The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (21 page)

Norris advised Cecil to employ an Italian soldier named Captain Franchiotto to investigate further. Franchiotto had been working undercover for many years in the service of the French crown, but his Protestant faith had now caused him to defect. He soon uncovered a list of suspected agents and a plot, sponsored by the Guise, which sought to assassinate the Queen by contaminating her Bedchamber with poison. Sir Francis Walsingham hastily sent a report to Cecil based on Franchiotto’s intelligence and urged that Elizabeth and her gentlewomen ‘exercise great watchfulness over her food, utensils, bedding, and other furniture, lest poison should be administered to her by secret enemies’. He stressed how ‘there are at the present time a great number of malcontents in that country, whose greatest desire is to upset and change the existing regime, and who would spare no means to carry out their wicked intentions’.
8

*   *   *

Elizabeth deliberated over what to do with Mary following her arrival in England. As an anointed sovereign, she was reluctant to take action against her and believed she should be restored to her legitimate throne. However, she knew that this would alienate James Stewart, the Earl of Moray, Regent of Scotland for his young nephew King James VI, which she could ill afford to do. Finally she resolved that a hearing was necessary to adjudicate upon the charges made against Mary in Scotland as to her involvement in the murder of her late husband. Proceedings opened in York at the beginning of October 1568.

At the heart of the case against her was a silver-gilt casket of letters purportedly written in Mary’s hand, which was said to provide stark evidence that she had plotted her husband’s murder and had had an adulterous affair with the Earl of Bothwell, the chief suspect in Darnley’s death. The letters have since been shown to be almost certainly fakes but within three months the tribunal formally recognised the authenticity of the letters and so by implication demonstrated its belief that the deposed Queen was guilty. When Mary refused to answer to the charges before a deputation sent by Elizabeth, judgement was deferred and the trial adjourned indefinitely. Whilst Mary continued to protest that her imprisonment was entirely unlawful, Elizabeth had little choice but to keep her in close custody. Cecil’s words of warning to her were unambiguous: ‘The Queen of Scots is, and always shall be, a dangerous person to your estate.’
9

With the trial adjourned and the matter of Mary left unresolved, Elizabeth moved to Hampton Court ahead of the festive season. When the Queen was in residence, and particularly before Christmas, the palace would become a hive of activity. Servants in red liveries carried trays laden with food, or armfuls of firewood from the woodyard to stack by the palace’s hearths ready to fuel the great fires that would burn throughout the festivities. Horses could constantly be heard clattering across the cobbles bringing guests to the palace, or conveying the Queen’s personal messengers across the country and abroad.

During the preparations, Katherine Knollys, Elizabeth’s cousin and trusted woman of the Bedchamber, fell gravely ill. Sir Francis, then custodian of the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots at Bolton Castle in north Yorkshire, begged to be allowed to return to London and visit his sick wife. ‘I would to God I were so dispatched hence that I might only attend and care for your good recovery,’ he wrote to Katherine. Yet Elizabeth refused to grant him leave from his post. When Katherine’s condition improved a little, she urged the Queen to let her join her husband in the north, but still Elizabeth refused, saying the ‘journey might be to her danger or discommodity’. Sir Francis’ response to Cecil was curt: as Elizabeth would not let him look after his wife, hopefully ‘her Majesty will comfort her with her benign clemency and gracious courtesy’. Cecil assured him that Katherine was ‘well amended’, but Sir Francis remained desperate to return to London and complained bitterly of Elizabeth’s ‘ungrateful denial of my coming to the court’.
10

On New Year’s Eve, Sir Francis wrote to his wife from Bolton Castle, pouring out his feelings and frustrations. The Queen had never granted them what they wanted nor rewarded them enough for their service. ‘For the outward love that her Majesty bears you, she makes you often weep for unkindness to the great danger of your health.’ He wished they could now retire from court to a ‘country poor life’, adding ‘whereunto I thank God I am ready to prepare myself for my part if you shall like thereof’.
11
He would leave the decision to Katherine.

