Mary Queen of Scots (33 page)

Along with Norfolk she had begun plotting with Roberto di Pagnozzo Ridolfi of Florence, an influential Catholic banker in England who had recently cleared his name after somewhat compromising dealings with Northumberland and Westmorland. Mary and Norfolk dispatched Ridolfi to Alva, Pius V, and Philip with requests for financial and military aid. Since Mary and Norfolk mostly communicated with Ridolfi through intermediaries, Leslie and the ducal secretary, William Barker, it is not certain what their specific instructions were. Norfolk did meet with Ridolfi but Leslie and Barker worked out the details with him.

In Mary’s instructions, which Ridolfi drew up for her in March 1571, she offered Philip and Alva either Dumbarton or Edinburgh Castle as a base for their expedition. She also requested Pius V to free her from Orkney, expressing her grief at the abduction and declaring she was forced to consent to the marriage against her will.
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This plea was likely the reason Pius issued a brief in July, authorizing Archbishops Hamilton and Beaton and William Gordon, bishop of Aberdeen, to begin nullification proceedings.

Her letters to de la Mothe Fénélon and to Archbishop Beaton prove Mary’s principal concerns were gaining restitution and assisting her allies in Scotland’s civil war. Although her English rights remained important, they were not her highest priority. After the plot was discovered, she explained to de la Mothe Fénélon that seeking aid for her Scottish allies was not equivalent to inciting an English rebellion. A confirmation of this assertion can be found in her March instructions to Lord John Hamilton, her envoy to the duke of Alva. She directed Lord John to inform Alva that she was seeking assistance from all Christian princes for her realm of Scotland.

In contrast, Leslie and Ridolfi understood Philip required a greater incentive for invading Britain than her recovery of Scotland. Ridolfi’s instructions on Norfolk’s behalf held out the possibility of gaining the English throne and restoring the island to Catholicism. The duke reportedly promised to raise considerable forces but required money, arms, and additional troops to establish Mary, his future wife, as England’s queen. He also requested that Alva send an army to England and Ireland to link up with Catholic rebels. The churchman, the secretary, and the diplomat-financier thus concocted intrigues beyond their capacity to implement.

Shortly after Ridolfi’s departure for the continent, Lennox, who had succeeded Moray as regent, sent soldiers for a surprise assault on Dumbarton Castle. After they seized the castle on 2 April, the earl had his old rival, Archbishop Hamilton, one of its residents, tried and executed for Moray’s murder. At Dumbarton Lennox also discovered documents detailing Mary’s communications with Alva, which he revealed to Cecil.

Having received the intelligence that a plot was underway for Mary’s escape to Scotland, Elizabeth instructed Shrewsbury to institute strict orders to secure her and to reduce the number in her household to 30. He reported progress on 4 May in expelling some of Mary’s attendants and noted she was sickened at the loss of Dumbarton Castle to Lennox. She had also heard of Archbishop Hamilton’s death. New rules were imposed on the servants remaining with her. They had to depart her chambers between 9:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.; only Andrew Beaton, the master of her household, could wear a sword, and all must have a license to leave the castle.

In April Cecil, recently ennobled as Burghley, had ordered the arrest of Charles Bailly, one of Leslie’s secretaries, when he returned from the Netherlands with copies of the reprint of the bishop’s manuscript defending Mary’s honor and with some ciphered letters. Burghley incarcerated Bailly in the Marshalsea, confiscated his manuscripts, and ordered his spy William Herle to contact the prisoner. After winning Bailly’s confidence, Herle became his messenger, carrying to Burghley some ciphered letters from Ridolfi and others that were addressed to Leslie. Burghley had them copied before forwarding them to the addressees.

Following further questioning and at least the threat of the rack, Bailly revealed the information he could remember from having aided Ridolfi in encoding the documents, making it possible for Burghley to read them. In May Burghley detained Leslie in the bishop of Ely’s palace. Leslie later reported to Henry III that he had “suffered terrible injuries in England,”
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which apparently caused the fearful bishop to implicate Mary, Norfolk, and himself in the Ridolfi plot and to describe one of her gifts to the duke, a cushion embroidered with the pruning emblem that she sent to him before the Northern Rising. Fearful of bodily harm, the frightened bishop proved willing to admit to any statement, no matter how outrageous. He even charged Mary with colluding in the death of her first husband, with poisoning the second one, and with plotting to do away with the third. Toward the end of 1571, Elizabeth had Leslie transferred to the Tower and ordered the expulsion from England of Guerau de Spes, the Spanish ambassador, for assisting Leslie’s and Ridolfi’s communications with Alva and Philip.

