An Accidental Tragedy (50 page)

Two days later Rolleston gave the details of the plot to Thomas Stanley, who ‘not so much as read the letter, but presently rent in pieces both letter and cipher saying that we are all undone’. The conspirators went into hiding before fleeing unsuccessfully.
Rolleston fled to the Isle of Man on 2 March 1571 then by way of Dumbarton to London on 27 May, while Hall was taken at Dumbarton on 2 April 1571. The other plotters were finally all arrested, and on 15 July, Stanley denied everything but begged the queen’s pardon for not taking action against Hall. On 20 July, Francis Rolleston admitted that he had delivered ciphers, had met Beaton and knew some details, but stated that he had never met the Bishop of Ross and ‘craved pardon, pleading his age, infirmity and poverty; and also his inability to stand the rigour of his imprisonment’. Hall himself revealed the disorganised state of the plot: ‘he never heard of any determinate order or manner of the Queen of Scots delivery; howbeit it was thought that she might be taken away, either as she was shooting, or otherwise riding abroad to take the air’. Beaton, ‘as from the queen his mistress’, claimed that he begged them to ‘desist . . . and willed the matter off’. Stanley ‘was not the first beginner or deviser for the delivery of the Scottish Queen, nor ever had any such intent’. They were all liable to meet a traitor’s death and Hall was executed, but, probably because of their complete incompetence, the others were given light sentences, with Thomas Gerard spending only two years in the Tower.

On 17 July 1570 Lennox was finally confirmed as the new regent of Scotland. He was ‘burdened with the weighty and dangerous charge of regiment’. Lethington gave Mary a summary of affairs in Scotland, where her supporters were in a state of confusion. Mary had promised Elizabeth that they would not form an armed opposition, yet the opposing parties were, rightly, afraid to meet with each other unarmed. Lethington and Argyll were ‘in great pain how to behave [them]selves’. Kirkcaldy of Grange still held Edinburgh Castle, with the bulk of Mary’s jewels, such ‘gold and silver work’ and her gowns and furniture kept safely in store. Lethington had sent Lord Seton with Thomas Maitland, Lethington’s brother, to Alva in the Netherlands and then onwards to France. He hoped for help to retake Dumbarton, which had been taken by Hunsdon on Elizabeth’s behalf.

Norfolk had abjured all contact with Mary and had been released from the Tower, where plague had broken out, to go into house arrest in August 1570. Lethington, in a letter to John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, thought this the best news he could have hoped for, apart from Mary’s restitution or ‘that the Queen of England had been gone ad patres’. He also referred to the bishop having written to him about Mary’s possible escape – there had been plans to take her to the ‘West Seas’ but with no final destination in mind – and Norfolk prayed that he would be wary: ‘I fear “deadly” the craft of her enemies, who will not stick to make offers to convoy her away, and then, being privy to it, to trap her into a snare, and so to execute against her person their wicked intention.’ He was quite right to be cautious.

Elizabeth made another attempt to solve the problem of Mary’s position by negotiation. In October Cecil and Sir Walter Mildmay travelled to Chatsworth with a draft Treaty of Accommodation. It contained no fresh concessions by Elizabeth but proposed that Scotland be returned to the state of affairs on the eve of the Battle of Carberry on 15 June 1567. Inevitably Mary was asked to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh and to send James to England for his education. Needless to say, although the discussions continued at Chatsworth and then in London with commissioners from both sides attending well into 1571, they reached no conclusion. They did, however, give the appearance that Elizabeth was willing to negotiate peacefully, and she could claim that she was having her friendly overtures rebuffed by her ungrateful cousin. However, Cecil did meet his archenemy Mary face to face and found that she was of ‘clement and gentle nature, and was disposed to be governed by those in whom she reposed her trust’. Leslie, reporting to Norfolk, claimed that Cecil would ‘travaile’ to arrange a meeting of the two queens. Cecil seemed to favour the Norfolk marriage but reported that Elizabeth herself felt that, if married, the couple would ‘wax over great’.

By 26 October Cecil and Mildmay were back in Windsor thanking Shrewsbury, on Elizabeth’s behalf, for his hospitality, and advising him not to let Mary ride further than a mile or two
from his house ‘except it be on the moors’ – in other words, safe from outside contact.

