Heretic Queen (23 page)

By mid-October, it seems, Elizabeth had made up her own mind as to Mary's innocence. “The Queen's Majesty is now at the pinch so careful of her own surety and state as I perceive the Queen of Scots shall not be advanced to greater credit than her cause will serve. And I think,” Cecil added conspiratorially, “that is rather to put her back than to further her.”
4

So the last opportunity Mary would have to speak out in her own defense passed. Elizabeth refused to sit in judgment on her cousin without Mary's answer to the charges set forth by Moray. The result was that the Scots queen was sent to the Earl of Shrewsbury at Tutbury for safekeeping, and supposedly out of harm's way.

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Once again, Elizabeth
underestimated the pull of the international Catholic League initiated all those years before at the Council of Trent. Luckily for England, by the end of 1568, France had erupted once more into civil war between the Huguenots, the Guise family, and the court faction.
5
Charles IX, fearing the intervention of Alba and the unwanted support of the Huguenots by Calvinist Netherlanders now living in France, found himself fighting extremists on all fronts.

Spain, though preoccupied with its own internal troubles from the Moriscos in the south and saber-rattling from the Ottoman Turk in the Mediterranean, remained committed to reconverting northern Europe to the true faith. What was needed in England was a man who could carry out any Machiavellian plan devised to that end. Incredibly, Philip chose this precise moment to replace his affable and intelligent ambassador Guzman de Silva with the archplotter Guerau de Spes.
6
Of course, de Spes lost no time inserting himself into the captive Queen Mary's network of servants and informants, zealously rooting out weak spots in Elizabeth's regime. By October 1568, he was regularly transmitting correspondence from Mary to Philip.

De Spes's ardent desire to be in the thick of things was plain from the outset. “In the neighborhood [where Mary is kept], which is the part of the country where there are most Catholics,” de Spes wrote shortly after his arrival in London, “she has many sympathizers, and it will not be difficult to release her, and even raise a great revolt against this Queen [Elizabeth]; but it will be more prudent that your Majesty should not appear in this, and I will do nothing unless I receive orders from your Majesty or the Duke [of Alba].”
7

De Spes's correspondence with Spain and Alba in the Low Countries proved to be a source of illumination and controversy, aimed at deposing Elizabeth and enthroning Mary as queen of England. Nonetheless, at the end of November, when four small coasters from Spain were forced by storms and “French pirates” into harbor at Plymouth, de Spes requested that the cargo be brought to safety by Elizabeth. As the Channel had been teeming with pirates of all nationalities for some time, Elizabeth ordered the cargo ashore, initially in good faith, to transport to Dover overland. It transpired that the “cargo” was £85,000 in gold—about one-third of the amount Elizabeth had received from her last parliamentary subsidy—and was destined to be used by Alba to pay his troops for enforcing the Council of Troubles in the Low Countries. To ensure its safe arrival in the Netherlands would result in the death of many Protestants; to keep it might result in war.

Yet on closer examination, it seemed that the money still belonged to the Genoese banker based in London, Benedict Spinola, and not the king of Spain. Spinola, when approached, agreed readily that Elizabeth represented a better credit risk than Philip and Alba. Papers were drawn up quickly for the loan of the money to Elizabeth instead.
8

Naturally, de Spes was incandescent with rage. So much so that he had forgotten the first rule of an Elizabethan ambassador: to write only in guarded terms. He fired off a ranting missive to Alba at the end of December saying that the queen “wishes to declare herself openly against his Majesty [Philip], in the belief that if she makes herself mistress of the sea, and another army goes by land to attack the States, the task will be easy … I pray your Excellency do not doubt this determination … This is the reason that has moved me to write so urgently that you should seize all English property and advise the King, in order that the same step be taken in all his dominions.”
9
The letter was intercepted.

