An Accidental Tragedy (55 page)

Shrewsbury, separated from Bess, lived on until 1590, when he died aged sixty-two, and the formidable Bess outlived him until 1608, when she died aged ninety. Bess and Mary were chalk and cheese, Bess using violent frontal attacks which were countered by guile and subtlety from Mary, and her bounding ambition and greed were contrasted by Mary’s passivity and acceptance. Their embroidery sessions were no more than convenient pastimes for Bess, and if Mary had stood in the way of Bess’s advancement she would have been crushed without another thought. Shrewsbury disliked Mary as a Catholic and a threat to his monarch, but he had been given a duty to perform and he performed it with as much courtesy as was possible. He was more at home with horses and dogs than with women, and he was heartily glad to be quit of Mary in 1585.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

To trap her in a snare

The terms under which Mary was now confined were much more severe than under the benign rule of Shrewsbury, and Sir Amyas Paulet was a total contrast to George Talbot. Coming from West Country squirearchy rather than high aristocracy, Paulet had no reverence for Mary’s rank and rigorously carried out his instructions from Elizabeth to the letter. He had been appointed Lieutenant of Jersey in 1559 when he was twenty-three years old – his father was hereditary captain of the island – and seventeen years later had been knighted and sent to France as ambassador. He married Catherine Harvey, the daughter of a Devonshire landowner, and the couple had six children, five of whom survived them. Paulet’s was not a glittering career; rather it was one of an unimaginative plodder who could be relied on to carry out instructions meticulously. He was a zealous Puritan of the strictest honesty with a bitter hatred of all things Catholic; he possessed no sense of humour and rejected everything not strictly necessary to a spartan existence. Mary’s charm he found to be a shallow representation of an insincere personality and he was deaf to all her complaints. His total loyalty to Elizabeth is shown in a letter of 1586 in which he refers to his queen, ‘whom God in his mercy long preserve from the dangerous snares of this lady under my charge and her adherents.’ Paulet had been personally selected by Walsingham for the task, and he represented the first step on the road to a goal all of England knew to be necessary but which no one dared to contemplate seriously. That goal was the eventual removal of Mary.

Elizabeth flatly refused to consider taking such a drastic step.
Her natural gift for procrastination – the direct opposite to her father’s impetuosity – combined with her political sense told her that to make Mary a martyr for the Catholic faith might easily make herself a martyr for Protestantism. There were no precedents for executing exiled queens, and Elizabeth was determined not to provide one. Burghley and her Council knew very well that any mention of legal actions to be brought against Mary would earn severe disfavour, and they all regarded their own positions too carefully to risk the royal wrath. Walsingham, however, had never enjoyed royal favour and his fellow courtiers were only too happy to encourage him in his anti-Marian attitudes.

Even in parliament there were plots against Elizabeth. One Dr Parry was discovered to be part of such a plan and under questioning he implicated Thomas Morgan, cipher clerk to Mary’s French ambassador. Morgan was suspected by the Jesuits, with some justification, of being a double agent for Walsingham. The French obligingly imprisoned Morgan in the Bastille, but parliament was so shocked by Parry’s revelations that it petitioned Elizabeth to allow a more exemplary form of execution than the law allowed. Their requests were summarily rejected and Dr Parry was castrated and disembowelled in the normal manner.

Mary herself had been able to wait in the wings, keeping all her options open, antagonising no one directly and showing herself willing to agree to almost anything to achieve her freedom. It would have been difficult to bring her to justice under the Act of Association, even allowing for what was known of her encouragement of Ridolfi and Norfolk, since there was no concrete proof that she had agreed to seize the throne after Elizabeth’s murder. It was not treasonous to seek one’s freedom, nor to pledge friendship to one’s relatives, but Catholicism had been driven into dark corners and the Jesuit missionaries had been converted in the public mind into political agitators and possible assassins.