Lady Katherine never responded. Soon after Christmas and still with the Queen at Hampton Court, her condition worsened. Elizabeth ordered that she be nursed in a chamber close by her own and made regular visits to her bedside, but on Saturday 15 January 1569, she died aged forty-six. Elizabeth was overwhelmed with remorse. Only the day before, she had written to Sir Francis but had deliberately made no reference to his wife’s illness. Now she hastily sent a messenger north with news of his wife’s passing. In the meantime, arrangements were made for Mary Stuart to be brought south to the medieval and semi-derelict Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire and placed in the custody of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, one of Elizabeth’s leading noblemen.

Sir Francis Knollys returned to London on 8 February, ‘distracted with sorrow for his great loss’. After nearly thirty years of marriage he was now bewildered as to how to care for his family and manage their large household. Katherine had ‘disburdened him’ of many cares and had been the bookkeeper of his ‘public charges’ and his ‘private accounts’. Without her, he wrote, ‘my children, my servants and all other things are loosely left without good order’.
12
Elizabeth meanwhile retired to her Bedchamber in deep mourning. Katherine Knollys had become a dear friend. She had served the Queen since her accession and remained in close attendance in the Bedchamber despite the needs of her husband and many children.
13
Such was Elizabeth’s grief, that ‘forgetful of her own health, she took cold, wherewith she was much troubled’.
14
Visiting Hampton Court five days after Katherine’s death, Bertrand de Salignac de La Mothe-Fenelon, the French ambassador, found the Queen full of sorrow for the woman whom she had ‘loved better than all the women in the world’.
15
Visiting the court around the same time, Nicholas Whyte, one of Cecil’s emissaries, found the Queen beset by grief and hardly able to talk of anything other than her beloved servant and kinswoman:

From this she returned back again to talk of my Lady Knollys. And after many speeches past to and fro of that gentlewoman, I perceiving her to harp much upon her departure, said that the long absence of her husband … together with the fervency of her fever, did greatly further her end, wanting nothing else that either art of man’s help could devise for her recovery, lying in a prince’s court near her person, where every hour her careful ear understood of her estate, and where also she was very often visited by her Majesty’s own comfortable presence.

This rather tactless remark was followed by another. ‘Although her Grace was not culpable of this accident,’ said Fenelon, ‘yet she was the cause without which their being asunder had not happened.’ Elizabeth replied disconsolately that she was ‘very sorry for her death’.
16
Katherine had attended tirelessly and selflessly on the Queen and had been forced to endure long absences from her husband and her children. The years of unrelenting service had, as Elizabeth was forced to acknowledge, doubtless taken its toll.

Elizabeth spent £640 2s. 11d. on a lavish funeral ceremony complete with interment in Westminster Abbey.
17
Katherine’s hearse was so elaborate that the Dean of Westminster and the heralds both wanted to keep it. Her tomb, erected by her husband, identified her as ‘The Right Honourable Lady Katherine Knollys chief lady of the Queen Majesty Bed Chamber and Wife to Sir Frances Knollys, Knight Treasurer of her Highness’ Household’. A printed epitaph extolled her virtues, calling her a ‘mirror pure of womanhood’ with ‘wit and counsel sound, a mind so clean and devoid of guile’, she had been ‘in favour with our noble queen, above the common sort’.
18

In the years following Katherine Knollys’s death, Elizabeth continued to show care and affection for her children. On 14 March, Katherine’s brother wrote to Cecil that he ‘was glad to hear of her Majesty’s good disposition to his late sister’s children’.
19
Her daughter Anne became a paid member of the Queen’s chamber and was the recipient of several gifts.
20
The following year Henry Knollys became an Esquire of the Body and his brother William became a Gentleman Pensioner.
21
In a letter of January 1570 to the Earl of Sussex, Lord Chamberlain of the Household, and to Sir Ralph Sadler, the Queen wrote, ‘We require you to have consideration of the custody appointed to Henry Knollys, whom you know what reason we have to regard, in respect of his kindred to us by his late mother’.
22

