An Accidental Tragedy (54 page)

Perhaps reflecting her mood at the time, in February 1577 Mary drew up a draft of her last will and testament. Should she die in prison, which she now expected, she asked that her body should be taken to the cathedral of St Denis to be buried beside François II, her first husband, and that, provided he converted to Catholicism, James was to be heir to all her property and to her rights to the crown of England. If he did not convert, then Mary left everything to Philip of Spain to dispose of as he wished on the advice of the Pope. If James should predecease her, she left the throne of Scotland to the Earl of Lennox or Lord Claude Hamilton, either to be selected by the house of Lorraine on condition that the selected one then married into the house of Lorraine. Lady Arabella was to be created Countess of Lennox. History cannot but be grateful that this will was never put into effect, since the result could have been war between Spain and England, coupled with a renewed civil war in Scotland.

In June 1577 Leicester paid a visit to Buxton as a guest of Shrewsbury. He was presumably overweight and Elizabeth sent Shrewsbury a comic diet to be served to the earl. Two ounces of meat, washed down with the twentieth part of a pint of wine and as much of ‘St Anne’s sacred water as he listeth to drink’. On feast days his diet would be augmented by the shoulder of a wren for dinner and the leg at supper. Elizabeth could still play silly schoolgirl jokes. Mary, with her Valois antennae finely attuned to smell out a plot, if lacking judgment as to the plot’s chances of success, suspected that Leicester had come to Buxton to sound out the nobility as to the feasibility of his marriage to Elizabeth. Since Leicester had secretly married Lettice Knollys, the daughter of Mary’s former gaoler, Sir Francis Knollys, in 1575, this was unlikely. Mary herself may have been at Buxton at the same time since on 25 June Elizabeth thanked Shrewsbury for looking after Leicester so well and, only two days later, Walsingham noted that Tutbury – his favoured prison – was unsuitable and Mary should be returned to Sheffield.

Burghley himself came to Buxton with as much speed as his ‘old creased body’ would allow him, and it is tempting to speculate that during all this coming and going Mary may have renewed her acquaintanceship with Burghley and may finally have met her quondam suitor Leicester. Either circumstance would have needed the connivance of Shrewsbury, and both men were more powerful than the earl. But both men were also well aware that the wrath of Elizabeth would be terrible in the extreme should they be discovered. Although, like all Elizabethan politicians, both men controlled a network of spies, they also knew that many of these spies were double agents, and that arching over all was the great spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, one of whose most sinister agents, Sir Richard Topcliffe, was in Buxton at this time.

Topcliffe was a psychopathic anti-Catholic frequently employed by Walsingham to administer the rack in the Tower, a task he greatly enjoyed. Should the torture of the rack fail to produce results, prisoners would then be taken to Topcliffe’s own house – the windows of which were painted black – for more elaborate tortures. He enjoyed the total confidence of Walsingham and claimed – probably unjustifiably – to have seen Elizabeth ‘naked above the knee’. He wrote to Shrewsbury on 30 August 1577 about ‘Popish beasts’ at Buxton – ‘One Dyrham, as I remember, at the bath or lurking in those parts after the ladies’ – and he asked Shrewsbury to arrest Dyrham. With the close presence of such a man under the patronage of Walsingham, even Burghley would be cautious. Inevitably there were rumours of rescues, and Burghley consoled himself that near Chatsworth there was ‘no town or resort where ambushes may lie’.

The smaller pieces on the political chessboard started to move again, with indirect results for Mary. A new arrival in Scotland from the troublesome Stuart family arrived in 1579 in the handsome form of the 37-year-old Esmé Stewart, Seigneur d’Aubigny. He had been sent by the Duc de Guise to ingratiate himself with James and to clip the wings of Morton. In this he was partially successful, the fifteen-year-old James creating him
Duke of Lennox in 1581. Thanks in some part to Esmé’s influence, Morton was beheaded in June 1581, which was followed by an official abjuration of Catholicism. Mary had once been the most powerful card in the Guise hand, but now she took carefully guarded walks in the gardens at Chatsworth while she was informed at third or fourth hand of their newest machinations.

Finally, in London, the Duc d’Alençon arrived, albeit in secret. He had previously been considered as a suitor for Elizabeth when he had held the title of Duc d’Anjou. As the youngest of Mary’s brothers-in-law, he was over twenty years younger than Elizabeth, heavily pockmarked and below average height. He was, however, more than prepared to play marriage games and the couple, being careful not to appear together in public, exchanged intimate love tokens through Jean de Simier, Alençon’s ambassador. Elizabeth, hugely flattered by the elaborate attentions of a much younger man, called Alençon her ‘frog’ while Simier was her ‘monkey’. Alençon had shown distinct Huguenot leanings in France – to the horror of Catherine de Medici – and had befriended Condé.

