Elizabeth I (Penguin Monarchs): A Study in Insecurity by Castor Helen

Author:Castor, Helen [Castor, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography, Politics
ISBN: 9780141980898
Amazon: 0141980893
Goodreads: 60634539
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2018-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Now that Elizabeth was beyond doubt the last of the Tudor line, the unacknowledged heir she kept under guard at Sheffield embodied a yet more intractable dilemma and a yet more insistent threat. At almost forty, Mary of Scotland was struggling with deteriorating health and sore, swollen legs that made it difficult to walk, but she had lost none of the chaotic energy with which she continued to seek release or rescue. (‘I notice certain contradictory points in this communication’, one of Philip of Spain’s advisers observed diplomatically after receiving a message from Mary in April 1581.)32 What Mary did not know was that her letters were passing through the careful hands of Francis Walsingham before reaching their intended recipients. And in November 1583, with the arrest of a young Catholic gentleman named Francis Throckmorton, Walsingham uncovered a plot to co-ordinate an invasion of England by Mary’s ultra-Catholic French cousin the Duke of Guise, backed by Spain and the Vatican, with a simultaneous uprising of English Catholics in order to depose Elizabeth and put Mary in her place.

It was clear that Mary was involved. Through intermediaries, she had encouraged Throckmorton’s activities. For Walsingham’s purposes, however, her guilt was not clear enough. Without watertight evidence of her personal approval of Elizabeth’s murder, there was no hope of persuading the queen to sign a warrant for her death. But if there had been any uncertainty about the danger in which Elizabeth stood, it was dispelled in July 1584 when William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch Protestants, was shot dead at his home in Delft by a Catholic fanatic. The assassination was shocking, and the potential parallel plain. In response, the queen at last agreed to send soldiers to support the Dutch rebels, although she instructed Robert Dudley, who led the expedition in 1585, ‘that you rather bend your cause to make a defensive than offensive war’.33 Meanwhile, Cecil and Walsingham drafted an extraordinary ‘bond of association’ by which thousands of Elizabeth’s subjects swore to execute anyone who threatened her life or – a provision aimed directly at Mary – who claimed the throne if she were killed. In the parliament of 1584–5 the bond was then given legal force and process through an ‘Act for the Queen’s Surety’.34 The net was closing, for all that Elizabeth continued to resist these practical manifestations of her ministers’ fears: ‘I am so wounded with the late sharp and most heavy speeches of her majesty to myself’, Cecil wrote, near despair, as the act was passed.35

But there was not much longer to wait. In the spring of 1586, a new conspiracy began to form around another well-born young Catholic named Anthony Babington. This time invasion by Spain, revolt in England and Mary’s glorious accession would all be heralded by Elizabeth’s murder. And this time Walsingham knew everything. He held back, watching the plot take shape, until on 19 July he got what he wanted: the decoded text of an encrypted letter Mary had dictated two days earlier, signalling her endorsement of Babington’s plan to kill Elizabeth.

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