The Elizabethans (19 page)

When she was the widowed Queen of France, Mary married Darnley. They were both great-grandchildren of Henry VII and the match strengthened her claim to the English Crown. And he provided her with an heir: the future James VI. In no other respect was he a suitable King of Scotland, or husband. Drunken and idle, he was an object of Mary’s hatred, and was hated too by her Council of Protestant lords. Mary consoled herself with an Italian musician named David Rizzio – ‘Seigneur David’ as the Scots mockingly called him. The swaggering, conceited figure, who sat at dinner beside the Queen without removing his hat, was soon not merely her intimate, but a figure of political power. It was decided by the Protestant lords that Rizzio must go and, for once, they saw eye-to-eye with Darnley, who burst in on Rizzio with the Queen on 9 March 1566 while they were having dinner. Accompanied by the gaunt Earl of Ruthven who was clad in full armour, Darnley dragged Rizzio away from Mary. The Italian tried to hold on to Mary’s skirts as he was taken into a neighbouring room and stabbed fifty-six times. When told Rizzio was dead, Mary chillingly remarked, ‘No more tears. I will think upon a revenge.’
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The revenge was violent indeed. The following spring – 11 February 1567 – Darnley, who had suffered during the previous months from smallpox, was asleep at a mean house at Kirk o’ Field, in an Edinburgh suburb. Mary had by now taken another lover, the Earl of Bothwell. In the small hours of that February night, Edinburgh was shaken by a huge explosion. The house was blown up by gunpowder, but Darnley’s body, far from being destroyed by the blast, was thrown into the garden, where he was found to have been strangled.
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Mary’s folly in getting involved in such a crime – quite apart from its lack of morality – gave her enemies in Scotland the excuse they needed to depose her. The ‘trial’ of Bothwell made matters even worse for Mary. Mounted on Darnley’s horse, Bothwell rode out of Holyrood Palace to go to court; the Queen was seen waving him goodbye from a window. He had arranged for a huge gang of supporters, some said as many as 4,000, to throng the streets outside the courthouse. So intimidated was the 4th Earl of Lennox (who was supposed to be prosecuting) that he did not even appear and the ‘trial’ ended with a cry of ‘Not guilty!’ Bothwell then returned to Holyrood and carried off Mary. There followed her alleged ‘rape’ and her marriage by Protestant rites.

By now, the Protestant lords and the people of Scotland had had enough. They took up arms and, at Carberry Hill, Mary’s forces disbanded without a fight. Bothwell abandoned her on the battlefield, and she was arrested and brought back to Edinburgh, to face an angry mob chanting, ‘Burn the whore!’ The next morning she was taken to the seclusion of Lochleven Castle on an island in the middle of a lake, and there she was immured. Lennox became the Regent of Scotland.

Mary’s marital career was her sordid undoing; but even when her singularly poor taste in men has been admitted, her story was an object lesson in the dangers of marriage for a female head of state. The lesson was not lost on Elizabeth. While her closest advisers – Cecil, the Council, parliaments of both houses – all wanted her to marry, and while she in part desired it herself, she could see its dangers. Marry a foreign prince, and he would almost certainly be a Catholic. If she had married the Archduke Charles, for example, which would in many ways have looked like a sensible political move, strengthening England’s alliance with the Holy Roman Empire, it would have antagonised all Elizabeth’s Protestant-minded subjects. In Scotland and in France, the spectre of religiously motivated civil war provided Elizabeth with a fearsome example that she was determined
not
to follow. To marry a foreigner was to risk stirring up religious hatred. To marry an English nobleman was to risk joining a faction.

To marry off the Scottish queen to an English nobleman, however, was a very different matter. That was why Elizabeth had favoured Mary’s marriage to Robert Dudley – and made him Earl of Leicester for the purpose. But that was in 1564, and in a remarkably short space of time Mary had changed from a potential menace, mismanaging the kingdom of Scotland north of the border, to a political refugee on English soil. For she escaped from Lochleven. With a small band of supporters – Lord Herries, Lord Fleming and eighteen others – she took a boat across the Solway Firth and landed on the coast of Cumberland, at Workington.

Elizabeth’s attitude was one of genuine ambivalence. Her cousin Mary was, after all, the rightful Queen of Scotland, and the Deed of Abdication that she had been forced to sign on her island prison could not but shock the Queen of England. Elizabeth wrote to Mary congratulating her on her escape from Lochleven, and promising assistance so long as she did not appeal to France for help as well. The letter never arrived.

