The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court (42 page)

Ralegh was unaware that Robert Cecil had already found out about the marriage and therefore knew that he was being lied to. Bess meanwhile was left to endure childbirth alone and on 29 March was safely delivered of a son, who was later baptised Damerei. A messenger was immediately despatched to Ralegh who sent his wife £50, and then continued with the preparations for his voyage. He was keen to get as far away from the court as possible before the Queen found out about Bess and the child.

Four weeks later Bess was back in the Queen’s service as if nothing had happened, leaving Damerei in the care of a wet nurse in Enfield. Sir Walter meanwhile embarked on the first leg of his voyage. He was back in Plymouth by mid-May, when the scandal broke. The Queen, then at Nonsuch at the start of her summer progress, immediately ordered the arrest and detainment of her Gentlewoman and the Captain of the Guard, Ralegh at Durham House, Bess in the custody of the Vice-Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Heneage. On 7 August, both husband and wife were moved to the Tower.
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Ralegh sent urgent messages and poems to the Queen, assuring her of his love, bemoaning his misery and trying to win back her favour. Bess, however, remained unrepentant, signing her letters from the Tower, ‘Elizabeth Ralegh’.

In mid-September, Ralegh was released to travel to Dartmouth to greet the Portuguese carrack, the
Madre de Dios
, which his fleet had captured in the Azores and had returned laden with treasure; but Bess remained in the Tower. It was a sweltering late summer and plague was rife throughout the capital. She was freed shortly before Christmas, only to learn that their infant son Damerei had died, most likely in the plague. Bess retired to her husband’s estate at Sherborne in Dorset and by the following spring she was pregnant again. In November she bore another son, named Walter.

For the time being both Ralegh and his wife remained exiled from court. Bess continued to petition her friends to help her regain the Queen’s favour but Elizabeth proved unforgiving and would never welcome Bess back to court. At the end of the reign, Lord Henry Howard, an enemy of the Raleghs, wrote gloatingly that although ‘much hath been offered on all sides to bring her [Bess] into the Privy Chamber of her old place’, Elizabeth refused to receive her. Sir Walter Ralegh finally returned to court in 1597 and resumed his duties as Captain of the Guard.

Every scandal involving Elizabeth’s women of the Bedchamber and maids of honour soon became the stuff of alehouse gossip and malicious rumour. Even Anne Clifford, the Countess of Warwick’s young niece, reported that, ‘there was much talk of a Mask which the Queen had at Winchester, & how all the Ladies about the Court had gotten such ill names that it was grown a scandalous place & the Queen herself was much fallen from her former greatness and reputation she had in the world’.
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Suspected and Discontented Persons

After the defeat of the Armada, Elizabeth resumed her summer progresses beyond London and the Home Counties, where she had remained for most of the 1580s. Now, despite reports of the gradual build up of a new Spanish fleet, Elizabeth refused to be cowed by fears for her safety and ventured further afield. In an attempt to inspire loyalty across the confessional divide and to seek out signs of disloyalty or discontent, she visited many houses that were owned by open or suspected Catholics.

The route of Elizabeth’s progress in 1591 was carefully planned through Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire with visits to the homes of five Catholic gentlemen. Many of Elizabeth’s councillors regarded such stops as being unnecessarily dangerous and there was real anxiety for the Queen’s safety. One courtier, Richard Cavendish, sought to dissuade her from going to what he believed was a ‘tickle [dangerous] country and places fraught with suspected and discontented persons’.
1

In August, Elizabeth spent six days at Cowdray in Sussex, the seat of Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montague, a leading Catholic nobleman.
2
Having been employed on a number of embassies at the beginning of the reign and appointed to the lord lieutenancy of Sussex, Montague lost his position in 1585 and had thereafter become increasingly marginalised from Elizabethan political life as actions against Catholics intensified. His household included active supporters of both the Jesuits and the Spanish invasion and he was the owner of a number of houses where missionary priests were thought to have received help and support. Montague had also been implicated in the plot to have Mary Queen of Scots marry Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. Whilst he had acted to defend Elizabeth as the Armada threatened, Montague might well have feared that an example would now be made of him, as it had been with Edward Rookwood of Euston Hall in 1578, during the East Anglian progress. However this time, as the government looked to combat accusations of the cruel persecution of Catholics at home, a demonstration of loyalty to the Queen by a prominent Catholic nobleman suited better their purpose.