Outdoor exercise was still vital to Mary, and on 27 November she wrote ‘of truth we are not in great health . . . there is one rheum that troubles our head greatly with an extreme pain and descends in the stomach so that it makes us lately to lack appetite of eating’. Shrewsbury did allow Mary as much exercise and fresh air as he felt to be prudent, and she wrote again that when ‘we walked forth a little on horse back, and so long as we was abroad felt ourselves in a very good state, but that since then [we] find our sickness no thing slaked [eased]’. Shrewsbury moved the household to Sheffield Castle and the Bishop of Ross arrived there on 11 December with two doctors. Mary was still gravely ill, vomiting frequently and severely lacking in appetite; the pain in her left side was under her ‘short ribs, and she has had no proper sleep for 10 or 12 days, giving rise to fits of hysteria’. The doctors treated her with medicines which she promptly regurgitated and the bishop wrote to Cecil and Elizabeth, convinced that her illnesses were brought on by her continued imprisonment. Since these complaints had troubled Mary since late childhood, it may be a reduced amount of exercise had exacerbated the symptoms. They would remain with her for the rest of her life.

Shrewsbury continued his surveillance of Mary, receiving information from Hunsdon that there would be a boy coming from Edinburgh, identifiable by a cut on his left cheek, with secret letters sewn into the seams of his coat. He was promptly arrested and the letters sent to Cecil. The commissioners from both sides continued to advance the well-tried arguments from past negotiations to Mary with no success. Mary sent long letters to Elizabeth begging for a face-to-face meeting, but they produced no change of attitude.

At the start of 1571, on 25 February, Elizabeth raised her faithful Sir William Cecil to the peerage as Baron Burghley. Among his many activities, reaching back into the previous reign of Mary Tudor, had been the arranging of financial affairs not only for the crown, but also for various noblemen. One of the
many foreign financiers in London he had used in these affairs was one Roberto Ridolfi, a Florentine whose brother also ran a bank in Rome. Burghley also used Ridolfi as a banker on his own behalf and, like all foreigners in Britain, he was closely watched, his dealings with Norfolk being noted in particular.

In early March Shrewsbury found letters under a stone and sent them onwards to Burghley, who managed to decipher them. They were, firstly, from Mary to Alva, endorsing her support for Ridolfi, and, secondly, from Mary to Grange and Lethington, who were holding Edinburgh Castle for the queen, telling them to expect money to be sent to them soon. In the same month Mary had given a long letter, written in Italian, to Ridolfi with information for the Pope, the Duke of Alva and the King of Spain. In the letter she complained bitterly of her treatment by Elizabeth, of the persecution of Catholics in England and Scotland, and of the plots on her life. The Duke of Norfolk was named as the head of a movement to restore the Catholic faith to England and Ridolfi was instructed to assure the Pope of Norfolk’s devotion to Rome. Mary went on to assure Ridolfi that she had severed all links with France and that, when she was established as Queen of England, she would form an alliance between England and the Netherlands, and that she wished King James to marry a Spanish infanta. Furthermore, she declared that she would personally lead an army to take Dumbarton and Edinburgh castles and that she had been raped by Bothwell and her marriage had taken place under duress.

This hugely incriminating letter was almost certainly not intercepted by Burghley, since the original now resides in the Secret Archives of the Vatican with a similar letter from Norfolk, written at the same time. In his letter, Norfolk asked Ridolfi to assure the Pope and the King of Spain of his devotion to the Catholic faith and of the number of noblemen in a similar position to his own who were prevented from making a public declaration of their faith. He asked for the approbation of Philip II for his marriage to Mary. Then he issued a shopping list for his military needs, consisting of 20,000 infantry and 3,000
cavalry under an experienced commander, 6,000 arquebusiers, then, curiously, only 4,000 arquebuses, 2,000 breastplates, 25 pieces of light artillery, and, of course, money. Of these forces, 2,000 men were to be sent to Ireland and 2,000 to Scotland, with the main force landing either at Harwich or at Portsmouth; Philip was to bear the total expense of the venture. This enterprise would prevent the marriage of Elizabeth to the French Duc d’Anjou – Norfolk believed that this marriage was being negotiated by French Protestants! – and furthermore it would reestablish Catholicism and place Mary on the thrones of Scotland and England. All of this was to be carried out with great urgency.

