The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (38 page)

Walsingham persisted in his attempts to get the ambassador recalled and looked to exploit Sir Edward’s reputation as a notorious gambler. As Stafford fell into greater debt, he became compromised and accepted an advance of 6,000 crowns from the Duke of Guise in return for sharing the contents of his diplomatic bag, thereby betraying his English informants and selling the country’s secrets to the enemy at a time of great national danger.
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Stafford was also accused of acting in the interests of Spain by repeatedly denying the existence of any hostile intention by Philip II, and by passing on English intelligence to Madrid. Writing from Paris in July 1587, Mendoza, the former Spanish ambassador in England who had himself been implicated in more than one plot to assassinate the Queen, told his master that Sir Edward had sent Charles Arundell to see him, ‘to ascertain from your Majesty in what way he might serve you’. Stafford was known to be ‘much pressed for money’, Mendoza added; ‘even if he [Stafford] had not made such an offer as this, his poverty is reason enough to expect from him any service, if he saw it was to be remunerated’. Shortly afterwards, Charles Arundell arrived with news from Sir Edward that an English fleet was about to sail against Portugal:

The ambassador told Arundell to advise your Majesty of this instantly, which, he said, would serve as a sample and handsel [token] of his goodwill; and within a fortnight or three weeks he would report whether the despatch of the fleet was being persisted in, together with the exact number of ships, men, stores and all other details of the project.
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In a letter dated 28 February, Mendoza described how he had authorised the payment of 2,000 crowns to his valuable ‘new correspondent’.
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For the next eighteen months, Mendoza’s dispatches were full of detailed information on English policy from his ‘new friend’. The evidence points to this being the English ambassador, though Sir Edward later claimed he was acting as a double agent, deliberately providing false information to the Spanish with the full knowledge of the Elizabethan government. Stafford also began to supply information, in December 1586, on Sir Francis Drake’s preparations for his raid on Cadiz (to ‘singe the King of Spain’s beard’) and warned the Spanish in advance of the English attack.
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That Walsingham had sought to give Stafford false information about Drake’s plans suggests that he suspected the ambassador of treason. The quality of intelligence Stafford passed back to the English court was low and he exaggerated the hostility of French Catholics in order to make out that they, rather than the Spanish, were Elizabeth’s principal enemy. As the Spanish threat grew, Sir Edward’s activities threatened to fatally undermine national security.

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Nightmares

The sentence of Mary Queen of Scots’ guilt had been proclaimed on 4 December 1586, but Elizabeth continued to resist signing the warrant for its enforcement.
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She remained deeply ambivalent about the execution of one who had been an anointed monarch. Elizabeth still hoped that Mary could be killed in private, by an assassin, at Fotheringhay, rather than by public execution, but Sir Amyas Paulet, Mary’s gaoler, professed himself shocked at the suggestion. But, as Elizabeth insisted, had the signatories of the Bond of Association not pledged to pursue to their death any that sought her harm? Finally in late December, the Queen authorised Cecil to draw up the warrant for Mary’s execution. It was charged to William Davison, the recently appointed Secretary to the Privy Council, to secure Elizabeth’s signature.

It was a time of great tension, with fears of disturbances, plots to rescue Mary, and conspiracies against the Queen’s life. At the end of January 1587, great alarm spread across the country, as Walsingham described,

False bruits were spread abroad that the Queen of Scots was broken out of prison; that the City of London was fired; that many thousand Spaniards were landed in Wales; that certain noblemen were fled; and such like … The stir and confusion was great; such as I think happened not in England these hundred years past, for precepts and hue and cries ran from place to place, even from out of the north into these parts, and over all the west as far as Cornwall.
2

William Davison had kept the warrant in his possession for five or six weeks, hoping that Elizabeth might be ready to sign it. On 1 February, the Queen sent for him. Alarmed by the rumours that were spreading through the country, she declared that she was now fully resolved to proceed with Mary’s execution and signed. Later that day, as Elizabeth had instructed, Davison gave the warrant to the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Bromley to attach the great seal.