Montague was keen to prove his devotion to her Majesty and laid on lavish entertainments at Cowdray Park in August to emphasise his position as the leader of a loyal local gentry. The country dances performed by local people and joined by Montague and his wife pointed to a ‘beautiful relation’ among all classes; speeches by the characters the ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Wild Man’ extended the notion of order and loyalty to the entire county, whilst claiming that the world outside was one of treachery and instability. Montague sought to dismiss claims that Roman Catholicism amounted to treason and threatened the peace of the realm and the life of the Queen. He, like many other Catholics, instead pointed to Protestantism as the main source of ‘rebellion and civil disobedience’, with Protestants being ‘men that are full of affection and passions and that look to wax almighty, and of power, by the confiscation, spoil and ruin of the houses of noble and ancient men’.
3

The uproar in London caused by William Hacket, a fanatical Protestant, little more than a fortnight earlier appeared to be evidence of just the kind of disorder that Montague described. In July, Hacket claimed to be the Messiah and on the streets of London he and his two followers preached the overthrow of the government and the usurpation of the Queen.
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Having declared the Day of Judgement to be near at hand, he then took an ‘iron instrument’ to a picture of the Queen hanging in his lodgings and ‘villainously and treacherously’ defaced it, especially that part of the picture which represented Elizabeth’s heart, and railed ‘most traitorously against her Majesty’s person’.
5
By one o’clock on 26 July 1591, the three men had been arrested.
6
Hacket was found guilty of high treason, and was executed two days later at the Cross at Cheapside.
7

Whilst other Protestants were anxious to disassociate themselves from Hacket and regarded him as a madman, the Attorney General at Hacket’s trial dismissed arguments about the defendant’s ‘frantic humours’ and instead stated that he had led a carefully constructed plot to overthrow the state. Even though Hacket was a fanatical puritan, Elizabeth’s government was quick to cast him as a Catholic. As the Jesuit priest Robert Southwell wrote in a letter to Rome, ‘the puritan Hacket had been posted over to us as a papist and is named to the vulgar sort’.
8

In the face of such disorder, Montague represented his estate at Cowdray as a bastion of stability and loyalty. Yet his show of loyalty to the Queen did not serve its purpose, for on 18 October, Elizabeth issued a new anti-Catholic proclamation which further criminalised anyone found harbouring Catholic priests.
9
The proclamation, which may have been drafted by privy councillors whilst they were being hosted by Montague, referred to Catholic activity as ‘treasons in the bowels of our Realm’.
10
Sir John Harington observed that as the laws against Catholics became more and more harsh, ‘their practices grew fouler and fouler’, yet he wondered which came first: whether Catholics’ ‘sinister practices drew on these rigorous laws, or whether the rigour of these laws moved them to these unnatural practices?’
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The following year there were reports of another major plot abroad. Thomas Phillipes, an agent working for the Earl of Essex and formerly used by Walsingham, had acquired intelligence from Flanders about a plot to kill Elizabeth and hasten a foreign invasion supported by the Pope and the Duke of Parma and led by recusant officer Sir William Stanley.

When fighting under Robert Dudley in the Low Countries, Stanley had spectacularly defected to the Spaniards, handing over the town of Deventer which he was then occupying. He remained in post as governor of Deventer for a year, during which time he became involved with the English Catholic exile community in Flanders and came into contact with Cardinal Allen. Stanley would become one of the Elizabethan government’s most implacable enemies among the exiles abroad and he and his disaffected regiment were perceived to be plotting tirelessly against the Queen and her realm.