In August 1584 a Jesuit, Creighton, was stopped at sea by the
Dutch authorities. He tore up his documents and made to throw them overboard, but knowing more Scripture than seamanship, he threw the scraps into the wind and they came back on board. Pieced together, they were another version of the plans for the Enterprise of the invasion of England, and Creighton was handed over to Walsingham’s men. Inevitably he confessed everything, revealing his contacts in England. The tide of hatred for Mary rose.

In Tutbury, Paulet enforced the letter of the law. Mary was forbidden to go out of doors and her servants were not allowed to walk on the walls of the castle in case they attempted to signal to sympathisers, although there were no bystanders since the area surrounding the castle for miles around had been cleared of any but the most trusted people. The effect of this close confinement on Mary was devastating and her claustrophobia increased, leaving her with only receding memories of long gallops through the forests of Fontainebleau. She was allowed no correspondence with the outside world and could only receive letters from her ambassador in London after they had been opened and read by Paulet. She was forbidden to give alms, in case they contained secret messages or were used as bribes. Her gifts of cloth to the poor were stopped – a year earlier Walsingham had intercepted a letter from her giving precise instructions on how to use alum for invisible writing in all sorts of ways, including on cloth, so this stricture was hardly surprising. In any case, Paulet disapproved of such charitable affairs as merely encouraging idleness among the poor. Walsingham had been more precise on this point: ‘Under colour of giving of alms and other extraordinary courses used by her, she hath won the hearts of the people that habit about those places where she hath heretofore lain.’ Rosaries, crucifixes, devotional pictures and embroideries were all regarded by Paulet as ‘Catholic toys’, and when some were sent to Mary as presents he attempted to have them all burnt.

Any one of these restrictions in isolation might have seemed reasonable from a security standpoint, but taken together they bordered on the brutal, and Mary complained to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s response was unhelpful. Mary had, in the past, said that she was willing to accept whatever Elizabeth wished to give her, and she was now to accept Sir Amyas Paulet as Elizabeth’s unquestioned representative: ‘You need not doubt that a man that reverenceth God, loveth his Prince, and is no less by calling honourable than by birth noble, will ever do anything unworthy of himself.’

Paulet had started as he intended to continue, and one of his earliest acts was savagely hurtful to Mary. He removed her dais and the cloth of state with her heraldic arms which had hung above her chair. These were the tangible symbols of her royalty and had been with her for over forty years. Mary had been bred to believe that her total identity was contained in the arms which hung above her head, and some of her bitterest conflicts with Elizabeth had been over the quarterings of these arms. Sir Amyas considered that there was only one queen in England and, therefore, that only her cloth of state should hang anywhere. In his view Mary was quite simply Mary Stewart, murderess, adulteress, probable plotter against his sovereign and his prisoner. Mary then insisted on dining alone on a rigorous diet which she maintained for six weeks until finally Paulet conceded that when she next dined in public her cloth would be restored.

By 10 July 1585 Mary wrote to Mauvissière, the French ambassador, complaining of lack of communication from Elizabeth and of her dread of spending the winter in Tutbury. There were gaps in the ceiling allowing the wind to blow through her bedchamber and her doctor despaired of her health in such surroundings. Even in summer there were stoves burning indoors, and the hundred or so peasants in the wretched village below the castle were better lodged than she was – even their lavatories were superior to her arrangements. Mary had never been so badly housed since she came to England. James was being subjected to ‘sinister and damnable’ counsels designed to portray her as ‘ungrateful disobedient and unnatural’. Mary hoped that Mauvissière might persuade Catherine and Henri to appeal to Elizabeth. Two months later, in September, she
repeated her requests adding that, bizarrely, the body of a tortured priest had been found hanging outside her windows and, a few days later, another corpse had been found to have been thrown into the well. In his regular reports to Walsingham, Paulet mentioned neither of these events.

For outdoor exercise Mary claimed she was confined to about a quarter of an acre around a pigsty – her gaolers called it a garden – where she could walk, or be carried in a chair, and she was everywhere accompanied by arquebusiers with their weapons primed ready to fire. We can presume that a significant part of their orders included instructions that, if a rescue were to be attempted, their first action would be to shoot her. Paulet had assured Walsingham that he would carry out this instruction himself rather than risk her being rescued – as Shrewsbury and Sadler had promised to do before him.