At the heart of Elizabeth's supposed desire to declare herself “openly” against Spain was de Spes's mistaken belief that both Cecil and Leicester were itching to become involved in the religious affairs of the Low Countries. Unfortunately for Spain, the Netherlands, and England, de Spes's advice was heeded by Alba, and all English property was seized. Five days later, on January 10, 1569, Elizabeth retaliated:

Her Majesty commands all and every, her justices and officials within her towns, cities, ports, and other places under her government, to take steps to detain and arrest with all their goods, chattels, and ships, all subjects born in the dominions of the King of Spain, in order that they may be held as security and pledges for the damages and loss received, without just or apparent cause, by the subjects of Her Majesty, and for other reasons which may appear.
10

Further letters were intercepted, leading to de Spes's house arrest. Within two weeks, Alba realized that he had acted precipitously and sent his own ambassador, Christophe d'Assonleville, to try to patch things up. While the queen and her councillors were more than happy to avert open war with Spain, Cecil's spies warned him of an even more treacherous plot involving de Spes and the Catholic earls of the north of England. The plan was for them to rise up against their anointed queen. The year 1569 began as momentously as it would end.

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The following month,
de Spes, still under house arrest, received a message in “a safe cipher” from the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Arundel, assuring the Spanish ambassador that they were biding their time to free him from “Cecil's impertinences” while they garnered their resources. “They will be able to turn out the present accursed Government,” de Spes wrote to Alba on February 29, “and raise another Catholic one, bringing the Queen to consent thereto. They think your Excellency will support them in this, and that the country will not lose the friendship of our King … I have encouraged them.”
11
The plot was intended to dethrone Elizabeth and imprison Cecil in the Tower. The messenger delivering the “safe cipher” was a long-term resident of London, the Florentine banker Roberto Ridolfi.

As the spring wore on, Norfolk's aspirations to marry the Scottish queen became generally known and gained momentum in the council, with Leicester cited as its foremost champion.
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Moray, as Scotland's regent, thought that the marriage had a great deal to commend it. Mary herself was evidently in favor of anything that would release her from her drafty prison at Tutbury. Leicester thought it was an elegant solution to Mary's perpetual imprisonment that should satisfy both Spain and France. The only problem was that the plan became a “plot” with each week it remained carefully concealed from Elizabeth and especially Cecil. By June 1, it was no longer a secret.

It was September before Elizabeth broached the subject hotly with Leicester. It seemed Norfolk's plans had progressed to the stage where Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fénélon, the new French ambassador, and de Spes had heard that if Elizabeth did not agree to the match, Norfolk intended to liberate Mary willy-nilly.
13
Yet none of them seemed to be troubled by the fact that Mary was still the wife of the Earl of Bothwell. Though Bothwell had escaped the wrath of Moray and “the king's party” in Scotland, he had been a political prisoner in increasing squalor in Denmark since Mary's defeat. Nonetheless, Bothwell was alive and for now remained Mary's husband.

Another point Elizabeth's councillors seemed to discount was that the Protestant heir to the throne, Catherine Grey, had died fifteen months earlier. Catherine's younger sister, Mary, had been in disgrace since 1564, putting the Protestant succession in disarray. Queen Mary's proposed remarriage to a Protestant English nobleman made the specter of the Scots' queen as an “acceptable” Catholic queen of England both a real possibility and alarming. Elizabeth was not amused that the issue of her successor should be raised again in such an oblique way.

So Elizabeth made inquiries that autumn. Leicester admitted on bended knee that it was a plan, not a plot, to find a resolution to indefinite imprisonment for Mary, which also threatened Her Majesty personally. Elizabeth was infuriated. Mary's papers were searched, specifically for material proof against Leicester and Norfolk's friends on the council, Arundel and Pembroke (William Herbert, 1st earl of Pembroke, Leicester's man in the council). None was found. Even Cecil was censured for not advising her earlier about the proposed marriage. Norfolk was her maternal cousin and England's only duke. It was sedition for him to marry without her approval, and just the sort of plotting she abhorred.

Elizabeth felt personally threatened, seeing once trusted friends within her council through betrayed eyes. She angrily decamped to her fortress of Windsor. From there Elizabeth commanded Norfolk to attend her. He refused, pleading sickness. Elizabeth insisted. Still he refused. Finally, on October 2, 1569, Norfolk was taken to Paul Wentworth's house in Burnham and from there to Sir Henry Neville's home.
14
Cecil called upon a man who had helped him a few years before on other “silent” endeavors of a clandestine nature to investigate the affair. It was the first official assignment Francis Walsingham would take on behalf of the government.