In the general confusion that would follow Elizabeth’s assassination, when ‘the people will be together by the ears about the succession’, it was anticipated that Stanley would give support to James VI. Phillipes explained that this plot had been brewing ‘since the Great Enterprise was disappointed’. The Pope was said to have ‘revoked the assassin from the camp of the French King [Henri IV], whom he was to have killed, to attempt the like on the Queen’.
12

Stanley and his conspirators aimed to target Elizabeth during her progress into Wiltshire that summer, which would give them the ‘means and opportunity fit for this practice’.
13
In 1592, Phillipes reported that, ‘Sir William Stanley’s force has long been preparing, and it is fully expected that the desperate Italian that is to come over [to kill the Queen] will do the deed.’ The plot was foiled because of Phillipes’s intelligence, as was another conspiracy the following year, also sponsored by Stanley and other English exiles, which saw Father Persons and Gilbert Laton debating how best to kill the Queen and ‘show how it might be performed – her Majesty being in the progress – and to be executed with a wire made with jemos or with a poignard’.
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Over the next few months and on into the new year, the activities of Jesuit priests, factions at the English court, disaffected soldiers and impressionable young men seduced by the promise of a fortune, combined to produce a deluge of assassination plots, most of which seemed to have Sir William Stanley at their heart.

In 1594 it was reported that a number of former soldiers from Stanley’s regiment came secretly to England with the aim of murdering Elizabeth. In February, an Irish soldier called Patrick O’Collun was captured and imprisoned in the Tower. It was alleged that he had been sent to England by Stanley and the Jesuit priest Nicholas Owen to carry out the deed.
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Two witnesses testified to O’Collun’s mission, one of whom was William Polwhele. Polwhele was also a soldier in Stanley’s regiment who had been arrested and had admitted to having been sent by Stanley to assassinate Elizabeth. He described how that summer, Captain ‘Jacques’, Stanley’s deputy in the regiment, had urged him to go to England and kill the Queen, saying that ‘no action could be more glorious than cutting off so wicked a member, who is likely to overthrow all Christendom’. Polwhele was instructed to go to England, gain William Cecil’s trust and then ingratiate himself at court. The plan was to be put into action ‘when the Queen went for a walk or to the sermon: that she might be shot or stabbed’, for, they claimed, ‘she takes no care’.
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Around the same time, Hugh Cahill, another Irish soldier from Stanley’s regiment, was examined at William Cecil’s House in Westminster, where he revealed that, like O’Collun and Polwhele, he had been approached by the Jesuit priests Fathers Holt, Archer and Walpole at Stanley’s behest to assassinate the Queen.
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The plan was that he should go to England, enter the service of a courtier, ‘and then manage to waylay her (the Queen) in some progress, and kill her with a sword or a dagger at a gate or narrow passage, or, as she walked in one of her galleries’. Cahill approved the scheme and a fee was agreed. However, upon arriving in England, Cahill divulged the plot to William Cecil.
18
It was claimed that John Scudamore, stepson of Elizabeth’s long-standing Lady of the Bedchamber Mary Scudamore, was party to the plot. Scudamore was arrested and questioned, but released soon afterwards, presumably having proved his innocence or perhaps because of a timely intervention from his stepmother, and then returned to Rome, where he had become a priest.
19

All of the prisoners denied any serious intent to kill the Queen. Beyond their confessions there is no proof as to what had been planned, though it seems likely that there had been an intention by some to assassinate Elizabeth. Hugh Owen protested that, ‘neither he, Owen, nor Sir William Stanley, had any more to do with killing the Queen than the man in the moon’. He said that John Annais, another accused solider, ‘is a sorry fellow, who can make a white powder, but would not kill a cat if she looked him on the face’. He denied ever seeing Cullen and protested that he barely knew Cahill or Polwhele.
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In February 1594, Henry Walpole, the Jesuit whom Cahill had accused, was arrested on landing near Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. The Queen’s priest-hunter–interrogator Richard Topcliffe was sent to York to question Walpole, who was subjected to long and painful torture. Again and again Walpole insisted that his mission was a purely religious one: to administer the sacraments and urge English Catholics to remain faithful to their queen. He rejected with horror the suggestion that he had encouraged the assassination of Elizabeth. His pleas were rejected and on 7 April he was hanged, drawn and quartered. There was no evidence beyond Cahill’s claims, but the fact that he was a Jesuit seemed sufficient to condemn him.