From Carlisle, Mary wrote to Elizabeth to say that she had no clothes other than those she stood up in, and asking her cousin to supply the deficiency, and to meet. Meanwhile she held court in the northerly English town, where the local gentry streamed in to pay their respects. (Four years earlier, Cecil had been told by a spy, Christopher Rokesby, the Scottish queen had a list of English families from whom she could expect support if she made a bid for Elizabeth’s crown.)
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The significance of clothes in Elizabeth’s personal mythology can never be exaggerated. She herself had been crowned wearing a dress belonging to her sister. No portrait ever appeared of Elizabeth in which the dress she was wearing did not make an eloquent public statement about her. Mary had asked for her to send raiment worthy of a queen.

Elizabeth put the matter in the hands of Sir Francis Knollys, Vice Chamberlain of the Queen’s Household. He was dispatched to Carlisle, and told one of the waiting women to make up a parcel of clothes. There was a misunderstanding, and the maid merely brought two worn-out chemises, a length of black velvet and a pair of shoes – apparently thinking clothes were required for some other waiting woman. By the time this insulting parcel was opened, Mary had been supplied with ‘two or three suits made in black velvet’, tailored in Carlisle. Meanwhile, her base-born brother, the Earl of Murray, had dispatched some of the Scottish queen’s jewels to London as a present for the Queen of England: six ropes of extremely fine pearls strung on a knotted thread, and twenty-five separate pearls of enormous size, whose tinge was ‘like that of black muscat grapes’.

Sir Francis Knollys, meanwhile, had to break the news to Mary that she must be under custody. She was to be moved from Carlisle to Bolton Castle and to be placed under the supervision of the Earl of Shrewsbury. ‘I have made great wars in Scotland – I pray to God I make no trouble in other realms also!’ she exclaimed. But her very existence on English soil was a trouble.

Her arrival coincided with an especially difficult juncture in political affairs for Elizabeth and Cecil down in London. Ireland, as nearly always, was in trouble, with a revolt by Fitzmaurice in Munster. Relations with the French were in the process of being brought to a difficult peace. Sir John Hawkins’s adventures in the Caribbean had begun a sharp deterioration in Anglo-Spanish relations, which would, from now on, descend from bad to worse. There was a feeling at court that Cecil was not up to the job of running the nation’s affairs.

The Council was divided into squabbling factions, some loyal to Elizabeth, others not. The idea was mooted that Thomas Howard, the 4th Duke of Norfolk, England’s premier peer, should be married to the Queen of Scots. It was suggested by Secretary Maitland, one of the Scottish regent (Murray)’s commissioners who came down to York to discuss Mary’s future. And there were friends of Elizabeth who saw advantages in the idea. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, for example, and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, former English Ambassador in Paris, saw it as a way of
containing
Mary, securing the succession and making peace with the Catholic powers, France and Spain.

Elizabeth challenged Norfolk to deny the rumour, which he fulsomely and insincerely did:

What! Should I seek to marry her, being so wicked a woman, such a notorious adulterer and murderer? I love to sleep upon a safe pillow. I count myself, by your Majesty’s favour, as good a prince at home in my bowling-alley at Norwich, as she is, though she were in the midst of Scotland. And if I should go about to marry her, knowing as I do, that she pretendeth a title to the present possession of your Majesty’s crown, your Majesty might justly charge me with seeking your own crown from your head.’
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Even as he said the words, she only half-believed him. But on Ash Wednesday 1569, Leicester went to Elizabeth and told her not only to dismiss, but to behead, Cecil. She dismissed the suggestion furiously, but it meant that in the matter of the Norfolk–Mary Stuart marriage plot Elizabeth was momentarily isolated, unable to rely on either of her stalwarts at court. Again, she confronted Norfolk. Again, he denied it. At this stage of things the court was in progress. Pleading illness, Norfolk retreated to his East Anglian estates at Kenninghall. Since he did so without permission, it was taken as an admission of guilty connivance in the conspiracy that was now coming to light. Norfolk sent desperate messages north to his brother-in-law, Westmorland, telling him not to rise against Elizabeth, but by then events were out of Norfolk’s hands. By October he was in the Tower.