Walsingham had written his first significant political pamphlet in the spring of 1569, evidently with approval from Cecil and possibly Elizabeth. In the pamphlet, he described Mary as “an evil papist vying for the English throne” and a leading member of the league for the destruction of Protestantism. His dedication to the Protestant cause was unshakable, making him the perfect man to discover the truth behind the veil of lies.

Without delay, Walsingham concentrated on the Florentine banker, Roberto Ridolfi, who had been on the fringes of the court's financial affairs. Under the respectable cloak of banking, Pius V had made Ridolfi's services available to Mary, effectively as his secret nuncio in England. What Pius had been unaware of was that the charming Italian was also in the pay of Spain and France, reporting back regularly to their monarchs. Walsingham made Cecil aware that Ridolfi was receiving large sums of money from abroad and that much of this was destined to help finance rebellion in the north of England aimed at freeing Mary. The money, he suspected, came from the pope.

Ridolfi was put under watch. Walsingham, meanwhile, discovered that further funds were paid out to the bishop of Ross and other of Mary's loyal servants, including those in the pay of the Duke of Norfolk. The order was sent out for an arrest on October 7 signed by Leicester and Cecil “for the apprehension of Roberto Ridolfi, whom her Majesty would have remain in your house without conference until he may be examined of certain matters which touch her Majesty very nearly.”
15
Ridolfi immediately and willingly confessed to Walsingham his funding the northern earls, Mary, and even Norfolk.

On October 8, Norfolk was transferred from Sir Henry Neville's home to the Tower. After Norfolk's initial interrogations and protestations of innocence, Elizabeth determined with Cecil that they had to “deep search” just how the plot ran. In what seems like a bizarre twist, Ridolfi pleaded for his liberty in return for his honesty. Amazingly, this was granted with a bond of £1,000 in security paid on the promise that he would no longer meddle in matters concerning the state, except by Elizabeth's consent.

Why was Elizabeth so generous to Ridolfi in face of proof that there had been several plots against her? The only reasonable explanations are either that the pliable Ridolfi promised he would faithfully serve England for an appropriate payment—just as he had done the pope, Philip, and Charles IX—or that Walsingham and Cecil deemed he would be of greater value to England left in place where his machinations could be followed.
16

Clearly, Mary presented a serious threat. Cecil had little difficulty in persuading Elizabeth that so long as Mary lived, she would “always be a dangerous person to her estate.” While Mary remained restrained, that danger could be contained; if she were at liberty, then the threat she posed would increase. What was needed was reliable information regarding the Catholic nobility, including Norfolk, whose Protestantism was seen as unsafe, and a clear idea of the type of defense a muster of the non-Catholic nobility and gentry could generate. Cecil wrote to the Earl of Sussex, now president of the Council of the North, directing him to be on the lookout for “lewd persons uttering seditious speeches or any attempting unlawful actions.”
17

Though the first reports back declared that there was no danger, Elizabeth remained mistrustful of Sussex, as he was one of Norfolk's dearest friends. It didn't help that Leicester loathed Sussex as well and that Elizabeth's favorite never missed an opportunity to whisper some poisonous remark about him into her ear. Yet, setting these petty squabbles aside, Elizabeth was right to fear her northern Catholic nobility. These were the men who guarded the borders between Scotland and England, and her first line of defense from a northern invasion. She now had proof that the pope had been funding rebellion among them.

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The northern counties
of Yorkshire, Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, and Westmorland were a natural refuge for brigands and malcontents. Each county was dominated by a fortified cathedral city that had carried out the law of the land for centuries. With Chester on the west, Newcastle-upon-Tyne to the north, and York rising above the dales of York and Pickering, the only road north was through the Tyne Gap toward Scotland, and the way south stretched via the Great North Road. Lancashire (within Cumberland) was administered by a separate duchy under Elizabeth's control.