Although greatly concerned about a possible invasion of England, Elizabeth and her councilors were also unhappy about Mary’s plans for Philip’s interference in Scotland. They had not repulsed France from that realm with the intention of permitting another power’s intervention there. As Sussex predicted in 1568, the best scenario was to keep Mary their prisoner and leave Scotland to the rule of her son’s regents who were friendly to England. During her captivity the Northern Rising was the only English rebellion favoring Mary’s cause, and the Ridolfi conspiracy was the most serious plot on her behalf involving foreign powers. Unwilling to accept her captivity complacently, she encouraged schemes that posed no grave threat to Elizabeth but that resulted in her closer confinement and ultimately her execution.

It is also true, however, that it was unrealistic for the English to expect the acquiescence in her imprisonment of a woman who was a queen regnant from her infancy, was reared at the French court, and had already escaped captivity twice. In a letter of December 1571, she defiantly asked Elizabeth what she would do if they changed places. After receiving this message, as well as another from her in January 1572 protesting her imprisonment, Elizabeth did not respond directly to this question, although she had once experienced the fears and worries of captivity. Instead, she replied that she had never refused Mary’s reasonable requests and pointed out that she was not a captive but lived in a nobleman’s house, waited upon as a queen. The draft of this letter that survives is in Cecil’s hand.

In September 1571 after discovering the Ridolfi Plot, Elizabeth had required Shrewsbury to confine Mary to Sheffield Castle, her residence since November 1570, and to reduce her household to 16. Grief-stricken by these orders, Mary composed an emotional letter of farewell to her servants. Among those leaving were the Livingstons, Willie Douglas, and her almoner, Ninian Winzet, a recent arrival who was transferred to the imprisoned Leslie’s residence. As Shrewsbury suspected accurately that Winzet was a priest, his employment at Sheffield would soon have ended in any case. Mary arranged passage to France for the Scottish attendants fearful of returning home and pledged her willingness “to endure every kind of misery and suffering, even death, in the cause of my country’s liberty.”
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Meanwhile, de la Mothe Fénélon sent Norfolk 2,000 crowns
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of which the duke forwarded £600 to an agent to pass on to Grange, still holding Edinburgh Castle for Mary. Instead, the messenger carried the money to Burghley, who had Norfolk’s house searched and acquired Mary’s ciphered letters to him and her cipher key. Hampered by his loyalties to the crown and to Protestantism that gravely weakened his leadership in these conspiracies, Norfolk was imprisoned in the Tower again in September.

After intercepting a letter to Mary from Ridolfi in which he related his successful visits to Pius V, Philip, and Alva, Burghley placed further restrictions on her household. On 22 November she related to Leslie that she had been detained in her chambers for ten weeks. While continuing to seek help from friends on the continent and requesting Seton to reveal her plight to Alva, Mary reminded Elizabeth that for four years she had been complaining about her good sister’s refusal to assist her restitution that caused her to seek aid elsewhere.
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In January 1572 as Lord High Stewart, Shrewsbury headed a commission to try Norfolk for treason at Westminster Hall, leaving Sadler as Mary’s substitute custodian. After learning about the duke’s guilty verdict, Sadler informed Lady Shrewsbury so that she could convey the news to his prisoner. The countess found a grieving and weeping Mary, who had already heard about the verdict; she subsequently decided to observe three days of abstinence weekly to pray for his preservation. In June when he was beheaded after parliament requested his execution, Mary became quite ill. She had rightly been concerned about this parliament’s actions. It also demanded her execution and approved a bill to prevent her accession in England on which Elizabeth postponed her decision.