Certainly Norfolk’s letter was treasonable and Mary’s would have made her the implacable enemy of Elizabeth. In spite of her protestations that she had broken off correspondence with France, by the end of the same month she was writing to Fénélon vowing her complete confidence in French support. It was clear, however, that if Elizabeth did marry the Duc d’Anjou – a very unlikely circumstance – then all of Mary’s support in France would be gone. This support had already been weakened by the Treaty of Blois in April 1571, which cemented an Anglo-French defensive agreement; both sides were being prudently cautious of the manoeuvres of Philip and Alva in the Netherlands.

Ridolfi carried both letters to their addressees, and nothing untoward was detected until March 1571 when Thomas Crawford of Jordanhill, one of the King’s Party, seized Dumbarton Castle – under control of the queen’s man, John, Lord Fleming – in a midnight raid. Not only did he capture the castle, he also captured documents belonging to Claude Hamilton of the Queen’s Party giving details of the state of negotiations with Alva. Burghley immediately put the channel ports on full alert and, later that month, one Charles Bailly was arrested at Dover as he entered England from the Netherlands.

Charles Bailly, a 29-year old Fleming who had been a courier for John Leslie, Bishop of Ross for seven years, was carrying a copy of
A Defence of Queen Mary’s Honour
. This book had been printed at Liege in 1571 giving Morgan Philips as the author,
although it was, in fact, a version of the bishop’s original pamphlet rewritten to seem more acceptable to Elizabeth. He was also carrying letters from Ridolfi for Norfolk, the Spanish ambassador and the bishop himself. Bailly was swiftly removed to the Marshalsea prison where, astoundingly, he managed to communicate with the outside world. Under his window was the roof of the house of some poor person with a hole in it ‘wherein’, he reported, ‘I may easily thrust my hand’. Bailly told his informant that he would be at his window at seven o’clock in the morning, noon, three o’clock and between seven and eight daily. Bailly also allowed himself to be befriended by William Herle, a fellow prisoner, unaware that Herle was a double agent working for Burghley. Herle reported that Bailly was the Scottish Queen’s man, a servant of Leslie from whom ‘great things might be drawn’, a man ‘given to the cup and easily read’.

Almost as a diversion to these incriminating actions, on 11 May 1571 Shrewsbury wrote to Burghley asking for the wardship of young Sir Anthony Babington, since his father, a near neighbour of Shrewsbury’s, had just died. The request was granted and Babington met Mary, probably falling in teenage love with her. Fifteen years later this love would cause Sir Anthony to be disembowelled.

Burghley had, by now, a bulky file giving details of various plans for Mary’s escape, some sent to him from the Earl of Mar, who had become Regent of Scotland after the death of Lennox in August 1571, and some from the ever-nervous Shrewsbury. In all probability Mary knew nothing of them but merely used what diplomatic sources she could summon to promise anything to anyone who might help. In the Marshalsea, Bailly was interrogated by Burghley on 26 April and frightened in the extreme by threats of ear-lopping. Bailly was visited by his employer, the Bishop of Ross, who asked for the cipher and told him not to be afraid and that Burghley was ‘only words’. After an unproductive interrogation at five in the morning on 29 April, Bailly was given into the care of William Hampton, Lieutenant of the Tower, to whom he revealed that he had met Westmoreland, the Countess of
Northumberland and Dacres in Mechlin – near present-day Maastricht – and that they had given him the letters. He claimed that he had no idea of their content and had never heard of Ridolfi. He said to his torturer, ‘Ils me mettent sur la gehenne.’ (Gehenna was a place of human sacrifice dedicated to Moloch and also called the Valley of Slaughter.) In other words, he was to be racked to reveal the ciphers of his letters.

The rack was an instrument of torture where the victim was laid on his back – ‘his’ since only one woman was ever racked. His ankles were then strapped to a stationary bar while his wrists were strapped above his head to a large roller. When the roller was turned his limbs would be stretched to the point where his joints would dislocate – usually the shoulders, but wrists, elbows and hips could also suffer. The pain was extreme, and the instrument had the advantage, for the torturer, that, unlike a blow or burn, the agony could be constantly maintained. The pain could be prolonged, without risk of death, and the victim could have the dislocations brutally reduced and be ‘rested’ before continued sessions.

Bailly survived the initial session on the rack but was tricked by another of Burghley’s double agents, a man called Story, into revealing the ciphers: the person ‘40’ was Mary, and ‘30’ was the Spanish ambassador. With this information Burghley slackened his grip on Bailly, and the bishop visited him again and told him not to worry. In fact, Bailly was freed in 1573 and died near Brussels at the ripe old age of eighty-five.