For Mary the possibility of the Alençon marriage was terrifying for several reasons. Firstly, the marriage threatened that, even allowing for what was regarded as Elizabeth’s advanced age, it might produce an heir and all Mary’s dynastic dreams for James and herself would crash irrevocably to the ground. Secondly, Mary’s only realistic source of foreign aid would then be from Spain where, so far, Philip had shown extreme caution in offering anything more than moral support. The Pope would fulminate, but, having already excommunicated Elizabeth, there was nothing more he could do. Mary let some of her feelings be known in conversation, and Elizabeth inevitably heard that Mary Stewart was criticising her marriage plans. When Mary heard that she had fuelled Elizabeth’s fury, she wrote to de Mauvissière, the French ambassador, denying everything: ‘Whosoever has told this to the Queen of England, my good sister, has wickedly and villainously lied . . . ask Shrewsbury and his wife in what terms I spoke of the Duke’. Perhaps with more honesty Mary wrote to
the Archbishop of Glasgow, hoping that the marriage might improve the lot of the English Catholics. Elizabeth and Alençon’s marriage dalliance continued with the young man trying to escape from the political clutches of his family and the older woman acting out the teenage romance she had never been allowed until, with finance from Elizabeth, Alençon undertook a campaign in the Netherlands where, on 10 June 1584, he died after an attack of fever. It was now inevitable that Elizabeth would die childless.

Mary’s hope for better treatment for English Catholics had suffered a heavy blow in June 1580, when the first Jesuit missionaries had begun to arrive from the seminaries in Rome and Douai. The hope in Rome was that they could unify and strengthen Catholic support for Mary’s seizure of the throne and the deposition, bloody or otherwise, of Elizabeth. The effect was exactly the opposite, since, almost without exception, they fell into the merciless hands of Walsingham and Topcliffe, to end their days in the cruellest of deaths, portrayed as traitors intent on delivering England into the hands of Spain to rekindle the fires of Mary Tudor. Also, the intensity of belief displayed by these agents at their deaths helped to strengthen the siege mentality in the country. And Burghley found it easy to identify the principal enemy within the walls as Mary Stewart.

Mary had now been the unwelcome guest of Shrewsbury for eleven years and his financial complaints were becoming more and more extreme. The consumption of wine, spices and fuel were costing him £1,000 annually, on top of which ‘The loss of plate, the buying of pewter and all manner of household stuff which by them is exceedingly spoiled and wilfully wasted, standeth in me one thousand pounds by the year.’ In August 1580 he asked if he had in some way offended Elizabeth and if her refusal to pay him was some kind of punishment, to which he got a sharp reply reminding him of his duty. Although he had reduced Mary’s expenses almost to a starvation level, Shrewsbury was quietly warned by Leicester that rumours of his overromantic liaisons with Mary were circulating.

James angered Elizabeth by rebuffing an embassy at Berwick – most probably an administrative error of which he knew nothing – and the incident was used by Elizabeth, in association with Robert Beale, the secretary for the ‘Northern Parts’ and clerk to the Privy Council, a bitter anti-papist, to impose more restrictions on Mary. She would be allowed to write to James only on the condition that she made an open demonstration that ‘she would have no dealings with papists, rebels, fugitives, Jesuits or others which might go about to trouble that estate of the policy and religion now established, or would seek alteration of the same’. She was to cease all dealings with foreign princes and to persuade James that Elizabeth was his best friend, ‘being herself diseased and not like to continue long’. This demand was too crude and was quietly dropped.

What was not dropped was a proposed association whereby Mary and James would rule Scotland jointly, Mary would renounce all her claims to the English throne, would join a league against France, renounce the Papal Bull of excommunication, give amnesties in England and Scotland for all misdeeds, and even consent to remain in England as a sort of hostage, ‘in some honourable sort’. In other words, under twenty-eight different clauses, Mary would have to agree to a total rejection of everything she had claimed in exchange for a limited freedom. However, Mary had been secretly advised to agree to anything at all if it bought her freedom, and, in any case, it had been suggested to her in confidence by the Spanish ambassador that she remain in England. Should Philip, in alliance with the Duc de Guise, manage to launch the ‘Enterprise’ – an invasion of England – then Mary was already in place to stand at the head of the army. Unfortunately, Elizabeth realised that she could rely on James’s loyalty without granting his mother anything at all and the matter was not pursued.

