the fashion with wide cuts, his garters of fine silk of Granada’. Fine lace became a new ‘craze’ among both sexes, with its application to cuffs and ruffs, aprons and handkerchiefs. The style of male and female costume, at least in London, was as changeable as the wind. One woodcut shows a semi-naked Englishman with a pair of tailors’ shears in his
hand, saying ‘I will wear I cannot tell what’. Samuel Rowlands, the sixteenth-century pamphleteer, made out an inventory of