However, the next morning, as the Queen was speaking with Sir Walter Ralegh in the Privy Chamber at Greenwich, Elizabeth called secretary Davison to her and described to him a distressing dream she had had the night before in which her Scottish cousin had been executed without Elizabeth’s consent. She told Davison that the sealing of the warrant must be delayed. It had already passed, he replied. According to Davison, Elizabeth said nothing further.
3

Now unsure of whether to act on Elizabeth’s signed warrant or not, Davison sought out Hatton and Cecil who called a Privy Council meeting for the following day. It was agreed that they would proceed without further consultation, it being ‘neither fit nor convenient to trouble her Majesty any further’.
4
Robert Beale, the clerk of the council, was sent immediately to Fotheringhay, accompanied by two executioners. A covering letter signed by the councillors and by Walsingham, who was ill in bed, to the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, appointed to preside over the execution, justified this subterfuge, as ‘for [the Queen’s] special service tending to the safety of her royal person and universal quietness of her whole realm’.
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*   *   *

At eight o’clock on the morning of Wednesday 8 February, Mary, dressed in black and clutching an ivory crucifix in her hand, was led out to the scaffold which had been erected in the great hall at Fotheringhay. She laid her head on the block to await the fall of the axe. The first blow missed her neck and sliced into the side of her skull. As the second blow severed her head, Richard Fletcher, the Dean of Peterborough, cried out, ‘So let Queen Elizabeth’s Enemies perish!’
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The following evening it fell to Cecil to break the news to Elizabeth that her cousin, the Scottish Queen, was dead.
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Elizabeth immediately took ‘to bed owing to the great grief she suffered through this untoward event’.
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By the morning her feelings had turned to incandescent rage. She summoned Sir Christopher Hatton and berated him for his part in what she saw as ‘a thing she never commanded or intended’.
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She threatened to throw all her councillors in the Tower for such blatant defiance of her orders, and in the meantime ‘commanded them out of her sight’.
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Davison bore the brunt of the Queen’s wrath; she believed he had abused her trust by allowing the signed warrant to leave his possession. He was stripped of his office, interrogated by Star Chamber and sent to the Tower. By the end of the month Elizabeth was threatening to have him summarily executed, but in the event he was fined £10,000, a sum far beyond his means, and was to stay in prison for ‘as long as her Majesty decreed’. Though his fine was remitted, he remained in the Tower for twenty months and was never allowed back into the Queen’s service.
11

Cecil, after years of loyal service, was banished from the Queen’s presence and remained out of favour for several months, during which time Elizabeth referred to him as that ‘traitor, false dissembler and wicked wretch’. Normally proud and pragmatic, the sixty-six-year-old Cecil was now reduced to writing despairing epistles in which he pleaded just to even be allowed just to lie at Elizabeth’s feet, in the hope ‘that some drops of your mercy [might] quench my sorrowful panting heart’.
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His friend, Lady Cobham, one of Elizabeth’s most trusted women, assured him, ‘If you will write I will deliver it. I do desire to be commanded by you.’
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She proceeded not only to speak favourably of him to the Queen, but to keep him informed of everything that happened at court during his absence. Finally, in March, Cecil was admitted back into the Queen’s presence.

In the days after learning of Mary’s execution, Elizabeth neither ate nor slept. A joint letter from her senior councillors of 12 February urged her ‘to give yourself to your natural food and sleep, to maintain your health’.
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On the Sunday after Mary’s death, Richard Fletcher, one of Elizabeth’s most favoured preachers, faced the daunting task of delivering a sermon before the Queen in the small chapel royal at Greenwich.
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As Dean of Peterborough, Fletcher had served as chaplain during Mary’s trial and execution, and now condemned the Scottish Queen for her traitorous Catholicism. Elizabeth sat in an elevated gallery, her courtiers in the chapel stalls below. Fletcher hailed Mary’s execution as an act of God’s deliverance and urged Elizabeth to rise above her grief and pursue her enemies and those who sought her life.
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Soon after receiving the news from Fotheringhay, Elizabeth wrote to James VI, denying that she had authorised his mother’s execution:

My dear Brother, I would you knew (though not felt) the extreme dolor that overwhelms my mind, for that miserable accident which (far contrary to my meaning) hath befallen … I beseech you that as God and many more know, how innocent I am in this case … I am not so base-minded that fear of any living creature or Prince should make me afraid to do that were just; or done, to deny the same. I am not of so base a lineage, nor carry so vile a mind … Thus assuring yourself of me, that as I know this was deserved, yet if I had meant it I would never lay it on others’ shoulders; no more will I not damnify myself that thought it not … for your part, think you have not in the world a more loving kinswoman, nor a more dear friend than myself; nor any that will watch more carefully to preserve you and your estate … your most assured loving sister and cousin Elizabeth R.
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Robert Carey, youngest son of Lord Hunsdon and now a trusted courtier, was charged with delivering the letter to James, who took the news of his mother’s death ‘very heavily’. On the streets of Edinburgh, violence erupted against the English Queen. An agent in the Scottish capital reported to Walsingham a libellous epigram that addressed Elizabeth as ‘Jezebel, that English whore’.
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In Catholic Europe too there was outrage.
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From Paris, Sir Edward Stafford reported, ‘Truly I find all men here in a fury, and all that love not her Majesty in a great hope to build some great harm to her upon it.’ He added that Henri III, the French King and Mary’s former brother-in-law, ‘took it very evil’ when he heard the news and immediately severed diplomatic ties with England.
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For several months the King refused to receive Walsingham as Elizabeth’s envoy, who had requested an audience to explain the execution. The French immediately called for vengeance and such was the strength of feeling that the French King felt obliged to send a message to Stafford imploring him, for sake of his personal safety, not to leave the embassy in Paris.

Parisian preachers and polemicists denounced the execution. A propaganda war of images broke out: Catholics displayed hideous portraits of Elizabeth, while Huguenots set up pictures of the English Queen in all her magnificence, accompanied by laudatory verses.
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In April 1587, Walsingham wrote to Stafford to say that he was editing his dispatches so that Elizabeth would not know how enraged the French were over the execution; he feared the news would only increase her anger towards members of the Privy Council.
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English and Scottish Catholic exiles in France denounced Elizabeth in print and made great play of the nightmares and fitful sleep that she was rumoured to have had on the night after she signed Mary’s death warrant.
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Adam Blackwood’s
Martyre de la royne d’Escosse,
written shortly after Mary’s death, claimed that Sir Walter Mildmay had gone to Dudley while he was in bed at court and warned him of ‘the evident danger and ruin of his Majesty’, if with ‘inexcusable cruelty’, Mary was executed ‘without all pretence of law, right or reason, or any apparent show of justice’. Blackwood then described how Dudley immediately got out of bed and in his nightgown went straight to Elizabeth’s Bedchamber – ‘whether often he was wont to go for less necessary business’ – to warn her of the consequences if the execution went ahead’. Dorothy Stafford ‘being in her bed’ had cried out in a ‘terrible voice’ that awakened the Queen and then began to weep. She told Elizabeth that she had had a nightmare in which the Queen of Scotland was beheaded and immediately after that Elizabeth’s head was also cut off. Elizabeth declared that the ‘same vision had appeared to her in her sleep leaving her greatly terrified’ and as a result she had changed her mind about putting Mary to death.
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Another version of Blackwood’s account describes how, having given orders to go ahead with the execution, Elizabeth – ‘the harpy’ – did not sleep the entire night ‘having another demoness within her soul who tormented her strangely and vengefully about the execution of her cousin, to such an extent that she repented of having ordered it’.
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Blackwood’s propagandist tract, in which Elizabeth was once more condemned for her innate depravity, was printed in France and distributed throughout Catholic Europe.
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Attacks on Elizabeth could always fall back on the lurid details of her conception – choice material for any opponents of the Elizabethan regime. Blackwood referred to her illegitimate and incestuous birth, alleging that the Queen was ‘not only a bastard’ but also born ‘of triple incest and had no right to the throne of England’.
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She owed her sexually corrupt body to the unrestrained sexual immorality of her mother, Anne Boleyn, the ‘
hacquenee
[mare]
d’Angleterre
’.
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