21

Secret Enemies

Mary Stuart’s arrival in England could not have come at a worse time. Europe was riven with conflict and the Protestant cause was in grave danger. Civil war in France continued, with Huguenots fighting Catholics; the Protestants in the Low Countries, led by William of Orange, faced the might of a huge Spanish army led by the Duke of Alva. Now it seemed only a matter of time before the Catholic powers would turn their attention across the Channel. Sir Henry Norris, the ambassador in Paris, was in no doubt that ‘if the Duke of Alva do bring his purpose to desired effect he will forthwith invade England’.
1

As relations with Spain and France cooled in recent months, England had become increasingly isolated. The French King, Charles IX, and his mother Catherine de Medici were convinced that Elizabeth was sending covert aid to the Huguenots and the Dutch rebels and this, together with growing resentment over English pirates preying on French shipping, left England vulnerable to French hostility. Meanwhile diplomatic relations with Spain had broken down completely after Elizabeth impounded treasure from Spanish ships bound for the Low Countries which had been forced to shelter in English ports. The imprisonment of Mary Stuart in England served only to heighten tensions and raise fears of an imminent Catholic invasion. In December 1568 an English agent in Paris reported that the monarchies of France and Spain were conspiring to undermine English security, ‘for the alteration of religion and the advancement of the Queen of Scots to the crown’.
2

In early 1569, Cecil made a stark assessment of the safety of the realm. ‘The perils are many, great and imminent, great in respect of Persons and Matters.’ At the top of his list came a ‘conspiration of the Pope, King Philip, the French King and sundry potentates of Italy to employ all their forces for the subversion of the professors of the gospel’.
3
Pope Pius V was, he believed, determined to recover the ‘tyranny’ of his authority and restore England to the Catholic fold and to support Elizabeth’s ‘eviction’ from her throne’ and replacement with Mary Stuart. Elizabeth was also under threat from within her realm. Don Gureau de Spes, who had been appointed Spanish ambassador the previous year, wrote to Philip describing Mary Queen of Scots as a ‘lady of great spirit’, gaining so many friends where she was that ‘with little help she would be able to get this kingdom into her hands’.
4
In her own over-optimistic epistle to Philip, Mary claimed that if the King could ‘help me, I shall be Queen of England in three months, and mass shall be said all over the country’.
5
By July, de Spes was reporting that ‘this Queen sees that all the people in the country are turning their eyes to the Queen of Scotland, and there is now no concealment about it. She is looked upon generally as the successor.’
6

*   *   *

At the end of 1568 rumours circulated at court that the Duke of Norfolk was about to propose marriage to Mary Queen of Scots. The match had first been suggested by Sir William Maitland of Lethington, Mary’s adviser, who believed that a union between Scotland’s deposed Queen and England’s pre-eminent noble could revive her fortunes and resolve the Anglo-Scottish impasse. Elizabeth had considered Norfolk as a possible consort for Mary four years earlier, as a means to secure the Scottish Queen’s loyalty, but now in very different circumstances, she was not consulted.

In response to the gossip, the Queen quizzed Norfolk. Was there any truth to the rumour? The duke strongly denied any such accusation. ‘Should I seek to marry her, being so wicked a woman, such a notorious adulteress and murderer? I love to sleep on a safe pillow.’
7
In truth, by early 1569, Norfolk had resolved to press ahead with a marriage to Mary and set about winning support from the leading men at court. By the spring, Dudley, the Earl of Arundel and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton had all declared themselves in favour of the match and were working secretly to bring it to fruition. Having secured Mary’s consent, Norfolk made contact with the leading Catholic noblemen in the north, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, to secure their support. The challenge now was to gain Elizabeth’s approval. Would she see the merits of the match as a means to securely bring about Mary’s restoration to the Scottish throne and make it safe for her to declare Mary her heir? Or would she regard Norfolk’s designs as more the product of his own personal ambition?

No one wanted to broach the subject with the Queen. Finally, on 6 September, Dudley feigned illness, took to his chamber and then summoned Elizabeth to his bedside where he revealed details of Norfolk’s proposal. Despite Dudley’s assurance that in supporting the plan he believed he was acting in her best interests, the Queen regarded his actions as a betrayal. If Norfolk married Mary, Elizabeth would, she believed, find herself in the Tower within four months of the ceremony. How could he, Dudley, the man she trusted above all others, support a marriage alliance between her greatest rival and her premier nobleman?