The miasma of intrigue continued to surround Mary and she took a captive’s delight in watching the machinations from her prison. A Spanish agent, disguised as a dentist, was arrested in May 1582. Mary gave detailed instructions on how to use secret
writing methods to her own agents. Plots to assassinate Elizabeth were still formed by English Catholics – a gentleman of Warwickshire announced to his friends that he was going to London to shoot Elizabeth, only to be met on arrival and escorted to the Tower – and in November of 1583 Francis Throckmorton, another Catholic member of the ambassador’s troublesome family, was arrested. He possessed lists of Catholic conspirators as well as details of possible landing places for an invading army. Clearly he was a man of exceptional courage: not until after he had suffered seventy-two hours on the rack did he confess and ‘disclose the secrets of she who was the dearest thing to me in the world’. In fact, since Mary knew nothing of his plot, the ‘secrets’ were invented under torture.

William of Orange, the leading Protestant in Europe after Elizabeth, was assassinated in June 1584 and anti-Catholic passions reached boiling point. The Privy Council drew up a Bond of Association, whereby in the event of an attempt, or even a planned or inferred attempt, on Elizabeth’s life, anyone even remotely associated with the plot was to be executed. Voicing disloyalty, however weakly expressed, was now treason. The Bond simply formalised the view that England was under permanent threat from Catholicism, and the embodiment of that threat was Mary Stewart. On 5 January 1585, Mary, loyally if hypocritically, made a public declaration of her personal support of the Bond. Elsewhere, support for the Bond was overwhelming, but Elizabeth supervised a redrafting to require that there must at least be some proof of a third party’s involvement. Parliament passed the Bond into law as the Act of Association.

What was now being spoken of was the revived rumour of a romantic intrigue between Mary and Shrewsbury, to the extent of Mary having borne his child. This ludicrous rumour was probably started by Bess of Hardwick, who was in a bitter dispute over property with her husband, who was now living apart from his formidable countess. Mary was furious and wrote at once to Elizabeth, asking, inevitably, for an interview in which she would explain everything. Mary was quite capable of defending herself
and, when her request for an interview was, equally inevitably, refused, she wrote a letter to Elizabeth giving an account of Bess’s privately expressed opinions of her queen. Bess had told Mary that Elizabeth was Leicester’s lover, had enjoyed troilism with Sir Christopher Hatton and another, and was the lover of Simier, to whom she gave state secrets as pillow talk; Mary also told Elizabeth how Bess had advised her to encourage the young James to try to feed Elizabeth’s nymphomaniac passions. The letter was never sent, but Bess knew that it existed and would only sharpen Elizabeth’s already bitter hatred for her. Thus Mary had let Bess know that she had her finger on the trigger of an explosive charge. The situation was a very uneasy stalemate. Elizabeth had sense enough to realise that Mary’s position as a pawn in the vicious chess game of hatred between Shrewsbury and Bess was untenable, and on 1 April 1584 draft orders were prepared to release Shrewsbury from his charge as gaoler. Mary realised that she was unlikely to be released into greater freedom – there had been another attempt to free her in the previous year – and in July she said farewell to Buxton and its healing waters.

In early September 1584, Mary travelled to Wingfield, and by the middle of the month Shrewsbury was relieved of his charge by the Privy Council. Mary passed into the care of Sir Ralph Sadler, whose life had touched hers at so many points. He had forty-three men with him as guards and he set about cleansing Shrewsbury’s household of possible Marian spies. What Mary did not know was that her final destination was not to be Wingfield, but the hated Tutbury. There, 150 men would guard her, forty or fifty of whom were to be mounted soldiers. Sadler drew up an inventory and described her requirements. She had four coach horses and her gentlemen had six. Her household numbered forty-seven: ‘five gentlemen, fourteen servitors, three cooks, four boys, three gentlemen’s men, six gentlewomen, two wives, ten wenches and children’. She had no furniture, hangings, tableware or napery of her own and had used Shrewsbury’s, which was now worn out. She was served sixteen dishes at both
courses, more or less. Beer could be brought from Burton ‘three miles off’ and she and her household drank an astonishing 10 tuns of wine, or 2,500 gallons, annually. Her bedchamber was twenty-seven feet long with a private chamber within and her dining chamber was thirty-six feet long with a private cabinet and chimney. ‘Thus in my opinion, she shall be very well lodged and accommodated in all things’, Sadler concluded. Sir Amyas Paulet was to be Mary’s gaoler once Sadler had delivered her, and on 1 January 1585 he did just that.