For months now an Italian banker, Roberto Ridolfi, had been acting as go-between between the southern nobility and the Pope. De Spes, the Spanish Ambassador, urged Philip II to marry Mary and was wholly optimistic about the success of a rebellion. Some of the northern peers, most notably Thomas Percy, 7th Percy Earl of Northumberland, were doubtful about the Norfolk–Mary match, for Norfolk was Church of England – by their standards, a heretic. Whatever the political ramifications of the Northern Rebellion, it was seen by the leadership as essential to draw upon the powerful Catholic feelings of northerners who, it was hoped, would be enlisted to a movement that could bring the Church of England to an end and restore the country to papal obedience.

It cannot be doubted that the clumsy and insensitive ultra-Protestant attacks on Church rites and buildings were deeply offensive to many people. Although the Queen hoped that her Church of England could contain both Catholics and Protestants, the Protestants made the loudest noise and, at this stage, the most damage. Elizabeth, for example, specifically excluded funerary monuments from destruction by the Reformers, but William Whittingham, the rigidly Calvinist Dean of Durham, hacked at tombs in the cathedral if they bore imagery offensive to his prejudices. Whittingham had been an army chaplain who had initially refused to use the Prayer Book, as smacking too pungently of Romish superstition. Meanwhile, his wife Katherine scandalised local opinion by organising the burning of the ancient banner of St Cuthbert, the patron saint of Durham, who lies in the cathedral. The dean was much hated for this act of gratuitous vandalism.
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So it was with a real sense of a region getting its own back on southern interference, and of men and women expressing their love of their saint and their creed, that the northerners followed the Earl of Westmorland (Charles Neville, 6th Earl) and the Earl of Northumberland (Thomas Percy, 7th Earl) in their rebellion. The clumsy, southern, Protestant vandalism of the dean and Mrs Whittingham were but the outward and visible signs of resentment felt by various levels of society in Durham and North Yorkshire. Robert Tempest of Holmside, one of the landed gentry who rallied to the earls, had been displaced as sheriff of the county and lost valuable leases to the new bishop who had taken his land. John Swinburne of Chopwell (ancestor of the great poet) and Sir George Bowes were other landowners who, long before actual persecution of recusant Catholics had begun, had lost out, in material ways, to the new Protestants. Swinburne, for instance, had lost valuable coal-producing land to the bishop at a juncture when the coal fields of the North-East were increasing in production and value.
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Nor was it simply a question of the old feudal system surviving in the North, and the great lords having the power to ‘call in’ their tenancy to take up arms. A survey of the 6,000 men who instantly answered the earls’ call, and took up arms, shows that the bulk of them were not the earls’ tenants. This was not a medieval case of peasants blindly following, because they knew ‘no prince but a Percy’.
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On the contrary, locally it was an expression of widespread opinion at all levels. Religion was its focus.

On 14 November 1569 they marched on Durham. They occupied the cathedral and destroyed the prayer books, bibles and the Communion table set up by the dean and Mrs Whittingham; 794 people were counted by worried government observers crowding in to hear Mass sung once more.
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But it was not just in the cathedral, or just in Durham, that people took matters into their own hands. At Sedgefield, for example (later in history Tony Blair’s parliamentary constituency), they re-erected the stone altar in the church. (They had done so once before in 1567 and it had been destroyed by visitors.)
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The government of Elizabeth and Cecil in London faced the nightmare possibility of a religiously enflamed civil war, such as had torn apart Scotland and France. And the woman who had been queen of both of these countries was now in the North of England, with an army willing to fight to make her their queen also. Only two things could save Elizabeth’s position now: the weakness of the rebels’ power-base, especially in the South; and a complete ruthlessness in securing out-and-out defeat of the rebellion.

As we have seen, Norfolk caved in before the rebellion even started. Even those you might expect to have supported it were lukewarm in their enthusiasm. The recusant priests in exile – Robert Parsons, the Jesuit, and Cardinal Allen – were dubious about the prospect of putting Mary Stuart on the English throne at this point.
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Richard Norton was an old veteran of the Pilgrimage of Grace, when he had worn the badge of the Five Wounds of Christ. He was wearing the old badge again at Durham for the rebels’ Mass in the cathedral. Norton it was who wrote a letter to Northumberland ‘leaking’ the fact that Spanish troops were on their way to reinforce the northerners. It was designed to strengthen morale and – for he knew the letter would be intercepted – to worry the government. It merely insured for Norton, when the rebellion was over, a particularly grisly end at Tyburn. The rebels’ hopes, that Philip II would supply them with military aid, were a groundless fantasy. Philip did not want the daughter-in-law of the hated Guise family as Queen of England. Mary herself, at this point, did not wish it, being far more concerned to be released from her imprisonment.
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