He was, however, prepared to allow ‘soft’ riding inside the limits of two miles and let Mary watch her greyhound course a deer, although her priest was not allowed to attend the hunt. Bemused by Paulet’s seemingly random changes to the terms of her confinement, Mary remarked, ‘Well, I find innovations every day.’

Paulet did, however, agree that Tutbury was unsuitable and, after several alternatives were rejected – not all noblemen wanted to give their houses as prisons for Mary – Chartley Hall was selected. It belonged to the Earl of Essex, who objected that all his trees would be cut down to provide wood for Mary’s household, but he was assured that his timber would be spared. As an alternative, Essex had suggested the nearby house of one Robert Gifford, a ‘recusant’ living at Chillington, but the idea was rejected, and so Essex was persuaded to give up his house and leave his furniture and hangings for the prisoner. Paulet approved of Chartley since the house had a moat, which was not only a useful defence, but also meant that Mary’s laundresses need not leave the house to draw water – these girls had been a constant headache for Paulet at Tutbury where he suspected that during their outings with laundry they were being used as
couriers. Chartley was only twelve miles west of Tutbury – just beyond Uttoxeter – so Mary’s removal could be made in a single day. The windows of Mary’s chamber gave directly on to the park, but there was no danger she would attempt to use them as a means of escape, since she was now ‘too infirm to run away on her own feet’. Her now grossly swollen and painful legs may have been a symptom of water retention due to poor circulation. Her mother was ‘dropsical’ from the same complaint. In addition, Mary’s heart may have been in decline. Paulet tried to persuade Mary to remain at Tutbury until the start of the next year, but she insisted on making the move as quickly as possible, and on 24 December 1585 she was installed in her new prison.

In spite of her various moves and privations, Mary still maintained a considerable wardrobe, with twenty-seven robes, twelve of which were black, in varying materials, velvet and silk being the principals. Skirts, outer mantles, doublets and petticoats in scarlet were now worn under her habitual black, while on her head she wore her white lace widow’s cap. Eleven tapestries, four carpets, and, most questionably, three daises ranked beside her three beds, two covered in velvet. The crucifix without which she was never seen was of solid gold. Mary had lost her freedom but she was hardly shivering in rags in a dungeon.

In France dangerous moves had been afoot. On 15 October Thomas Morgan, who was still under comparatively light incarceration in the Bastille, had received a visitor by the name of Gilbert Gifford. Morgan said that Gifford was ‘a Catholic gentleman to me well known for that he has been brought up in learning on this side of the seas this many years past’. His uncle, Robert Gifford, was the ‘recusant’ who lived near Chartley, and the family were kinsmen to the Throckmortons. Gilbert had studied for the priesthood in Rome, but had been expelled before renewing his Catholic contacts in Douai in 1585. In Paris he had presented himself to ambassador Mauvissière and his replacement, Guillaume de l’Aubespine, Baron de Châteauneuf; he was now suggesting himself to Thomas Morgan as a possible
courier for Mary’s correspondence. Gifford was also in touch with Thomas Paget, a member of Archbishop Beaton’s household, who was himself Mary’s French ambassador. Paget was a close friend of Morgan’s and a devoted agent of Francis Walsingham. Mary’s network in France was thoroughly penetrated by double agents.

Robert Gifford was arrested immediately on his arrival at Rye and given the option of torture or of turning double agent to work for Walsingham. He agreed at once and with an appalling disregard for security he lodged in London with Thomas Philips – or Phellipes – Walsingham’s cipher clerk and principal assistant. Morgan was still totally convinced of Gifford’s honesty and wrote him a letter of warm commendation to show to Mary. Gifford also carried several months’ worth of correspondence from the Paris embassy and Philips visited Paulet to arrange for Gifford’s arrival and for the easy transmission of letters back and forth.