In June Elizabeth dispatched four commissioners, William West, first Lord de la Warr, Sadler, Thomas Wilson, master of requests, and Christopher Bromley, solicitor-general, to charge Mary with attempting to advance her claims to the throne by marrying Norfolk and participating in the Ridolfi plot. Her response to them was that although she recognized no earthly superior, she would be willing to answer Elizabeth’s accusations in person.
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Two months later European Protestants were horrified by the St Bartholomew massacre in which Catholics slaughtered 2,000 Huguenots at Paris and another 3,000 in the provinces. Concerned about possible French aid to Mary’s allies in Scotland, Elizabeth attempted to resolve the question of her captivity. Elizabeth sent Killigrew ostensibly to alert James’s governors to the possible danger but actually to negotiate Mary’s return home, her murder trial, and execution, relieving the English of responsibility for her fate and preventing future complications if she escaped or gained restitution. Having succeeded Lennox as regent after he was killed in a scuffle engineered by the Hamiltons in 1571, Mar proved receptive to the English proposals. The terms had not been worked out when he died of natural causes in October 1572, however, and they were dropped under his successor, Morton. Between 1574 and 1576, Elizabeth briefly raised the possibility of her cousin’s restitution with Morton, again unsuccessfully mainly because he did not want her returned. By then the Scottish civil war was over; in late May 1573 Drury led a force of 1,500 equipped with artillery and seized the last stronghold of Mary’s allies, Edinburgh Castle, including its keeper, Grange, who was later hanged, and Lethington, who died somewhat mysteriously.

LESLIE’S DEFENSE AND BUCHANAN’S DENUNCIATION

While English officials were handling issues relating to Mary’s captivity, Leslie’s and Buchanan’s tracts about her involvement in her second husband’s murder and about her English succession rights were being published. Outraged by the defamation of her character at the inquiry in 1568, Leslie decided to defend her publicly. In his
Defence of the Honour of...Marie Quene of Scotland
, which appeared in 1570 and in revised form in 1571, he denied that she colluded in her husband’s death and characterized the undated and unsubscribed Casket Letters as forgeries. (Actually, one of the letters was dated.) He condemned the spite and malice of Moray, whom he charged with actually planning the king’s murder. Validating Plowden’s and Browne’s arguments that the common law rule against alien inheritance did not apply to the crown, he explained that even if they were incorrect, she could still succeed because of England’s claim of lordship over Scotland. He also questioned the validity of Henry VIII’s will, which was stamped but unsigned by him. Finally, he rebutted Knox’s arguments limiting the monarchy to males, claiming instead that the law of nature emerged from the historical process in which many women participated as rulers.

In 1570 Buchanan criticized both the Hamiltons in
An Admonitioun to the Trew Lordis
, which was published that year, and Lethington in
The Chamaeleon
, which remained in manuscript until the eighteenth century. The first printed version of his denunciation of Mary appeared in London in November 1571 after Burghley’s discovery of the Ridolfi plot caused Elizabeth to cease opposing the public defamation of her cousin’s character. In
De Maria Scotorum Regina
(later entitled
Detectio Mariae Reginis
), which Buchanan prepared in 1568 at the direction of the Scottish privy council, he offered dishonest interpretations and inaccurate facts about Mary’s relationships to her second and third husbands, accusing her of colluding both in the king’s death and in Bothwell’s abduction of her. Appended to
De Maria
was
Actio Contra Mariam Scotorum Reginam
, composed by Thomas Wilson, which emphasized female fickleness and claimed Mary aggressively pursued Bothwell, a mere puppet in their liaison. Finally, the appendix contained three of the Casket Letters in Latin. Burghley probably promoted this first publication of Mary as a murderess in the Latin language to attract a large Catholic readership abroad. Wilson also translated the
De Maria
(
Detectio
) into a language, identified as Scottish, and added all eight Casket Letters, two editions of which appeared within one month of the Latin rendition. Afterwards, most of the letters were issued in correct Scottish and French.

It is interesting that the French versions of the letters, which were published in 1572, are bad translations of the Scots, which seem to be versions of Buchanan’s Latin renditions of the originals. Since the Scottish privy council authorized some of the translations that were published and presumably had access to the actual letters, it is extremely odd that they never appeared in their initial French form. This bizarre publication record lends support to the speculation that the Casket Letters were originally written in the Scots version that Moray sent to Elizabeth in 1568. The last known possessor of the letters was a descendant of Morton. After his death, they disappeared.